The Condemnation of the Flesh: Platonic Anthropology and Theosis

In his contribution on the Pauline epistles, Ben Blackwell identifies participation as a kind of deification and as the core of Paul’s Gospel—relocating justification as a consequence of this more fundamental concept. These claims are critically correct. However, when explaining this process in more detail, Blackwell aligns with a longstanding Christian tradition that insists that the deified human body remains unaltered in substance and form. Instead, it retains its mortal nature but is infused with contranatural divine properties by the Spirit. I argue that this framework, despite its venerable Christian pedigree, is foreign to the Pauline idiom. Rather, Paul conceives of participation in Christ’s death and resurrection as involving the abolition of the flesh, which is irremediably intractable to the noble volitions of the mind, and the assumption of an ‘aethereal and luciform’ body—a more ontologically primitive form not subject to the law nor the condemnation it effects.