the believing Christian his divinity understood as his “truth, wisdom and goodness.”97 Alternatively, God’s divinity can also be understood as “his name” which is Christ himself.
The above-mentioned determination of spiritual goods and of the name of God contains also an aspect that aims at the deification of the person (deificatio hominis). God is the whole blessedness of his saints; the name of God gives the Christian the goodness of God, that is, God himself. The spiritual goods are gifts of God (donum Dei) in the Christian. The attributes do not remain, therefore, simply in God; rather they actually are given to the Christian.98
This means that there is a three-fold coming of Christ the word to the believer. First and foremost, in the incarnation God becomes human. Next, the word comes as grace (Gnade) heard and clung to. Finally, the word takes form within the person as the gift (Gabe) of Godself. “In each of these, the arrival of Christ—though differently in each case—has the result of the deification of the person,” argues Peura.99 The thrust of his claim is that God in Christ offers two benefits: grace (the merciful declaration that makes the sinner just) and gift (the ontological presence of God in the believer.) The first benefit has been the exclusive emphasis of Ebeling and Forde; the second is the reframing of God’s benefits offered by the Finnish Luther interpreters. When God gives the sinner God’s own name, God really and truly offers God’s essence to them.
Luther also uses other terminology traditionally related to deification to make similar points. He speaks of participation in God, union with God, and the transformation of the person. “Through them all, however, the same point is legitimately made, that is, the actual-ontological character of the salvation realized by God in the person.”100
This leads to Peura’s work on Luther’s understanding of justification. Simply stated, Luther comes to understand justification as the basis for the internal structure of deification. The emphasis on justification protects the sovereignty of God. The gift always remains a divine gift, but this gift is really and truly received by the Christian due to the grace of God. The gift is not due to extortion on the part of the believer; the motive for the giving is located in the same God who gives through the word. The reason for the giving is not, therefore, to be found within the Christian. In fact any preparation within the believer that makes possible the act of reception is also the act of God through the word. Peura writes:
Luther understands God working in the word in a way analogous to God’s relating at the cross. God executes his work on the person in the same way that God has done so already to Christ. The persons must, if desiring to believe and assume the word, first become weak and foolish in order to be able become strong and wise in the power and wisdom of God. Glorification and exaltation presuppose kenosis and abasement.101
Through the word, God destroys the self that is a self-justifying self; the sinner is reduced to nothing.102 Through this reduction God creates a vacuum wherein God makes the person capable of bearing divinity.103 God bestows God’s name through a happy exchange as the sinner clings to God in faith and, solely by that faith, God justifies the sinner.104 Justification results in the real transformation of the person as the name of God, which is God’s essence or divinity, comes to reside, and this truly, in the Christian. This indwelling is not only founded in externality. The “real presence of God” indwells the believer as that person also dwells in the Godhead through participation (but not fusion) in the same. This transformation is integral and includes even the transformation of the human will together with other faculties such as the intellect.
Transformation realizes itself in this life above all through the faith that transforms the faculties of the person and leads him to knowledge of the divine will. Transformation thus refers to how—already at justification’s beginning—the whole person is renewed with his will again and again. The transformation of the will is important, because only thereby can the love of the new person increase.105
The transformation of the Christian leads to a new way of relating to God from the human side of the relationship:
The caritas dei works in the Christian so that the person wills and loves what the intellect has allowed him to comprehend. The love of God for the person changes the person who then loves God willingly and seeks God again and again. For that reason Luther understands here by the love of God a constant affection (affectus) for God.106
So a new being that is ontologically transformed has been bestowed upon the believer, and this gift yields a new activity. The being of God within the Christian translates into a new doing wherein the deified Christian loves with the actual love of God; put another way, the God who is ontologically present in the believer becomes the subject of his or her actions.
Peura’s interpretation of Luther differs dramatically from those we have already examined, yet he does claim as emphatically as they did that Luther’s theology is a theology of the cross. Deification does not nullify the theology of the cross, but rather is the firm foundation upon which Luther built his theology of the cross. In what sense does Peura see the confession of Luther’s theology of the cross within this framework?
First of all, the theology of the cross is a critique of certain aspects of scholastic theology since that theology of glory seeks to ground itself in a capacity that humans by nature possess. Peura writes:
According to Luther, the theologia gloriae leads inevitably to the false striving of the person to deify himself. This way of thinking rests upon assumptions of natural human capacity and finally on the idea of liberum arbitrium. Thus Luther sees in the theologia gloriae an intensification of human sin, because, at base, it would like to realize its own egoistic, self-willed aspiration to divinity.
By no means does it follows from this criticism of the theologia gloriae that Luther also rejects the true deification of the person as willed by God. On the contrary, over and against his criticism of the metaphysical basis for the theology of the love held to by the aristotelian scholasticism, he demonstrates that true deification (in the sense of an ontological transformation of the person) is the conditio sine qua non for true love.107
Thus the theology of the deification in Luther is also a theology of the cross because it sees God as the sole source of transformation.108 Though this transformation is an actual, ontological transformation of the person, it is so not as a human act, but as an act of God alone. The error of the scholastics was to attribute to innate human capacity what can be done in humans by God alone.
This first characteristic, that is, that God alone justifies and deifies, has implied the second characteristic that qualifies Luther’s theology as a theology of the cross. If God alone deifies, then the human being is not the subject or agent who brings about that deification. Thus, the word’s act of reducing us to nothing destroys all attempts at self-justification. God again creates out of nothing, and, in this case, through the word, God is also the creator of nothingness. The human being has no grounds for boasting in the gift that dwells in him or her, because that gift, even when received and rooted, never loses its givenness.
Next, this focus on deification does not lead to a theology of glory, because the theologian
