The Ultimate Gift: The Transformative Indwelling of Christ and the Christian

Abstract

The Ultimate Gift:The Transformative Indwelling of Christ and the Christian David Vincent Meconi S.J. All those ἵνα and ut clauses should have given it away. As a patrologist with a special interest in the soteriology of Christian deification, I had always seen that the Church Fathers depicted the descent of Christ in terms of a purpose and a plan. His kenosis demanded our theosis, for he did not intend to visit in vain. The more modern understanding of God's descent into humanity and the consequent gift of divinizing grace as an event that required absolutely nothing in return, therefore, never quite squared with how I was interacting with these ancient texts. Instead, what I was encountering on those pages insisted that "this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God."1 We see the same construction of purpose clauses in Clement and Origen and throughout the Cappadocians, as well as at the heart at the most legendary and lapidary formula, the Athanasian dictum that "God became human so that humans could become gods."2 Obviously this was no disinterested descent. Surely the Incarnation was effected in order to achieve some end, an exhortatory truth not limited to the ancient world, but seen throughout the best of Christian thought. Take St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, [End Page 197] whose lengthy meditations on the grace of the Incarnation led him to teach that "the only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods."3 From Athanasius to Aquinas, the greatest Christian minds have understood that the gift of the Son's human nature was so that humans could come to partake of the divine nature. Yet, in many strands of modern Christianity, such an expectation would be piously disregarded as some merit- or work-based soteriology wherein God does something only in order to have something in return. There is (rightful) caution that the old pagan adage and the crux of their civil creed, do ut des, would erase the agapic covenant in favor of a commutative contract. But how does one speak of the utter gratuity of God without making his gift an undemanding frill or a favor so void of power that it refuses a return on its investment? Perhaps that is what every fallen soul, however, desires—a God who only gives but wants nothing really in return? In his inimitable way, C. S. Lewis realized this when he teasingly wrote that no one really wants a Father-God who makes demands on those brought into his household, but rather a cognitively diminished deity who simply provides us with what we need to have fun and then apparently turns in early: By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingness; and in this we may be right. And by Love, in this context, most of us mean kindness—the desire to see others than the self happy; not happy in this way or in that, but just happy. What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'What does it matter so long as they are contented?' We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven—a senile benevolence who, as they say, liked to see young people enjoying themselves, and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, 'a good time was had by all.' … I should very much like to live in a universe which was governed on such lines. But since it is abundantly clear that I don't, and since I have reason to believe, nevertheless, that God is Love, I conclude that my conception of love needs correction.4 [End Page 198] Lewis rightly sees that the modern notion of love is in need of correction, especially as regards whether it is congruent with any language of...