On Not Shirking Deification

The April 2026 issue of the journal Modern Theology has a book-review symposium on the Oxford Handbook of Defication. The editors invited me to to respond mainly to the historical chapters in the volume. I did so from an evangelical Protestant point of view, but not as if representing any particular team or party. The Handbook is such a solid and definitive monument of scholarship that I decided engaging it would be a great place to make a few declarations about deification as a doctrine and a category of spirituality. The issues around deification have been important to me for a while (though I reserve the right to re-frame it as “high soteriology”), and I wanted to put a few markers on the board.

Here’s the opening of my article, but if you can get access to the whole issue, there are several other responders and a summing-up by the volume editors.

On Not Shirking Deification

The title of my essay turns on a little wordplay, exploiting the two meanings of shirk. The most common meaning of shirk is to evade an obligation, especially in a devious manner.1 I will argue that Christian theology has an obligation to affirm a high soteriology, a doctrine of salvation that describes not just a repair project or a rearrangement of created elements, but one that rather envisions an exaltation to transformational fellowship with God. “Not shirking deification” in this sense means rising to the demands of a soteriology developed in a fully theological perspective. But the word shirk also happens to have come into English independently, by way of Arabic. In Islamic thought, shirk is the sin of associating something creaturely with the majesty of the one God. Shirk avoidance guards a principle of jealous monotheism. These two meanings of shirk are conveniently suggestive for situating the task of Christian soteriology, which takes place according to a definite index of obligations. Soteriology is obligated to reach high enough, but not too high. It must track the relocation of believers to the divine neighborhood, without trespassing onto the private property of God. Deification can neither be shirked nor commit shirk.

Say it in the Vernacular(s)

The Oxford Handbook of Deification sets out to be a significant landmark in the field of “deification studies,” a term introduced by the editors in their opening theses (1-4). The Handbook succeeds decisively in every way. The contributors are authoritative, their chapters are carefully focused, and the range of topics is encyclopedic. The entire project is intelligently designed, cohering persuasively under the editing of Paul Gavrilyuk, Andrew Hofer, and Matthew Levering. It is framed by biblical sections (Chapters 1 to 5) and systematic considerations (Chapters 33 to 44) which carry the main burden of defining and theorizing deification. But filling out the volume’s center, at nearly two thirds of the page count, is a generous portion of historical chapters. The range of coverage makes the Handbook a wonderfully informative reference work for grasping in detail what deification has meant across a diverse array of cultures, traditions, and theological sensibilities. Especially after the patristic and medieval material, the volume opens out onto a surprisingly vast panorama of sources: Palamites, Lutherans, Reformed scholastics, Anglicans, Pietists, and Wesleyans; Byzantine and Russian figures; Barth and neo-Thomists and contemporary Greek Orthodox thinkers. It is within this range of soteriologies that we can actually pursue the question of how well deification has done as an instrument for meeting the obligations of soteriology. If we trace it out through all the varied idioms of vernacular theologies, how has it served?