Deification: For This We Were Made

Olson on John Paul on the Trinity:

...Man has a God-made hole in his being, a deep recess which can only be fulfilled in one Way and by one Person, Jesus Christ. In the Incarnation, God united himself to man, making possible the unthinkable: intimate communion between the creature and the Creator. "This union of Christ with man is in itself a mystery," the Holy Father states in his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, "From the mystery is born ‘the new man,’ called to become a partaker of God’s life, and newly created in Christ for the fullness of grace and truth." (RH 18.2).

This "partaking" of God’s very life (see 2 Peter 1:4) is the reality of divinization, or deification. In the Eastern Churches it is often called theosis; it is a central focus of Eastern Christian theology and worship. It is also one of the consistent and unifying themes of John Paul II’s thought, appearing often in his important trilogy of Trinitarian encyclicals – Redemptor Hominis, Dives in Misericordia and Dominum et Vivificantem – respectively on the Son, the Father, and the Holy Spirit.

At times acknowledging his debt to Eastern sources, John Paul II writes with profundity and insight about the reality of divinization. In the Trinitarian trilogy (and elsewhere) he addresses four key features of this vital doctrine: divinization, the adoption of man into God’s family, reveals the inherent dignity of man; it is possible only through the central mystery of the Incarnation; the Redemption is the concrete way in which the Incarnate One paved the way for man’s divinization; and the divine grace, given to man is the inner life and love of the Triune God and comes to man through the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church...