Deification Makes All The Difference

between the Eastern religions and Christianity. Stratford Caldecott on the Christian difference:

...It was there that we really started reading Newman, Chesterton, Balthasar. Up until that point, I had still believed at heart that all religions were equal, with Christianity being merely more appropriate in my case than any other.  Ideas like this had led me to the Church; but they could not survive long immersion in the Catholic tradition itself.  Leonie's [his wife] own strong sense of the sacraments had first given me the inkling that there was something more going on, some fuller kind of presence here. The overwhelming reality of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament now more than made up for the relative lack of gurus in Christianity. Priests were there to bring Christ to earth, and the Holy Spirit of Christ was everywhere present.

I began to realize that no matter how much grace is present in the other religions, it is only Christianity that knows the secret of how grace enters the world. The Buddha himself would not have been saved if it had not been for the Cross of Christ. Without the cross, no 'religion' would suffice--were it founded on the Beatitudes themselves. Christ came not primarily to teach, but to do. He came to die for us (as Chesterton points out eloquently in The Everlasting Man). It was through the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar that I finally came to understand what it was that truly makes Christianity different from any other religion under the sun.

Sure enough, it is the sacramental principle--but that only makes sense in connection with the Incarnation, and the Incarnation in the context of the Trinity. The fact is that Christianity is not to do with states of consciousness at all, or with a liberation to be attained through enlightenment. I had once made the mistake of thinking that that was the only thing a religion could be about.

Christianity is about salvation, not enlightenment; an ontological change, a change in the substance of reality itself, brought about by the sacrifice of the Son of God. In fact you might say that the Asian religions would have been right on all counts, as true as true can be, but only if Christ had never been born or died on the Cross. They describe with perfect accuracy the nature of reality and of awareness as it would appear to us without the revelation of God's love. The world would indeed have been an image in a mirror, and nothing more, if God had not in person stepped within that image and made it real with his own reality.

If God had been merely One, the creation of the world would have ended with the mirroring of that unity and its eventual reabsorption in God. But because God is also three, the divine nature can be given; it can become gift. If it can be given by the Father to the Son, it can also be given to us in the Son. The world that is a natural reflection of God can become a true creation, can be filled with the substance of reality, can be 'deified', as the Orthodox say. But in order to be deified it must first be saved.--Dwight Longenecker, ed. The Path to Rome: Modern Journeys to the Catholic Church. (Herefordshire: Gracewing, 1999), 179-180.