Evangelicals are often surprised or maybe even shocked whenever they encounter the early Church Fathers' description of salvation in terms of deification, divinization, or apotheosis. It was Athanasius, the black dwarf, the champion of Nicene orthodoxy, who coined the phrase in his On the Incarnation, "God became man that man might become god." Hundreds of years before Athanasius, Irenaeus, disciple of Polycarp, disciple of the Apostle John, wrote of Christ's salvific provision for humanity using similar deification type concepts. Why did these Church Fathers use such seemingly foreign...
Evangelicals are often surprised or maybe even shocked whenever they encounter the early Church Fathers' description of salvation in terms of deificat...
