Review
Divinely Saved
Theosis: Patristic Remedy for Evangelical Yearning at the Close of the Modern Age
by Michael Paul Gama
reviewed by S. M. Hutchens
This is a compact, scholarly analysis of mainstream Evangelicalism as a religious offspring of modernism, concentrating on its losing struggle for acceptance among its own millennial children, who are leaving their parents' churches in increasing numbers because, as post-modernists, they no longer share a presuppositional basis in rationalism and linear patterns of perception, including those associated with a punctiliar salvation experience that has given rise in older-form Evangelicalism to a morbid and unslakeable thirst for exultant feeling, in ever-larger and ever-emptier enthusiasms where which the gospel is reduced to a single aspect of a larger reality.
The author proposes that the answer to the yearning arising from these deficiencies is to be found in theosis, or deification, the understanding of the Eastern churches that the object of human being and definition of salvation is an unending growth into and identification with God, in which only the perfect identity of the self and society of selves may be found.
Reading this impressive little book, this reviewer was struck by two thoughts in particular, first, that the millennials' (and pre-millennials') rejection of their natal Evangelicalism, including their creation of an "Emerging Church," rings fairly hollow as a protest when it appears more as an attempt to escape Christianity itself, using the faults of the parental faith as an excuse to indulge in their own generations' preferred forms of worldliness, particularly egalitarianism and sexual license. See, for example, Rachel Held Evans's self-righteous and passive-aggressive Theses on p. 89. Second, in analyses of Evangelicalism there needs to be a strong understanding that, however one defines the phenomenon by its positive traits (e.g., Bebbington's Quadrangle on p. 37), accurate definition must include the foundational anti-sacramentalism upon which rationalism and revivalist soteriology combine to control its reading of the Bible. The range and depth of its effect in the creation of the Evangelical mind would be hard to overestimate.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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