The Seed of David Becoming the Son of God: Understanding Regeneration and Sanctification in View of Christological Deification in Witness Lee

The Seed of David Becoming the Son of God: Understanding Regeneration and Sanctification in View of Christological Deification in Witness Lee

Brian Siu Kit Chiu

Researcher, Logos Evangelical Seminary

Researcher, Asia Research Center

Abstract: This paper argues that Witness Lee (1905–1997) reads Romans 1:3–4 as a hermeneutical key to deification: in resurrection, by the Spirit of holiness, the genuine humanity assumed by the eternal Son as the seed of David was designated—sanctified, uplifted, and transformed—into divine sonship, making Christ the Firstborn among many brothers (8:29) and the prototype of believers’ deification. In alignment with Chalcedonian Christology and in conversation with the participatory turn in Pauline scholarship (Gorman, Campbell, Blackwell, Litwa), the study traces through Romans how this christological deification grounds and patterns God’s organic salvation in chapters 5–8. Regeneration imparts divine life through the risen Christ as the life-giving Spirit—deification begun—and dispositional sanctification progressively saturates believers’ entire being with that life—deification continued. As deified sons of God and brothers of Christ, believers thereby become God in life and nature, though never in the Godhead, with the Body of Christ as the corporate issue of this deifying process.

Keywords: deification (theosis); Witness Lee; Romans 1:3–4; Romans 8:29; participatory reading; prototype; divine sonship; regeneration; sanctification

The apostle Paul opens the Gospel of God in Romans with the arresting claim that Jesus Christ, “who came out of the seed of David according to the flesh” was “designated the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness out of the resurrection of the dead” (Rom 1:3–4).¹ That a descendant of David was designated the Son of God has long unsettled interpreters: did Jesus become in resurrection the Son of God in a sense in which he was not before? Modern criticism has frequently answered by detecting a pre-Pauline, even adoptionist, confession in Paul’s exordium.² This study proposes instead a participatory approach through the reading of Witness Lee (1905–1997), a Chinese-American Bible teacher in the stream of Watchman Nee (1903–1972).³ Lee read Romans 1:3–4 as the hermeneutical key to human deification (or theosis, divinization)⁴—first in Christ and then in believers—grounded not in Hellenistic metaphysics but in resurrection and the movement of Paul’s own argument in the epistle.⁵

In alignment with Chalcedonian Christology,⁶ this paper argues that Paul presents the designation of David’s seed as the Son of God (1:3–4) as the prototypical deification of humanity: by the Spirit of holiness, Christ’s genuine humanity is uplifted into divine sonship in resurrection. Christ thereby becomes the pioneer (ἀρχηγός) of the many sons of God (Heb 2:10). This christological deification is both the ground and the pattern of believers’ full salvation beyond justification. It begins in regeneration, the impartation of divine life (ζωή) through the risen Christ as the life-giving Spirit, and continues in sanctification, the progressive saturation of the believer’s entire being with that life unto conformation to the image of the Firstborn (πρωτότοκος, Rom 8:29) so that they may become God in life and nature, though never in the Godhead (θεότης, Col 2:9), as members of Christ’s Body.

Four movements of Lee’s interpretation establish this connection between christological and believers’ deification, as summarized in his note on Rom. 1:4 and 8:29.⁷ First, Christ in His deity is always the only begotten Son of the Father, without ceasing to be such from eternity to eternity (John 1:18, 3:16). Second, the “seed of David” denotes Christ’s genuine, creaturely humanity, assumed in incarnation. Third, in resurrection this humanity is sanctified, uplifted, and transformed by the Spirit of holiness (Rom 1:4); it is Christ’s humanity, not His divinity, that is designated and brought into divine sonship. In this sense, Christ was “born” on the day of resurrection (Acts 13:33; Heb 1:5, 5:5) as the Firstborn Son of God in His humanity (Rom 8:29). Fourth, the Spirit thus functions as the designating, or deifying, Spirit. The same Spirit is now working in believers, imparting divine life, regenerating and sanctifying them, and progressively conforming them to the Firstborn, that Christ might be “the Firstborn among many brothers” (8:29). The ultimate issue is ecclesial deification: the Body of Christ, constituted of the many deified sons and corporately expressed in the churches (Rom 12–16).

The argument proceeds accordingly. Section I situates Lee’s reading within the Christian tradition of deification and sets out the study’s method and definition. Section II establishes the christological lens: Romans 1:3–4 presents the deification of the seed of David as prototypical. Sections III and IV then read the two particular movements of believers’ organic salvation through this lens—regeneration as the beginning of deification and sanctification as deification continued—before the conclusion draws the contribution of this resurrection-centered, participatory account to the further thoughts on deification.

I. Survey, Methodology, and Definition

A. The Resurgence of Deification and the Participatory Turn

The first of the two converging recoveries framing this study is the resurgence of deification across theological disciplines.⁸ Long associated with patristic and Eastern Orthodox theology, the classical grammar of theosis was forged by the fathers: Irenaeus’s recapitulation—the Son of God “became what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself”; Athanasius’s exchange formula, according to which the assumed flesh is to be deified in the Word; and Cyril of Alexandria’s account of Christ’s flesh as made life-giving through its union with the divine Word, who communicates to it His own life-giving power.⁹ Gregory of Nyssa developed the christological dimension with particular force: as Chungman Lee’s recent study shows, in Christ “the human nature was deified” and named this “christological deification” effected by the Holy Spirit—a pneumatological accent especially suggestive for the “Spirit of holiness” of Romans 1:4.¹⁰ Since Tuomo Mannermaa’s Finnish interpretation of Martin Luther, theosis has reemerged as a constructive category beyond Eastern Orthodoxy or the Catechism of the Catholic Church, while studies of Protestant figures—from John Calvin to Karl Barth and Robert Jenson—have demonstrated how themes of union and participation may be understood in terms of deification.¹¹

The second recovery is the participatory turn in contemporary Pauline scholarship, increasingly pursued in conversation with Paul’s patristic interpreters. What E. P. Sanders termed Paul’s “participationist eschatology” and later James Dunn’s account of “participation in Christ” have matured into a broad scholarly current.¹² Michael Gorman calls Romans “the first Christian treatise on theosis”¹³ and argues that Pauline soteriology is inherently participatory, transformative, and missional;¹⁴ within such a reading, justification itself is construed as a participatory event of dying and rising with Christ (“resurrectional cruciformity”) without ruling out the juridical and sacrificial dimensions of justification.¹⁵ Ben Blackwell, reading Romans alongside Irenaeus and Cyril of Alexandria, names the process “christosis”;¹⁶ and Constantine Campbell identifies union with Christ as the “webbing” that holds Paul’s theology together.¹⁷ Ben Dunson further argues that the participating individual in Romans is an “individual-in-community”¹⁸ and Gorman calls this “communal theosis.”¹⁹

Across these two recoveries the deification of Christ’s humanity is more often presupposed than expounded, and Romans 1:3–4 is treated as a reception-historical problem rather than as a deification text. M. David Litwa provides a significant exception: the resurrection is for him “the event in which Christ was declared ‘Son of God’ (Rom 1:3–4),” in which Christ “makes the transition…from an Adamic (psychic) human to a divine being.”²⁰ Yet Litwa’s history-of-religions framework leaves unresolved how this “transition” relates to Christ’s eternal divine sonship—the precise juncture at which a two-natures account must speak. At this intersection, the present study introduces Witness Lee as an interlocutor. His mature ministry develops a resurrection-centered, pneumatological account of deification within what he calls God’s “organic salvation,” anchored exegetically in Romans 1:3–4 and its movement toward 8:29. Lee’s reading thus brings the two trajectories into direct relation: Paul’s words in Romans 1:3–4 describe the christological deification of humanity as the ground and pattern of believers’ deification, thereby illuminating regeneration and sanctification through this christological lens.

B. Approach, Interlocutor, and Definition

Among various approaches, this study undertakes an exegetical-theological reading of Romans within the participatory approach to Paul.²¹ Advanced by scholars such as Michael Gorman and Constantine Campbell, this approach centers on believers’ union and κοινωνία with Christ and the Spirit (1 Cor 1:9; 2 Cor 13:14; Phil 2:1; 3:10), reading Paul’s “ἐν Χριστῷ” language not merely as a marker of legal standing but as a participatory and transformative reality.²² The in-Christ, with-Christ, and Spirit-in-us idiom of Romans thus describes real union rather than metaphor or forensic shorthand. This approach provides a grammar for reading regeneration and sanctification as participatory events—deification begun and deification continued—and for bringing Lee’s organic register into dialogue with Pauline scholarship.

This study is also conversational in Gorman’s sense of the study of Paul and participation as an ongoing conversation embracing “all interpreters of the apostle, in both academy and church.”²³ Since Lee taught deification outside the academy and its vocabularies, he is engaged not merely as a subject of description but as an interlocutor alongside other Pauline scholars with a participatory angle, such as Dunson on the essential individual-community connection,²⁴ Macaskill on incarnational ontology, especially participation in “sonship”;²⁵ and Dryden,²⁶ not to assimilate his reading to theirs but to discern his distinctive contribution.

The primary interlocutor merits brief introduction here. Lee was born in Chefoo (now Yantai), northern China, and converted at nineteen. From 1934 he labored alongside Watchman Nee in the churches until the 1949 political upheaval in Mainland China. After relocating to Taiwan in 1949 and to the United States in 1962, he continued to minister until his death, chiefly teaching the Bible to ordinary Christian audiences, with particular attention to Christian experience and practice for their spiritual growth and building up of the church. His corpus, largely transcribed and edited from spoken ministry, includes the study notes of the Recovery Version, the verse-by-verse Life-study of the Bible (1974–1995), and the 139-volume Collected Works.²⁷

This study draws primarily on his Bible notes, the Life-study and Crystallization-study of Romans, and publications from his final years (1994–1997),²⁸ reconstructing from them a coherent theological understanding of regeneration and sanctification through the lens of christological deification as the ground and pattern of believers’ deification. One theological constraint governs the study throughout: the Creator–creature distinction captured in the formula “becoming God in life and nature but not in the Godhead,” denoting participation in the divine life and nature rather than apotheosis.

II. Christ’s Designation: The Birth of the Firstborn Son—the Prototype of Deification

A. Text, Translation, and the Modern Debate

Paul’s exordium announces “the gospel of God” (v. 1):

Concerning His Son (περὶ τοῦ υἱοῦ αὐτοῦ),

who was made²⁹ (τοῦ γενομένου)

out of (ἐκ) the seed of David (σπέρματος Δαυὶδ)

according to (κατὰ) the flesh (σάρκα),

who was designated³⁰ (τοῦ ὁρισθέντος) the Son of God (υἱοῦ θεοῦ)

in power (ἐν δυνάμει)

according to (κατὰ) the Spirit of holiness (πνεῦμα ἁγιωσύνης)

out of (ἐξ) the resurrection of the dead (ἀναστάσεως νεκρῶν),

Jesus Christ our Lord (Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν). (vv. 3–4)³¹

Syntactically, the exordium is carefully balanced: two participial clauses, each accompanied by an ἐκ phrase of origin and a κατά phrase of manner—suggesting His humanity and divinity, respectively. Dodson and Scalise show that the verb ὁρίζω carries no adoptionist connotation.³² Patristic interpreters generally read it as confirming the two natures of the one person of Christ.³³ Modern criticism, however, generally construes the clauses in opposition.³⁴ As Joshua Jipp observes, much modern scholarship has read Romans 1:3–4, alongside Acts 2:36, through historical reconstructions of primitive Christology.³⁵ Construed as antithetical parallelism, the clauses represent successive yet contrasting stages: an earthly, Davidic, fleshly existence, followed by heavenly exaltation to divine sonship. Because some vocabularies are considered un-Pauline, the passage was widely regarded as a pre-Pauline confession quoted and adapted by Paul. Detached from the letter, this “two-stage” schema readily shaded into adoptionism—a Jesus who became at resurrection what he had not been before.³⁶

Two shortcomings undermine this construal. First, it detaches the passage from its literary context: God’s gospel is “concerning His Son” (1:3a); the One who came from David’s seed is identified with the pre-existent Son. Second, it neglects the passage’s reception.³⁷ The ancient interpreters read the flesh/Spirit pair as complementary rather than antithetical, and Michael Bird locates the developed adoptionist controversy in the late second century, making its retrojection into Paul’s exordium speculative.³⁸ Nathan Johnson’s analysis of the parallelism, lexical studies of ὁρίζω, and Poythress’s challenge to the confession hypothesis similarly point away from a change in Christ’s identity to a change in His state.³⁹ If the adoptionist two-stage reading stood, Romans 1:3–4 would describe a man’s apotheosis, risking the Creator–creature confusion that deification must exclude. If, however, the designation concerns the humanity of One who is already the eternal Son, the passage opens another possibility: the uplifting of human nature, in the person of the Son, into the state of divine sonship. Deification, on this reading, is christological before it is soteriological.

B. The Exegetical Spine: From Designation to Conformation

Four observations secure this reading and open it toward the rest of the epistle. First, the same word-stem chain. Paul is “separated” (ἀφωρισμένος, 1:1) unto the gospel; the Son is “designated” (ὁρισθέντος, 1:4); the many are “predestined” (προώρισεν, 8:29) to be conformed to the image of the Son. The threefold ὁρίζω stem binds the exordium to the epistle’s climax, linking the designation of the Son in 1:4 with the predestination of the many in 8:29.⁴⁰

Second, ἐν δυνάμει lexically qualifies the designation: the Son was not appointed to a sonship He lacked but designated as “Son of God in power.” With Dunn and Bird, resurrection marks a transition from sonship in weakness and obscurity to sonship in power and glory—a transposition of state, not an acquisition of identity.⁴¹ Paul’s exordium concerns the promised seed of David and presses this transition upon His assumed humanity.⁴² Geerhardus Vos similarly describes “two successive stages” in Christ’s life, with resurrection inaugurating “the pneumatic state of Christ’s glory which is described as sonship of God ἐν δυνάμει.”⁴³

Third, the generalizing plural is significant. Paul writes not “out of his resurrection” but “out of the resurrection of the dead” (ἐξ ἀναστάσεως νεκρῶν)—the eschatological resurrection of which Christ is the Firstfruits. His designation thus opens toward the many: what occurred in the One anticipates what will reach those who are His (1 Cor. 15:20, 23).⁴⁴ As the first of the resurrected, His humanity now immortal and glorified, Christ pioneers the way for the many into the same transformed and glorified sonship.⁴⁵

Fourth, the two κατά phrases must be given their full weight without reduction to a chronology. Κατὰ σάρκα locates the Son’s coming in genuine human descent—flesh here is not sinful flesh but creaturely humanity—the seed promised to David (2 Sam 7:12, 14). Garland indicates that Christ’s Davidic ancestry confirms God’s fidelity in fulfilling His covenant with David.⁴⁶ Tsumura calls this covenant “the turning point in the divine plan of salvation”: its father-son pledge awaits beyond every failing heir “the real son, the messiah.”⁴⁷ Anderson likewise traces this messianic promise into the New Testament, including Romans 1:3–4.⁴⁸ Ellison hears in ἐκ σπέρματος Δαυὶδ the same covenantal echo (2 Sam. 22:51; Ps. 18:50) and sees κατὰ σάρκα as stressing Jesus’s humanity as the rightful Davidic king without denying His deity.⁴⁹ Κατὰ πνεῦμα ἁγιωσύνης, in turn, identifies the sphere and agent of the designation. Unique in Paul, the phrase evokes the Spirit in His sanctifying character. The passage thus yields its own grammar: in resurrection, by the sanctifying Spirit, the Davidic humanity of the Son entered divine sonship in power. It is precisely here that Witness Lee’s reading begins.

C. Theological Reading: Christological Deification

Through the lens of deification, Lee reads the deep thought of Romans as God becoming man that man may become God in life and in nature—but not in the Godhead—to produce the organic Body of Christ for bringing forth His kingdom on earth.⁵⁰ Behind this stands his controlling hermeneutic key: the divine economy (οἰκονομία, Eph. 1:10; 3:9), God’s administration to dispense Himself into His chosen people for a corporate expression.⁵¹ Romans 1:3–4 is not an isolated christological ornament but the gospel’s content in nuce—the economy in miniature: God’s Son entering humanity, and humanity, in Him, entering divine sonship.⁵² As Ellison argues, Davidic descent is a central yet often overlooked element of the basic kerygma: “the proclamation of the gospel depends on Jesus’s human kingship, particularly his Davidic lineage.”⁵³

Lee’s note on 1:4 supplies the christological center of the gospel. In incarnation the Son of God assumed genuine Davidic humanity, which was not yet in the state of divine sonship. By resurrection, Christ’s “human nature was sanctified, uplifted, and transformed,” so that He was made the firstborn Son of God, possessing both divinity and the sanctified, uplifted, and transformed humanity. The day of His resurrection was thus, in fulfillment of the Psalms, a birth for the man Jesus: “Today I have begotten You” (Acts 13:33; cf. Ps 2:7).⁵⁴ His incarnation and resurrection correspond to His two “births”: by the first, the divine Son was born into humanity as the seed of David (cf. Matt 1:1, 22:42; Acts 13:34, 36); by the second, His assumed humanity was born into divine sonship.

Lee affirms that Romans 1:3–4 fulfills God’s promise to David in 2 Samuel 7:12–14, as scholars have highlighted the Davidic covenant as pivotal in salvation history.⁵⁵ As Tsumura observes, God’s plan and purpose of salvation, worked out through human agents, was “finally fulfilled in the life and death of his son Jesus Christ, the Messiah.”⁵⁶ Lee further develops this identification through the lens of deification—“I will raise up your seed after you [God becoming a man (David’s son, typified by Solomon)]…I will be his Father, and he will be My Son [man becoming God]” (2 Sam 7:12, 14). The promise (prophecy) typologically discloses God’s intention to bring humanity into a filial relation with Himself, fulfilled first in Christ, the seed of David (Matt. 1:1), and then in the believers as the many sons of God (Heb. 2:10; Rom. 8:29).⁵⁷

The formulation of christological deification must remain precise. Christ’s designation is with respect to His humanity, not His divinity. As the Son of God, Christ remains unchanged in His Godhead, for He is eternally “the only begotten Son” in His divinity. It is Christ’s humanity assumed in incarnation that is brought into divine sonship in resurrection, receiving a new status of “firstborn Son.”⁵⁸ Lee’s reading thus firmly rejects adoptionism and presupposes the pre-existent Son of 1:3a. Based upon Christ’s full deity, the designation of His humanity opens the way for human deification. Such a reading not only finds echoes in patristic writers but also has Reformation precedent: lecturing on this verse, Luther wrote of the Son’s humanity being “completed and translated to divine being.”⁵⁹

Lee further identifies the Spirit as the rising-up, designating agent of deification—first in Christ as prototype and then in believers, whom the Spirit indwells (Rom 8:11).⁶⁰ The pneumatological agency connects designation with divine sonship (υἱοθεσία), literally the “placing” or “setting” of someone as a son, developed more fully in Romans 8.⁶¹ The “Spirit of holiness” in 1:4 thus opens toward the “Spirit of sonship” in 8:15. Lee accordingly underscores the recurrence of “Spirit/spirit” in Romans 8, and identifies “the Spirit with our spirit” (v. 16) as the “secret of all the experiences of God’s organic salvation,” from regeneration through sanctification to glorification.⁶² Through this Spirit, believers are progressively brought into the fullness of sonship—a process Lee describes as being “sonized”;⁶³ the process Blackwell and Gorman term christosis.⁶⁴

Read from the epistle’s climax, Christ’s designation in His humanity opens toward conformation, serving the restoration of God’s image in the redeemed. The designated One is thus the prototype: the only begotten Son, having become the Firstborn with glorified humanity, is now “the Firstborn among many brothers” (8:29)—Hurtado’s “criterion and pattern” for the elect (the many brothers);⁶⁵ and Lee’s term, the divine “model” for a “mass reproduction.” In Lee’s note, the Firstborn is “base, pattern, element, and means” for producing the many sons—His “increase and expression,” of which “the church today is a miniature.”⁶⁶ The ἀφορίζω–ὁρίζω–προορίζω chain thus maps the epistle’s movement: what the designating Spirit accomplished in the seed of David He purposes to reproduce, mutatis mutandis, in the many.

Three clarifications safeguard this account. First, Christ’s prototypical deification posits no second subject beside the Son: the single subject throughout is the eternal Son, whose assumed humanity, not another person, is uplifted. As the man Jesus, He entered into the sonship He eternally possessed as God. Second, although the word “deification” does not appear in these texts, Romans 8 supplies its participatory grammar—the indwelling Spirit, divine life imparted, filial inheritance, and conformation to the Firstborn’s image. Third, the asymmetry remains: Christ’s humanity is sinless whereas ours is corrupted in the fall; His unique place in the Godhead is incommunicable; and the siblings remain, as Litwa observes, subordinate to their unique elder Brother.⁶⁷ Christological deification, so delimited, is not apotheosis but the uplifting of humanity, in Christ, into the life of divine sonship. How that life reaches the many is the focus of the next two sections.

III. Regeneration: The Birth of the Many Sons

A. Regeneration as Deification Begun

Lee’s late ministry orders God’s complete salvation in two registers: the first, judicial, pertaining to law, is the procedure, while the second, organic, pertaining to life, is the purpose. The order matters: the judicial establishes the sinner’s standing (Rom 1:17, 3:26), resulting in justification. Yet justification does not change believers’ constitution; the organic—the “much more” salvation “in His life” (Rom. 5:10)—carries the justified from regeneration to glorification (8:30).⁶⁸ Lee compresses the organic salvation into six movements: regeneration unto the divine life, renewing unto the new creation, sanctification unto the holy nature, transformation unto the divine image, conformation unto the divine element of life (not of the Godhead), and glorification unto the divine image in full.⁶⁹

The first step of believers’ deification is regeneration, through which they receive the divine life (ζωή). For Lee, regeneration means not outward moral reform but divine begetting, a second birth from God: the divine life added to the natural life imparted by the Spirit into the believer’s spirit—“that which is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:6). Through this birth, believers enter a life relationship with God, becoming genuine children of God (John 1:12) and brothers and members of Christ (Heb 2:11; Rom 12:5; 1 Cor 12:27), thereby participating in God’s life and nature.⁷⁰ Lee’s boldest register for this divine birth is taxonomic:

God’s children are God’s species. … God begets gods. We who have been born of God are God’s species. We do not share in the divine Godhead, but we have God’s life and nature. The heart’s desire and good pleasure of God are to have a group of people who are exactly like Him, having His nature and His life to be His expression. This is why we need regeneration.⁷¹

Humans were created according to God’s image for His divine purpose (Gen 1:26) yet without innate divinity. God’s way to accomplish His purpose is for humans to partake of His divine life, signified by the tree of life (2:9), which the first man did not receive.⁷² For Lee, regeneration therefore answers God’s desire in His creation before man’s need: “We need to be regenerated [first] not because we have sins but because God’s desire is that we have His life and be exactly like Him.”⁷³ Lee carefully applies the vocabulary of deification “in a limited sense to convey the fact that we have been born of God to become sons of God,” not God Himself.⁷⁴ Ron Kangas affirms the point: regeneration, as the impartation of the divine life, is deification begun.⁷⁵

In the divine begetting, the believer’s created human life remains, but another life—the uncreated life of God—is imparted into the human spirit, the innermost part of the human being. Romans 8:16 specifies the site and reality of this birth: “the Spirit Himself with our spirit witnesses that we are children of God,” which Lee calls “the secret of God’s organic salvation.” At regeneration, the human spirit, deadened by the fall, is enlivened and indwelt by the Spirit, and the believer is joined to Him as one spirit (Rom. 8:10; 1 Cor. 6:17). Believers’ experience of organic salvation proceeds from this union of the two spirits.⁷⁶

Regeneration is thus the base of believers’ experience in God’s organic salvation and of their continual growth. On this base they are built up in that life, experiencing the renewing of the Holy Spirit that makes them God’s new creation—what Paul elsewhere calls the “washing of regeneration” (Titus 3:5).⁷⁷ They grow by being “nourished with the supply of the milk of the word of God” unto a “daily, gradual salvation” (1 Pet. 2:2), denying their natural life to live by the divine (Matt. 16:24). Corporately, they are built together, growing “with the growth of God” (Col. 2:19) to be constituted as the Body of Christ, His increase and fullness, consummating in the New Jerusalem as the ultimate purpose of God’s organic salvation.⁷⁸

The christological grounding makes regeneration more than private pneumatic renewal. The last Adam, having passed through death, “became a life-giving Spirit” (1 Cor. 15:45b): the One who was designated Son of God in resurrection is now, as the life-giving Spirit, the imparter of the divine life by which the many are regenerated. Peter makes the resurrection–regeneration link explicit: God “has regenerated us…through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Pet. 1:3). John expresses the same link with familial language in the risen Christ’s words: “Go to My brothers and say to them, I ascend to My Father and your Father” (John 20:17)—the Firstborn announcing His brothers produced through His resurrection.⁷⁹ The Firstborn’s resurrection-birth (Acts 13:33) thus grounds and effects the regeneration of the many brothers, making believers children (τέκνα) of God—the initial stage of a sonship that must yet mature.⁸⁰

B. Regeneration in Romans: Participation, Union, and Sonship

Pauline scholars have long noted the epistle’s two registers: a “juristic” idiom dominant in Romans 1–4 and a “participationist” idiom dominant in 5–8.⁸¹ Lee similarly frames Romans as the gospel of God’s complete salvation with two aspects, judicial and organic, corresponding respectively to 1:18–5:11 on justification (including condemnation) and 5:12–8:39 on sanctification (including glorification).⁸² Yet the judicial is not slighted: as the last Adam and the second man (1 Cor. 15:45, 47), the incarnate God-man satisfied the law’s righteous requirement in His living, ultimately becoming the propitiatory sacrifice and even the propitiation place (3:25), “delivered for our offenses and raised for our justification” (4:25), thereby reconciling sinners, God’s enemies, to God (5:10–11). Redemption, justification, and reconciliation thus establish the judicial foundation for the organic stage of God’s full salvation—the process of deification.⁸³

The judicial and organic meet in Paul’s own compressed phrase: the one righteous act issued “unto justification of life” (εἰς δικαίωσιν ζωῆς, 5:18). Lee adds organic precision: participation begins as birth, its content is the divine life (ζωή), and its organ is the regenerated human spirit. On the ground of the judicial righteousness of chapters 3–5, the human spirit becomes the vessel of God’s life. Romans traces this movement across chapters 5–8 in terms of this life. The justified walk “in newness of life” (6:4). “The law of the Spirit of life” frees them in Christ Jesus (8:2); and if Christ is in them, “the spirit is life because of righteousness” (8:10).

Regarding regeneration, υἱοθεσία in 8:15, usually rendered “adoption,” deserves attention. In its modern sense, the translation can suggest a primarily legal act; but as Roger Good argues, the New Testament’s register for entering God’s family includes birth, growth, and maturation—begotten of God, newborn babes, children, sons, and heirs—thus the translation “sonship,” organically conceived, better conveys Paul’s sense of an “abiding status” grounded in birth.⁸⁴ The surrounding imagery of Romans 8—begetting, children, firstborn, brothers—is generative, and 8:23 extends υἱοθεσία to “the redemption of our body.”⁸⁵ Believers received not “a spirit of slavery” but “a spirit of sonship,” in which they cry, “Abba, Father” (8:15). Lee’s note on 8:14 accordingly distinguishes stages: “children” (v. 16) marks the initial stage, “sons” (v. 14) a more advanced growth in divine life, and full “sonship” (v. 23) maturity in the redemption of the body.⁸⁶ As Moo indicates, Paul relates believers’ sonship to Jesus’s unique sonship.⁸⁷ Read thus, 8:15–16 becomes the subjective counterpart to 1:3–4: the Spirit who designated the Son in resurrection now witnesses with believers’ spirit that the same sonship has begun in them. This divine sonship, to which believers are predestined (8:29–30; cf. Eph 1:5) and into which they experientially enter through regeneration, connects Christ’s designation as the Firstborn with their birth as the many sons. Hence, Lee writes, “the gospel of God is a gospel of sonship.”⁸⁸

IV. Sanctification: The Saturation of the Many Sons

A. Sanctification as Deification in Process

In Lee’s account, if regeneration—being born of God—is the beginning, then sanctification is the establishing stage of God’s organic salvation. Sanctification primarily means not sinless perfection but the work of God’s Spirit through which believers are constituted with God’s holy nature and made holy unto Him (Rom. 6:19, 22; 15:16; 2 Pet. 1:4).⁸⁹ Due to the fall, human beings became separated from God and common in both position and disposition. God’s sanctifying work therefore has two aspects—position and disposition⁹⁰—a distinction also reflected in Paul’s usage (1 Cor. 1:2; 6:11; 1 Thess. 5:23).⁹¹

In Lee’s categories, positional sanctification—a change in position—belongs to the judicial aspect and is accomplished through Christ’s redeeming blood, which sets believers apart from what is common unto God (Heb. 13:12; 10:29; 1 Cor. 1:2; Rom. 1:7; cf. Matt. 23:17). Dispositional sanctification—a change in disposition—belongs to the organic aspect and is carried out by the Holy Spirit, progressively saturating believers with God’s holy nature (Rom. 6:19, 22; 15:16; 2 Pet. 1:4).⁹² As Romans 5:10b shows, those already reconciled through Christ’s death “much more will be saved in His life”; this further salvation is not for justification, already judicially accomplished, but “mainly for sanctification.”⁹³ Lee states succinctly, “to be sanctified in the Holy Spirit is to be saved in life.”⁹⁴

Dispositional sanctification establishes believers in God’s organic salvation as the Holy Spirit, with the element of Christ’s resurrection life, sanctifies their natural disposition (which is crooked, perverted, and full of peculiarities) with God’s holy nature. This “salvation in life” describes the larger organic process by which those already justified are inwardly made holy (1 Thess. 5:23). Read through the christological lens established above, sanctification may be understood as the deifying movement of 1:4 extended, mutatis mutandis, to the many. For Lee, holiness is God’s own nature; His desire to make His people holy (Eph. 1:4) therefore already implies the thought of deification.⁹⁵

With Lee’s tripartite anthropological framework, God first possesses the human spirit through regeneration, then spreads Himself as the life-giving Spirit into the soul to saturate and transform it, and finally enlivens and transfigures the mortal body by His life power, conforming it to Christ’s glorified body. Dispositional sanctification is thus a lifelong process extending from spirit, through soul, to body, until believers’ entire being is wholly sanctified (1 Thess 5:23), ultimately becoming as holy as the holy city, New Jerusalem (Rev. 21:2, 10; 22:19).⁹⁶

Lee further provides the experiential grammar of dispositional sanctification by connecting being “saved in His life” (Rom 5:10) with “reigning in life” in 5:17. Those who have received “the gift of righteousness” and continually receive “the abundance of grace” reign in life, bringing sin, death, Satan, the natural man, and the self under the rule of the divine life.⁹⁷ As believers learn to reign in life, they are experientially sanctified in the Spirit.⁹⁸ Sanctification and reigning thus mutually interpret one another: believers are sanctified as the reigning life within their regenerated spirit progressively saturates soul and body, while their growing sanctification increasingly manifests this reign.⁹⁹

The christological grounding again controls. Being designated in resurrection, the Firstborn takes up the office of Sanctifier (Heb. 2:11): “For both He who sanctifies and those who are being sanctified are all of One, for which cause He is not ashamed to call them brothers.” Christ’s sanctified humanity becomes, by the life-giving Spirit, the sanctifying element in His brothers. Lee draws this connection from Hebrews 2:11:

He who sanctifies is Christ as the firstborn Son of God, and those who are being sanctified are the believers of Christ as the many sons of God. Both the firstborn Son and the many sons of God are born of the same Father God in resurrection (Acts 13:33; 1 Pet. 1:3) and have the same divine life and nature. Hence, He is not ashamed to call them brothers.¹⁰⁰

In His designation this resurrected and ascended Christ is not only the Sanctifier but also the King and Lord “crowned with glory and honor” (Heb. 2:7, 9; Acts 2:33–36; Phil 2:6–11).¹⁰¹ For Lee, regeneration imparts Christ’s “divine, spiritual, heavenly, kingly, and royal life” into believers, enabling them to “reign in life” as kings (Rom. 5:17).¹⁰² Sanctification is thus christological through and through: by the life-giving Spirit, the Firstborn saturates believers with His sanctifying element as the Triune God organically permeates their entire being. The permeation accomplished prototypically in Christ is thereby reproduced in His members, constituting them as His Body.

B. Sanctification in Romans: From Participation to Glorification

Those freed from sin have their “fruit unto sanctification” (6:22). Having been reconciled by Christ’s death, “much more…we will be saved in His life” (5:10). Baptized into Christ Jesus and buried together with Him, believers are in Christ and have “grown together” (σύμφυτοι, 6:5) with Him in the likeness of His death and resurrection. The Spirit makes their spirit life (8:10); the mind set on the spirit, the leading part of the soul, becomes life (8:6); by the Spirit the practices of the body are put to death (8:13), and the Spirit gives life to their mortal body (8:11). All these verses from chapters 6–8, in Lee’s reading, highlight two “divine transfers” in God’s organic salvation, based upon the spiritual union of the Spirit with believers’ spirit: The first transfer, factual and positional, is out of Adam into Christ (6:3–8); the second, practical and experiential, is out of the flesh into the Spirit of life (7:1–6; 8:16a).¹⁰³ Chapter 6 grants those formerly in Adam a new position through identification with Christ; chapter 7 shows experientially that the law, though good, righteous, and holy (v. 12), cannot produce holiness from believers’ flesh; chapter 8—the kernel of the epistle, even of the New Testament—announces the resolution in “the law of the Spirit of life” (8:2). Lee accordingly traces the interchangeable and ascending titles of 8:9–11: the Spirit “of God,” “of Christ,” and “of the One who raised Jesus from the dead,” identifying the Spirit as the agent of sanctification and His sanctifying work as “the holding line” for believers’ “sonizing” (deifying) unto glorification.¹⁰⁴

The προορίζω of 8:29 completes the chain begun with ἀφορίζω (1:1) and ὁρίζω (1:4): the designating Spirit of 1:4 is now the deifying Spirit at work in chapter 8, toward believers’ conformation, glorification, and inheritance as “heirs of God” (8:17). The “golden chain” of 8:29–30 gathers this process into a single divine purpose: predestining the many “to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the Firstborn among many brothers.” Recent scholarship offers converging descriptions. Blackwell’s “christoformity is theoformity” names a somatic and pneumatological conformity to Christ traced through Romans 8 in light of patristic interpreters;¹⁰⁵ and Gorman argues that Pauline holiness is “Christlike Godlikeness,” theosis under another name. This holiness takes the lived form of conformity to the crucified Christ in cruciform faith, love, power, and hope.¹⁰⁶

Finally, this deifying process does not aim at perfected individuals. The many sons conformed to the prototype are “one Body in Christ” (Rom. 12:4–5), and transformation through the renewing of the mind (12:2) issues immediately in the practical life of the Body (12:3–21). This is Dunn’s “corporate Christ”: participation issues in membership; similarly, Gorman describes deification in Romans as “corporate, or communal, because it is common incorporation into Christ.”¹⁰⁷ Such a deified life is practically learned among “one another”: loving (13:8), refusing to judge (14:13), building up (14:19), receiving (15:7), admonishing (15:14), and greeting (16:16). In this community, righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit manifest the kingdom of God (14:17)—the prototype’s life reproduced in many members joined and functioning together.¹⁰⁸ The ecclesial dimension of the Spirit’s designating work in Romans 12 and later is treated more fully in other chapters in the present volume, to which this argument is complementary.¹⁰⁹

Conclusion

This study has argued that Witness Lee reads Romans 1:3–4 as the hermeneutical key to a doctrine of deification: Jesus Christ, while eternally remaining the only-begotten Son of God in His deity, through death and resurrection became the Firstborn Son of God with respect to His humanity and mode of Sonship, opening the way for humanity to become the many sons of God. Exegetically, the verse declares not the promotion of a man (Jesus) into deity but the designation of the incarnate Christ’s humanity into divine sonship: the word-stem of “designated,” the plurality of resurrection, and the Spirit of holiness together bind the destiny of the seed of David to that of the many brothers of 8:29.

Theologically, this christological deification is the ground and pattern of the believers’ full salvation after justification: regeneration is its beginning—the many reborn through the risen prototype as the life-giving Spirit; dispositional sanctification is its continuation—the divine life progressively saturating their entire being, experienced in reigning in life, unto conformation to the image of the Son. At no point is the Creator–creature distinction crossed: the redeemed, regenerated, and transformed become God “in life and in nature but not in the Godhead.”

The contribution to the present symposium is threefold. First, this study retrieves a resurrection-centered account of deification from a non-Western expositor in the Protestant tradition and demonstrates its convergence with the participatory turn in Pauline scholarship. Second, it shows this account to be ecumenical in instinct, resonating with patristic readings of Romans, particularly the connection between 1:3–4 and 8:29. Third, it suggests that regeneration and sanctification constitute one organic movement—deification begun and deification continued—whose corporate issue is the Body of Christ (Rom. 12:4–5), expressed in the local churches (16:16). The seed of David has become the Son of God; the sons of Adam, born anew through Christ and saturated with His divine life, are becoming sons of God—God in life and nature, though never in the Godhead—and corporately His expression in Christ. That, for Lee, is the kernel and climax of the gospel of God.

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