Conformation and Glorification with Deification as Their Telos: Witness Lee’s Pneumatological Ordo Salutis¹

Jacob Chengwei Feng · Fuller Theological Seminary

Introduction

Two witnesses who agree about very little agree about this.² Louis Berkhof, setting out the Reformed order of salvation, judges that “the nearest approach found in Scripture to anything like an ordo salutis, is the statement of Paul in Rom. 8:29,30.”³ Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, writing to move Christian soteriology beyond that category altogether, calls the same two verses “the most comprehensive Pauline presentation of the order.”⁴ The passage that Protestant theology has always treated as its charter for the order of salvation is also the passage in which conformation to the image of the Son and glorification stand in immediate succession — and it is remarkable how little has been made of that succession by those who claim the text.

This chapter argues that Witness Lee (1905–1997) made something of it. For Lee, conformation and glorification are not the last two names on a list of benefits but a distinct terminal pair with a logic of its own: conformation is “the end result of transformation,” glorification is “the step” and indeed “the ultimate step” in a complete salvation, and the second depends upon the first, since “glorification depends upon our growth in life.”⁵ The process by which the one issues in the other is what he calls reproduction — the firstborn Son is the prototype and the many sons the mass production — and it is a process both christological and pneumatological, since the glory that saturates the believer does so “according to the principle of His regenerating our spirit through the Spirit.”⁶ Deification, on this reading, is the telos of that pair, personal and, as the volume’s companion chapter shows, communal.⁷

What is claimed here should be stated narrowly, because part of it is already in print. That conformation and glorification belong in sequence to Lee’s soteriology has been established by Michael M. C. Reardon and Brian Siu Kit Chiu, who name them as the last members of a sanctifying thread and conclude that Watchman Nee’s and Lee’s soteriology amounts to deification as the telos of sanctification.⁸ The present argument differs in its point of departure rather than its conclusion: it takes the pair itself, not sanctification, as the terminus from which the telos is reckoned. Three things remain unworked. Romans 8:29–30 has not been read as a single unit; the ordo salutis as a category has not been brought to Lee’s material at all; and the reproduction figure by which conformation issues in glory has not been expounded. Nor is the gap peculiar to the Western traditions. The fullest study of theosis in Sino-Christian theology, Alexander Chow’s, credits Nee with “a soteriology—or, more precisely, an ordo salutis,” but carries it no further than regeneration and sanctification; conformation is never taken up there as a theological term, and Lee figures in it as an ecclesial organizer rather than as a theologian.⁹ That silence was noticed at once. Reviewing the study, Michael Reardon granted its typology but pressed one objection against it: although Nee is cast throughout as the strand most “resistant” to theosis, “of the three theologians analyzed, Nee’s theological framework is the only one that has been used to incorporate theosis as the telos of salvation” — and it was through Lee, a co-worker “mentioned four times in Chow’s study,” that this had happened.¹⁰ The observation on which the present argument rests has therefore been in print, by a scholar writing in this volume, since 2017. What has not been done is the exposition. Nor, finally, is the point that no one has connected the two terms — Aquinas connected them, as conformity imperfect by grace and perfect by glory. What is missing is a Protestant account that reads them as ordered stages out of the text that Protestant theology has always claimed.

Lee’s own contribution, as against Nee’s, will be located precisely: not the order, which is Nee’s, nor the prototype, which is Nee’s term, but the naming of its correlate, the claim that glorification depends on growth in life, and the fixing of the whole doctrine in the apparatus of a translation, where it stands at the verse for any reader who opens the page.

The argument proceeds in five steps: Lee’s ordo salutis in comparative frame; conformation and glorification in his scriptural interpretation; his indebtedness to Nee; the question of what, exactly, is glorified, and whether the creaturely boundary is thereby crossed; and the implications for a doctrine of deification in the third millennium. Because Lee never systematized any of this, it has had to be reconstructed from the annotations to his translation, from expository messages taken down by others, and from a topical compilation — a limitation acknowledged here and returned to in due course.¹¹

1. Lee’s Ordo Salutis in Comparative Frame

An ordo salutis is a Protestant invention, and its practitioners have always known it. Berkhof states the point without embarrassment: “The doctrine of the order of salvation is a fruit of the Reformation. Hardly any semblance of it is found in the works of the Scholastics,” since “even the greatest of the Schoolmen, such as Peter the Lombard and Thomas Aquinas, pass on at once from the discussion of the incarnation to that of the Church and the sacraments.”¹² Kärkkäinen, writing from a different confessional address, reaches the same verdict: “Prior to the Reformation there was very little interest in outlining the temporal or logical sequence of the process of salvation, even in the great medieval summae.”¹³ Calvin, on Berkhof’s account, “was the first to group the various parts of the order of salvation in a systematic way.”¹⁴

This matters for what follows, because it means that a comparison of Lee with the traditions cannot be a comparison of like with like. Lee inherited the Protestant habit of sequencing; the Catholic and Orthodox traditions he is often measured against did not have it to inherit. The question is therefore not whether Lee’s ordering matches theirs, but whether the ordering he produced is answerable to the same texts.

The charter text

On that question the tradition is unexpectedly unanimous, and it converges on the pericope this chapter reads. Berkhof: “The nearest approach found in Scripture to anything like an ordo salutis, is the statement of Paul in Rom. 8:29,30.”¹⁵ Kärkkäinen: some passages, “especially Romans 8:29-30, were often invoked as establishing a precedent.”¹⁶ In his epilogue he is more emphatic still, calling it “the most comprehensive Pauline presentation of the order.”¹⁷ Whatever else divides these witnesses, they agree on where a Protestant ordo salutis is supposed to come from — and it is the passage from which Lee’s conformation and glorification are drawn.

Where glorification falls

The Reformed order runs, in Berkhof’s summary, from calling or regeneration through conversion, faith, justification and sanctification, and “finally, the order of salvation is concluded with the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints and their final glorification.”¹⁸ Glorification is thus the terminus, and — this is the point most easily missed — it is not merely a terminus. Berkhof holds that in Romans 8:29–30 justification stands between “two acts of God in time, namely, calling and glorification, which begins in time but is completed in a future eternity.”¹⁹

Herman Bavinck presses the same claim further, and in doing so states the position this chapter must reckon with most carefully. Sanctification, he writes, “consists fully in believers being conformed to the image of the Son (Rom. 8:29; Gal. 4:19). To that extent sanctification coincides with glorification. The latter does not just start in the afterlife but is initiated immediately with the calling,” and “this glorification is continued throughout the Christian life (2 Cor. 3:18) until it is completed in Christ’s return.”²⁰ Here conformation and glorification are expounded, related, and given a temporal structure — and they are placed inside sanctification, as its content rather than its sequel.²¹

The Catholic and Orthodox alternative

Against this, the Reformed tradition has habitually set a Catholic order that is institutional rather than personal — for Bavinck, “a ‘hierarchical-ecclesiastical order,’ according to which the priest, by means of the sacraments, infuses, restores, and increases grace in the heart of believers. Grace follows the track of the sacraments.”²² The characterization is polemical, and it will not survive contact with the texts. A. N. Williams’s comparative study of Aquinas and Palamas concludes that “the ground that Aquinas and Palamas share is vast compared to the points at which they diverge,” so that “in most respects, to know and affirm the doctrine of deification in one is implicitly to accept the doctrine of the other.”²³

More to the present point, Aquinas turns out to hold the very connection this chapter is about, and to hold it thematically. Williams’s exposition of the Summa runs nature, grace, glory, and at the third it arrives where Lee arrives: “Glory represents the culmination of the image of God in humanity and the culmination of the dynamic of divinization,” since “grace is nothing else than a beginning of glory in us,” and “nature is not done away, but perfected, by glory.”²⁴ Aquinas states the relation of the two stages directly: “The adoption of the sons of God is through a certain conformity of the image to the natural son of God. Now this takes place in two ways: first, by the grace of the wayfarer, which is imperfect conformity; secondly, by glory, which is perfect conformity.”²⁵ Conformity to the image and glory are therefore not merely adjacent in Aquinas; they are two degrees of one thing, the second completing the first.

This has to be conceded plainly, because it narrows what can be claimed below. What Aquinas offers is a doctrine of degrees — imperfect and perfect conformity — rather than a sequence of stages, and he neither derives it from Romans 8:29–30 nor sets it within an order of salvation.²⁶

Kärkkäinen, and how narrowly the gap must be stated

Kärkkäinen’s own proposal is to leave the category behind. His chapter is titled “From Ordo Salutis to a Salutary Communion,” and his objection is not to the doctrines in the sequence but to the sequence as an organizing form: it is too individualistic, too abstract, and too little communal to carry a Christian soteriology.²⁷ Yet in his epilogue he concedes something that this chapter takes as its point of departure. “Even the Reformed tradition with its emphasis on the union with God (Calvin),” he writes, “failed to make the connection between glorification and union a theological theme. Although the Eastern tradition does not subscribe to the doctrine of glorification in the same sense as the Christian West, its intuition of salvation as deification materially makes that connection.”²⁸

The diagnosis is valuable, and the present argument depends on it. But it is stated more broadly than the evidence will carry, in two respects, and saying so sharpens rather than weakens the point Kärkkäinen is making.

First, the failure is not the Christian West’s but the Reformed tradition’s, and Aquinas is the counter-instance. As we have seen, the Summa connects conformity to the image with glory as its perfection, makes glory “the culmination of the image of God in humanity and the culmination of the dynamic of divinization,” and defines grace as the beginning of glory.²⁹ That is not an intuition awaiting thematization; it is the theme. Second, the concession to the East is too modest. Palamas does not merely make the connection “materially”: he grounds deification in the purpose of creation itself, holding that “God’s express purpose in creating us was to make us partakers of his own divinity,” so that “a God willing to divinize is a God who would also have created beings explicitly ordered to fellowship with him.”³⁰

What is genuinely missing, then, is narrower and more interesting than a Western failure of nerve. It is a Protestant account — and, more precisely, an account in which conformation and glorification are read as ordered stages out of the passage the Protestant order has always claimed as its charter.³¹

The same holds where one would most expect otherwise. Work on deification in Sino-Christian theology has grown quickly, and its fullest study places Nee within an ordo salutis in so many words; but it carries that order no further than regeneration and sanctification, and it does not read Romans 8:29–30 as the charter from which the terminal pair is drawn.³²

That gap has to be described more carefully still, because one Protestant account does read the two verses precisely as the order’s charter. J. V. Fesko’s defense of the early modern Reformed ordo salutis takes Romans 8:29–30 as its center, and argues that Paul’s chain is a sorites — a Greco-Roman rhetorical form — whose implication is that the order describes “degrees” rather than “a temporal sequence of events,” being “largely the simultaneous bestowal of the benefits of redemption.”³³ The reading is careful and it is not the one offered here; it is, in fact, the sharpest available objection to it, and it is taken up in the final section. What matters at this stage is that even on Fesko’s account conformation is not expounded — the word does not occur in his essay — and the relation between the two terms is one of interrelation rather than dependence.

Within that narrowed space the argument falls. Berkhof has the order and the text but expounds neither term; Bavinck expounds both and places them inside sanctification, where deification is refused as a Pseudo-Dionysian import; Aquinas has the two degrees of conformity but no order of salvation in which to set them; Fesko has the text and the category but reads the chain as degrees rather than stages.³⁴ What follows argues that Lee supplies what none of them does: an exegetical account, drawn from Romans 8:29–30 itself, of how conformation issues in glorification — and of why deification is their telos rather than a name for their middle.

2. Conformation and Glorification in Lee’s Reading of Romans 8

Lee’s treatment of conformation and glorification is not gathered into a treatise. It is distributed across three genres — the annotations to his translation of the New Testament, the expository Life-Study messages, and the topical synthesis of The Conclusion of the New Testament — and it is most compressed where it is least expected, in the footnotes. This section reconstructs it from those three, taking the annotations first because they are the earliest form in which the exegesis is fixed, and because they show what Lee thought a reader needed at the verse itself.

The apparatus as exegesis

The Recovery Version prints an outline over the text, and the outline itself makes the claim. Over Romans 8:28–30 the heading reads “Heirs Conformed.”³⁵ Before a single note is read, the translator has told the reader that this unit is about conformation and that conformation is what makes heirs.

The note on 8:29 supplies the figure that governs everything after it. God’s firstborn Son is the prototype; the many sons are the mass production conformed to that prototype.³⁶ The metaphor is industrial, and deliberately so: it makes conformation a process with a pattern, a product, and a quantity, and it locates the difference between the Son and the sons in order of production rather than in kind of substance.

The note on 8:30 then carries the sequence one step further, and it is here that Lee’s own vocabulary becomes decisive for the present argument. “Glorification,” he writes, “is the step in God’s complete salvation in which God will completely saturate our body of sin, which is of death and is mortal, with the glory of His life and nature according to the principle of His regenerating our spirit through the Spirit. In this way He will transfigure our body, conforming it to the resurrected, glorious body of His Son. This is the ultimate step in God’s complete salvation.”³⁷ Four things are given at once. Glorification is a step, and the word is Lee’s; it is the ultimate step, which makes the sequence terminal rather than open-ended; its mechanism is stated — saturation with the glory of the divine life and nature; and that mechanism is pneumatological, since it proceeds “according to the principle of His regenerating our spirit through the Spirit.” The last point is easily passed over and should not be. Whatever else conformation and glorification are for Lee, they are not christological alone: the pattern is the firstborn Son, but the operation is the Spirit’s, and it is continuous with the operation by which the process began.³⁸ The note on the preceding clause supplies the movement between the two terms: in justification’s acceptance “God works to conform them to the image of His Son until He brings them into His glory.”³⁹

It is worth adding that the outline itself refuses to separate them. The heading “Heirs Conformed” governs verses 28 through 30, so that glorification falls inside the unit Lee labels conformation; the next heading begins only at verse 31.⁴⁰

Two features of the apparatus are worth registering, because together they fix the position of conformation in the sequence. The first is that Lee’s cross-references gather the other conformation texts to this one. The margin at 8:29 sends the reader to 2 Corinthians 3:18, 1 Corinthians 15:49, Philippians 3:21 and 1 John 3:2, in that order; the margins at Philippians 3:21 and 1 John 3:2 return the reader to Romans 8:29.⁴¹ The verse is, in his apparatus, the controlling text on the subject.

The second is more consequential, and it forecloses a reading that might otherwise seem natural. Because 2 Corinthians 3:18 speaks of being “transformed” and Romans 8:29 of being “conformed,” one might expect Lee to treat the two as alternative descriptions of a single change, or else to keep them wholly apart.⁴² He does neither. The note on 8:29 states the relation in a sentence: “Conformation is the end result of transformation.”⁴³ The two are distinct, and they are ordered — transformation precedes, conformation completes. This is the first indication, and it comes from the apparatus rather than from the expository messages, that what Lee is describing is a sequence and not a cluster of synonyms.⁴⁴

Message Twenty: conformation for glorification

The expository treatment is fullest in the twentieth message of the Life-Study of Romans, “Heirs of Glory (3),” whose second section is headed “Heirs Conformed for Glorification.”⁴⁵ The preposition is the argument. Conformation is not one benefit among others and glorification another; the first is ordered to the second.

Lee states the relation directly: “This conformation is for the coming glorification… The glorification to come depends on our conformation to the image of the Son of God. Thus, glorification depends upon our growth in life.”⁴⁶ Three claims are packed into three sentences, and they should be separated. The first is teleological: conformation has glorification as its end. The second is conditional: glorification depends on conformation, which makes the sequence more than a chronology. The third is the one most easily missed and most consequential for the present argument — the dependence is a dependence on growth in life. Glorification is not, on this account, a divine act performed upon a passive recipient at the last day; it is the completion of a process whose earlier stages are organic and already under way.

It is essential to note what this does to the ordering of the ordo salutis. In the sequence Lee elsewhere sets out, conformation and glorification are the last two members of a series that runs from regeneration through renewing and transformation.⁴⁷ Read from the front, they look like termini — the places the process happens to end. Read from Message Twenty, the relation reverses: glorification is the end for which the whole is undertaken, and conformation is the immediately preceding condition of it. The series is not merely sequential but final.

The prototype and the mass production

The industrial figure that the apparatus introduces is worked out at three separate places in the corpus, and the consistency across them is itself evidence that it is a considered position rather than an occasional illustration.

In Message Twenty it is stated at its plainest: “God’s firstborn Son is the prototype, and we are the mass production. Christ is the model, mold, and pattern.”⁴⁸ In The Conclusion of the New Testament it recurs in the treatment of the believers’ present standing, where conformation is said to issue from transformation and to be inseparable from sanctification: “Sanctification, transformation, and conformation cannot be separated.”⁴⁹ And in the earliest messages of the same work the figure is already fully formed, with the two-stage structure made explicit: “The designation of the Firstborn of God is the work on the prototype; the conformation of the many sons of God is the work of mass production. Having gained the prototype, God is now seeking to have the mass production.”⁵⁰

That third passage repays attention, because it does something the other two do not. It assigns the prototype and the mass production to distinct divine works, and it puts them in temporal order — the prototype first, gained; the mass production now sought. Conformation, on this reading, is not the believer’s approximation to a static ideal but participation in a second work that presupposes a first, and the firstborn Son is the point at which the two are joined.

What the figure rules out is as informative as what it asserts. A prototype and its mass production share a form, not a substance; the language is of pattern and reproduction, not of essence and emanation. Lee is therefore not saying — and the figure will not bear — that the many sons become what the Son is in the Godhead. He says so elsewhere in the formula this volume’s other contributors have discussed: believers become God in life and in nature but not in the Godhead.⁵¹ The prototype figure is the exegetical form of that same restraint, and it is worth noticing that the restraint is built into the metaphor rather than added to it as a caveat.

What this section establishes, and what it does not

Three things have been shown from Lee’s own texts. Conformation is, for him, a distinct stage with its own vocabulary, controlled by Romans 8:29 and ordered to the transformation that precedes it as an end result is ordered to its process. Glorification is in turn its end, and the relation between them is one of dependence rather than mere succession — Lee calls glorification “the ultimate step,” and makes it depend on growth in life.⁵² And the prototype–mass production figure, worked consistently across three loci, supplies the mechanism: conformation is participation in a divine work whose pattern is the firstborn Son.

Two limits should be stated plainly here rather than left for a reviewer to press. The first is that Lee never systematized any of this. There is no treatise on the order of salvation in his corpus; the material has to be reconstructed from annotations to a translation, from spoken messages taken down by others, and from a topical synthesis compiled late — and his wording is occasional enough, at points, to invite the misreadings his critics have pressed.⁵³ That concession costs the argument nothing. A doctrine that was never systematized is precisely the kind that can have gone unexpounded, and the lacuna claimed here is a claim about scholarship, not about the sources.

The second is that what has been shown is not yet the thesis. That these materials constitute an ordo salutis in any sense a dogmatician would recognize, and that deification is its telos rather than a description of its middle, are the arguments of the sections that follow. It is enough here to have established that the materials exist, that they are consistent across genres and decades, and that they have not been read this way before — including by the scholarship that has come closest, which names conformation and glorification as the last members of a sanctifying sequence without expounding either.⁵⁴

3. The Indebtedness to Watchman Nee

The fullest scholarly account of Nee and Lee on this material is Reardon and Chiu’s, and it should be said at the outset what that account has already established. They trace Nee’s soteriology to the Keswick Holiness tradition, to patristic sources and to Christian mysticism; they set out his understanding of union with God as three stages keyed to his trichotomy — justification and regeneration in the spirit, sanctification in the soul, glorification in the body; they observe that he describes salvation as conformity to Christ’s image; and they conclude that the whole amounts to deification as the telos of sanctification, though Nee himself never uses the word.⁵⁵ That Nee’s teaching has the form of an order of salvation has also been observed from outside the movement, by Chow, who describes it as “a soteriology—or, more precisely, an ordo salutis,” and reads its account of salvation as a “synergy of divine and human wills.”⁵⁶ The present section does not dispute any of that. What it adds is narrower: that Nee reads Romans 8:29–30 as a single ordered series, that he draws from it a protological rather than a merely remedial account of conformation, and that these two moves are the shape Lee inherits — and that Lee then supplies the mechanism Nee leaves unstated.

The chain read as steps

Nee’s most explicit handling of the pericope treats it as a sequence with numbered members. Arguing that justification cannot be lost, he observes that “the history of our relationship with God does not start from justification and salvation. Rather, it starts from God’s foreknowledge. God’s foreknowledge is the beginning of everything. To be marked out is the second step. To be called is the third step. Only after the third step do we have justification.”⁵⁷ The argument is about assurance, not about the order of salvation, and Nee is not writing dogmatics. But the reading is unmistakable: the members of Romans 8:29–30 are steps, they are counted, and justification is located by its position among them rather than by its content. Whatever else is true of Nee, he does not treat the passage as a heap of benefits.

The corollary appears in The Normal Christian Life, where he quotes the whole of verses 29 and 30 and comments in a single sentence: “Here justification is seen to lead on to glory, a glory that is expressed not in one or more individuals but in a plurality: in many who manifest the image of One.”⁵⁸ Two things are done at once. The chain is read as a movement with a terminus — justification leads on to glory — and the terminus is corporate. Nee then passes directly to Romans 12 and the Body of Christ, which is where the argument of this volume’s companion chapter takes up the material.⁵⁹

Conformation as protology

The more consequential inheritance is not the sequence but what Nee thinks it is for. In The Glorious Church he reads Genesis 1:26–27 through Romans 8:29, noting that Scripture says man was made “in his image” rather than “in their image,” and concluding that “Adam was made in the image of the Lord Jesus.”⁶⁰ Conformation to the image of the Son is therefore not a repair of what the fall damaged; it is the purpose for which humanity was made in the first place. “God desires to have many sons, and God desires all these sons to be like that one Son of His. Then His Son will no more be the only Begotten, but the Firstborn among many brethren.”⁶¹ The same conviction is stated more briefly elsewhere: “God created us with a purpose, and He also saved us with a purpose. God’s intention is that we express the life of His Son and partake of the glory of His Son.”⁶²

This is worth dwelling on, because it locates Nee — and Lee after him — in a position the Western traditions arrive at by other routes. That glory is creation’s intended end rather than a compensation for sin is precisely what Bavinck holds, and what Palamas holds when he grounds deification in God’s express purpose in creating.⁶³ Nee reaches it exegetically, from the singular pronoun of Genesis 1:27 read against Romans 8:29, and without the vocabulary of either tradition.

The prototype, and where Lee’s figure comes from

It is usually said that the prototype–mass production figure is Lee’s own. The claim needs qualifying, because the governing term is already Nee’s, and the use he makes of it is more careful than the figure’s later reputation suggests. Under the heading “God Being after a Man of Resurrection,” Nee writes: “When the Lord was on the earth, He was a prototype of all men. He was a prototype during the first forty days after His resurrection. During the thirty-three and a half years He lived on the earth, He was a prototype of human moral virtues. During the forty days after His resurrection, He was a prototype of power.”⁶⁴ Nee’s scope there is wider than the present argument requires — the prototype is of all men, of moral virtues, and of power, and not, in that passage, of the sons conformed to the image. The link to Romans 8:29 is drawn here rather than found there.

What follows shows how he means it, and the manner is worth noting as much as the content. “For years orthodox theology has acknowledged that the earthly Lord Jesus is a pattern,” Nee continues, and he then states that theology’s account of the cross with evident approval: it “views the Lord’s death as a satisfaction of God’s requirement, without which God would condemn us for our sins,” and apart from that death “we would never have been saved.”⁶⁵ Only then comes the qualification: “However, theologians in the past have not seen the truth of Christ’s resurrection.”⁶⁶ The word marks an omission, not an error. Nee is not correcting the doctrine of satisfaction; he is adding to it what he takes to have been left out, and the addition is the resurrection. “Pattern” and “prototype” stand in that relation: a pattern is imitated, while a prototype in his sense is the first of a kind from which others come, and it is the risen Christ who is first in that sense. The distinction is not merely lexical, and two pages later he draws the practical consequence — “Today the Lord is leading us to be as perfect morally as He is as a man. At the same time, He is leading us to experience as much of the power of resurrection as He experienced after His death.”⁶⁷

Nor is the figure left in an individual key. The section that immediately follows is headed “The Church after the Lord’s Resurrection—Born of the Spirit to Be the Body of the Resurrected Christ, Being One with the Head.”⁶⁸ The prototype is therefore given for the sake of a corporate result: what is reproduced from the risen Christ is not a series of imitators but the Body of which he is Head.

This locates Lee’s contribution more exactly than the usual account allows. Lee does not invent the figure; he completes it, by naming the correlate Nee leaves unnamed. Where Nee has the prototype and the Body, Lee supplies the term for what stands over against the prototype — the “mass production,” and elsewhere the “corporate reproduction” of the resurrected Christ.⁶⁹ With that term the figure becomes a mechanism: conformation is participation in a second divine work that presupposes a first, and glorification is the completion of the product rather than a reward appended to it.

That is the shape of the indebtedness. Nee gives the order, its protological warrant, and the prototype itself in its resurrection and ecclesial key; Lee gives the correlate that turns a figure into an account of how conformation issues in glory — and with it the possibility of treating conformation and glorification as an ordered pair rather than as the last two names on a list.

4. What, Exactly, Is Glorified?

An account that makes glorification the completion of conformation owes an answer to a question it has so far postponed. If the many sons are reproduced from the prototype, and if that reproduction terminates in glory, what is it that ends up glorified — and does it remain a creature? The question is not a hostile one. It is the question any doctrine of deification has to answer, and the tradition that presses it hardest has good reasons.

The boundary, and why it is pressed

Bavinck states those reasons as well as anyone. Discussing the vision of God, he holds that to see the divine essence would entail “the deification of humanity and the erasure of the boundary between the Creator and the creature,” a corollary he assigns to “the Neoplatonic mysticism adopted by Rome.”⁷⁰ His verdict is unambiguous: “A divinization (θεωσις), such as Rome teaches, indeed fits into the system of the Pseudo-Dionysian hierarchy but has no support in Scripture.”⁷¹ What the Reformed may say instead is carefully bounded — however glorious the state of glory, “human beings remained human even there, indeed raised above ‘their natural position’ but never ‘above their own kind.’”⁷² The principle behind the boundary is stated elsewhere in a single clause: “Grace restores nature and takes it to its highest pinnacle, but it does not add to it any new and heterogeneous constituents.”⁷³

In Chinese-language discussion the same worry has been pressed in a different key. Stephen Tong, expounding what “only begotten” means, glosses the three characters in turn: “Son” indicates the same life, “begotten” indicates not created, and “only” indicates that there is none like him.⁷⁴ From that premise he objects, by name, to a teaching of Witness Lee’s that Jesus’ flesh was a body of sin, holding instead that Christ had only its likeness.⁷⁵ The objection is worth taking seriously, and the wording Tong reports would indeed be difficult to defend if it stood unqualified. It should be recorded, however, that the distinction he presses is one Lee’s own annotation states. The Recovery Version renders Romans 8:3 “in the likeness of the flesh of sin,” and the note there reads: “The flesh is of sin, yet the Son of God became flesh. However, He was only in the likeness of the flesh and did not have the sin of the flesh” — illustrated, as it happens, by the same bronze serpent to which Tong himself appeals, which “was in the form, the likeness, of the actual serpent but did not have its poison.”⁷⁶ Whatever stands in the passage Tong quotes, and he gives no reference for it, Lee’s settled exegesis is not the position ascribed to him. The dispute is nevertheless the right one to be having here, because what may be said about the humanity assumed constrains what may be said about the humanity glorified.

Three replies

Three things may be said in reply, and the first two are Bavinck’s own.

The first is that Bavinck’s doctrine of the divine attributes will not support the objection in its usual form. That form runs: the divine essence is incommunicable, therefore no real participation in God. But Bavinck holds the communicable–incommunicable division to be a pedagogical convenience rather than a partition of the divine being. Every such arrangement, he writes, “appear[s] to divide God’s being into two halves” and implies that “there is no unity or concord among God’s perfections”; and his own conclusion is that “in one sense each of his attributes is incommunicable and in another communicable.”⁷⁷ He grounds the whole classification in analogy and in the image and likeness, and traces its terms to the Trinity, where the divine essence is precisely what is communicated.⁷⁸ The point is semantic rather than a license — no attribute is predicated of God and creatures univocally — but it is enough to show that a flat appeal to incommunicability is not available from this quarter.

The second is that Bavinck affirms, in his own voice, most of what he declines to name. Participation in the divine nature, he writes, “is not something for the future alone but a goal envisaged already by the granting of God’s promises here on earth,” and the state of glory “is already initiated in the state of grace on earth.”⁷⁹ Sanctification “consists fully in believers being conformed to the image of the Son,” and to that extent “coincides with glorification,” which “is initiated immediately with the calling” and continues “until it is completed in Christ’s return.”⁸⁰ He can even say that the church’s holiness and glory “render it godlike.”⁸¹ What he refuses is a word, and he refuses it in a particular sense — the Pseudo-Dionysian sense his sources gave him.⁸² The disagreement is therefore narrower than it looks, and it is a disagreement about nomenclature conducted between parties who agree about the thing.

The third reply is not Bavinck’s but bears directly on him. In her study of Aquinas and Palamas, Williams observes that Aquinas “asserts the unity of sanctity and beatitude, the reality of humanity’s graced growth into divine being, but refuses to do so at the cost of compromising the uniqueness of divine nature,” and adds that “that refusal, far from diluting his doctrine of theosis, constitutes one of its crucial components.”⁸³ The boundary, on this account, is not a limit imposed upon deification from outside but part of what the doctrine says. A deification that erased the Creator–creature distinction would not be a stronger version of the doctrine; it would be a different and worse one.

The dispute in Chinese: a part, or a union?

The dispute has also been conducted in Chinese, and its central exchange bears directly on the present question. Writing in Christian Thought Review in 2012, Hou Jun treated the doctrine of a created humanity as a latent danger in the church’s theology, and named Witness Lee and the local churches as the party that had seized on it and pressed it further, “publicly declaring that Christ is a creature.”⁸⁴ The charge should be stated precisely, because Hou’s own footnote quotes the passage at issue in full, and the passage carries a qualification that his summary does not. Lee’s note on Colossians 1:15 reads: “Christ as God is the Creator. However, as man, sharing the created blood and flesh (Heb. 2:14a), He is part of the creation.”⁸⁵ What is predicated of the creature is predicated of Christ as man, and the reduplication is not ornamental; it is the substance of the claim. Nor is the predication peculiar to Lee: the passage of Athanasius that Hou quotes approvingly a page later says of Christ’s flesh that, “though it is still a part of the created world, it has become the body of God.”⁸⁶

Hou conceals nothing, and he is entitled to think the inference goes through regardless; he states its principle in his own voice. Christ’s humanity, soul and body alike, “cannot be severed from” his person and lies nowhere “outside the compass of” it, so that to concede a created humanity is to “affect or lower Christ’s uncreated person, and even to arrive at the conclusion that Christ, the person, is a creature.”⁸⁷ He is aware of the classical answer, moreover, and rejects it rather than overlooking it. Hou introduces Leontius of Byzantium himself, glossing enhypostasia as the Son’s assuming a humanity that has no person of its own, his own person serving as that humanity’s person — a formulation in which “created humanity” passes without objection. His complaint is not that this fails, but that the fathers’ solution “was not thorough” and “left a fearful loophole.”⁸⁸ The disagreement is therefore not about what Lee wrote, nor about whether the distinction is available. It is about whether it suffices — and a further charge of Hou’s, that Lee’s account of designation denies the incarnation outright, is answered in the same note.⁸⁹

That is the question the Reformed theologian Shao Kai Tseng answered in the same journal the following year, and his answer goes to the root of it. The main cause of the Chinese controversy, he judges, is that its participants have not distinguished “a part” from “union.”⁹⁰ If Christ’s humanity were a part of his person, Hou’s inference would go through, since what holds of a part holds of the whole. But the humanity is not a component of the person; it is united to the person by assumption, and predicates do not travel across that relation. The distinction does not so much adjudicate the dispute as dissolve it. Whether it leaves a loophole is a fair question, but the clause on which the objection itself rests was framed for the opposite purpose: Chalcedon confesses a rational soul in Christ because of the Cappadocian principle that “that which is not taken is not healed, but whatever is united to God is saved,” which requires the soul to be assumed, and so to be the kind of thing that can be.⁹¹ From the distinction Tseng draws the consequence that matters most here. Reading John 1:14 with Calvin, he concludes that the humanity Christ assumed “is not eternally imperishable but is a perishable humanity; and this humanity, through his resurrection, becomes imperishable.”⁹² Assumed humanity transformed in resurrection is precisely what a conformation terminating in glory requires, and it is reached here in a Reformed idiom, from Calvin, by a route independent of the one traced above.

There is a further Chinese form of the question, and in this volume’s setting it is the one that will be met first. Where deification is brought into contact with the classical motif of tian ren heyi 天人合一 — the unity of Heaven and humanity — the question is whether the creature survives the union at all. The distinction to which Sino-Christian theology has appealed in answer is the one already invoked above: participation falls upon the divine energies and not upon the essence, so that deification is “union by grace making us participate in the divine nature, without our essence becoming thereby the essence of God.”⁹³

What the figure will not bear

That is precisely the shape of the restraint in the texts examined here, and it is worth noticing that it is built into the figure rather than added to it as a caveat. A prototype and its mass production share a form, not a substance; the language is of pattern and reproduction, and it will not bear the claim that the many sons become what the Son is in the Godhead. Lee says as much in the formula his interpreters have made central — believers become God in life and in nature but not in the Godhead — and the negative case is set out at length in the secondary literature.⁹⁴ What is glorified, then, is a creature: saturated with the glory of the divine life, conformed to the image of the Son, and never at any point ceasing to be the kind of thing it was made.

It is worth adding that a figure of this kind is not what the objection is objecting to. On the same page on which he defines the only begotten as uncreated, Tong reaches for a reproduction metaphor of his own: the only begotten Son is like an original identity document, of which there is exactly one, and believers, made sons by the Spirit’s regeneration, are its photocopies — many, genuine, and derivative, and sometimes, he adds, coming out crooked or creased.⁹⁵ The two figures are not making the same claim: Tong’s copies are copies of adoptive sonship and his point is the copy’s deficiency, where Lee’s mass production is of conformation to the image and his point is how that conformation proceeds. But both hold that there is one original and that what follows from it is genuinely derived and never identical. The disagreement between them is therefore not over whether a language of reproduction may be used of the sons of God. It is over what such a language is taken to establish.

What the objection does establish is that the account cannot be stated loosely. Lee’s own wording is occasional, and where it is compressed it can be read as claiming more than the figure will carry.⁹⁶ The remedy is not to soften the doctrine but to state it with the boundary in place — which is what Bavinck, Aquinas and Lee, on this narrow point, are each in their own idiom doing. That answer also settles what kind of order is in view. An ordo salutis whose terminus is a creature glorified — not a creature superseded — can have deification as its telos without overreaching; and because the pattern is the firstborn Son while the operation throughout is the Spirit’s, the order is pneumatological in its execution and not christological alone.

5. Constructive Implications for a Third-Millennium Doctrine of Deification

Whether this material is called deification or sanctification is not a question of taste, and it is worth saying why before saying what follows from it. Williams puts the formal point exactly: a doctrine of sanctification “may function adequately without significant description of the One to whom we liken,” since one may say that holiness is growth in goodness because goodness belongs to God and then turn to the human side and stay there. “Such a dwelling on the sanctified is not possible with a doctrine of theosis. Once the claim is made that humanity becomes God,” the account is obliged to say who it is that the deified become.⁹⁷ A soteriology that terminates in deification cannot remain anthropology. That is the first implication, and it is what makes the terminological question a doctrinal one.

Conformation everywhere, glorification nowhere

The second follows from a convergence this chapter has met at every turn — not across the whole tradition, since Aquinas was conceded above as a counter-instance, but across the modern accounts that stand closest to the present question. Among them conformation is everywhere and glorification is almost nowhere. Berkhof gives the Reformed order and ends it with “the perseverance of the saints and their final glorification,” then expounds neither term.⁹⁸ Bavinck expounds conformation fully and folds glorification into sanctification.⁹⁹ Kärkkäinen writes fifty-six pages on deification without the word, and treats glorification in a six-page epilogue where he observes that the connection between glorification and union was never made a theological theme.¹⁰⁰

Michael J. Gorman is the instructive case, because his own formulation moves. In Inhabiting the Cruciform God theosis is “transformative participation in the kenotic, cruciform character of God through Spirit-enabled conformity to the incarnate, crucified, and resurrected/glorified Christ” — where “glorified” describes Christ, the one to whom believers are conformed, and glorification as a stage of the believer’s own course appears once in the book, in the phrase “cruciformity now that precedes glorification later.”¹⁰¹ Between the two stands a third volume, Participating in Christ, which a recent survey of the field takes as his fullest statement on Pauline deification — theosis governs it throughout, yet the order of salvation is never brought to it, and where it quotes the pericope read here it stops at the conformation verse. By 2022 the definition has been revised to include “glory” among what is participated and to state that theosis “includes as one process what has often been seen in the West as separate realities: justification, sanctification, and glorification.”¹⁰² The revision is worth noticing, because it moves in precisely the direction argued for here — and because, having refused the separation, it still does not say how conformation issues in glory. Four modern accounts, three traditions, one shape: the pair is in view throughout and its second member is deferred in each. A fifth case belongs here, and it is the most telling, because it comes from the tradition with most at stake in the question: Carl Mosser’s account of deification in the Reformed tradition expounds the doctrine at length without once bringing the ordo salutis to it, and without expounding glorification at all.¹⁰³ What Aquinas had as degrees of one thing, and what the Eastern tradition holds materially, the moderns name and pass over.

Lee’s contribution is to refuse the deferral. Conformation and glorification are for him two ordered stages of one work, joined by a mechanism rather than by juxtaposition: the firstborn Son is the prototype and the many sons the mass production, glorification is “the step” and indeed “the ultimate step” in a complete salvation, and it depends upon growth in life.¹⁰⁴ What that yields for a third-millennium doctrine is not a new claim about what deification is, but an account of how it proceeds — which is precisely what the four accounts above leave unsupplied.

It may be objected that this is to employ a theme rather than to hold a doctrine. Gösta Hallonsten’s distinction states the worry at its sharpest: theosis in Western hands often “renames another doctrine—typically sanctification—or acts as a metaphor for a doctrine—typically glorification,” whereas to qualify as a doctrine it must structure the whole rather than name a segment of some other system.¹⁰⁵ Hallonsten himself would not grant the point — he holds that the label should be reserved for the integral doctrine as the Eastern tradition presents it, and the answer offered here is Habets’s rather than his. The criteria he lays down are met here. Lee’s account rests on a view of creation in which humanity is made in the image of the Son rather than merely repaired by it; on a soteriology of incarnation and resurrection; on a terminus that is corporate; and on union with God as the final good. Above all it satisfies what Hallonsten treats as determinative — a teleology in which creation is ordered to that end from the beginning. What is thin is the sacramental clause, and that is a difference within Protestant deification rather than an absence of the doctrine.

Whose work it is

A third implication concerns whose work that proceeding is, and it is the point at which the account is least christologically narrow. Gorman’s definition already builds it in: theosis is participation through “Spirit-enabled conformity” to Christ, and the qualifier is not decorative.¹⁰⁶ Kärkkäinen, reporting Donald Fairbairn, puts the diagnosis behind it more sharply: Western soteriology “came to be linked predominantly with Christology,” while Eastern theology “keeps in place a healthy balance between christological and pneumatological understandings of salvation.”¹⁰⁷ What Lee’s apparatus supplies is that balance at the two stages in question, and it supplies it exegetically rather than by assertion. The Spirit’s intercession in Romans 8:26 is said to be “mainly that we may experience the transformation in life for growth into the maturity of sonship that we may be fully conformed to the image of God’s Son”; the intercession of verse 34 is “mainly that we will be conformed to His image and brought into His glory”; and glorification itself proceeds “according to the principle of His regenerating our spirit through the Spirit.”¹⁰⁸ Conformation and glorification are therefore not two christological terms with a pneumatological preface. The pattern is the firstborn Son and the operation throughout is the Spirit’s — which is what allows the pair to be a process at all, rather than a status conferred at one moment and completed at another.

This bears directly on Kärkkäinen’s proposal to move “from ordo salutis to a salutary communion.” His objection is that the ordo is too individualistic, too abstract and too little communal to carry a Christian soteriology.¹⁰⁹ The objection is sound against the orders he has in view. It is less telling against this one. Lee’s sequence is organic rather than forensic and its mechanism is participatory throughout; and its terminus is corporate, a point developed in the present volume by Reardon, whose chapter takes the ecclesial subject of transformation as its theme.¹¹⁰ If an ordo salutis can be communal, organic and participatory while remaining an order, then what Kärkkäinen wants may be obtainable without abandoning the category, and the choice he poses is not forced.

The sorites objection

One objection must be met before any of this can stand, and it comes from the quarter closest to the argument. Fesko’s defense of the Reformed order reads Romans 8:29–30 as a sorites, and draws from that rhetorical form a soteriological conclusion: the ordo describes “degrees” rather than “a temporal sequence of events,” and what it names is “largely the simultaneous bestowal of the benefits of redemption.”¹¹¹ On that reading the members of the chain are distinct but not dependent — John Murray’s principle, which Fesko quotes, that “not one of these can be defined in terms of the other.”¹¹² If that is right, Lee’s claim that glorification depends upon growth in life is not a development of the order but a confusion of it.

Nor is Fesko alone in resisting the reading offered here, and the resistance comes from opposite directions. Gorman, expounding Romans as a treatise on theosis, declines the category outright: the stairstep verbs of 8:30 are “often taken as a reference to the ordo salutis,” but “Paul’s point is not to define an order so much as to stress the effectiveness and totality of God’s saving action.”¹¹³ The pericope is therefore contested three ways among Protestant readers — Fesko finds an order but not a sequence, Gorman finds no order at all, and the reading advanced here finds an order whose members depend on one another. It is worth observing that Gorman nonetheless grants the relation he declines to systematize, writing that “ethical conformity precedes and is the prerequisite for eschatological conformity,” and that “Christlikeness now… becomes Christlikeness later — glory.”¹¹⁴ The objection, in his case, is to the category rather than to the ordering.

The disagreement is worth stating plainly, because it is a real one and it is not resolved by preferring one authority to another. Two things may be said. The first is that a sorites establishes the form of Paul’s argument, not the metaphysics of what it describes; that each link is rhetorically bound to the next tells us how the sentence works, and leaves open whether the realities named unfold. The second is that Fesko’s own concern is protective — his target is the claim that union with Christ settles the divisions between “Rome, Constantinople, and Geneva,” and his verdict is that “union with Christ is not enough; everyone affirms union with Christ.”¹¹⁵ That is well taken, and this chapter has not argued from union alone. It has argued from a mechanism: conformation proceeds by reproduction from a prototype, and glory is the completion of the product. Whether that mechanism is compatible with a sorites is a question the two readings can put to each other, and it is more fruitful than the older question of whether an order of salvation is legitimate at all.

Where it begins

A last implication concerns where all of this begins. Bavinck holds that glorification was creation’s intended end rather than a remedy for the fall; Palamas holds, in Williams’s summary, that “God’s express purpose in creating us was to make us partakers of his own divinity.”¹¹⁶ The two traditions differ over which word names that end. Nee, reading “in his image” at Genesis 1:27 against Romans 8:29, arrives at the same protological conviction from the text and without either vocabulary.¹¹⁷ That is the ecumenical shape of the argument: a Chinese Protestant reading, sequencing like the West and terminating like the East, and doing so on exegetical rather than confessional grounds. That is also why deification is the telos of the pair rather than a name for its middle: what the sequence terminates in is a participation christological in its pattern and pneumatological in its operation throughout.

Conclusion

Two things said in the course of this argument may appear to pull against each other, and it is worth saying how they hold together. The disagreement with Bavinck was described as one about nomenclature between parties who agree about the thing; the naming of that thing was then said not to be a question of taste. Both hold, and Williams supplies the reason. A doctrine of sanctification may describe what happens to the sanctified and stop there; a doctrine of theosis may not, because “once the claim is made that humanity becomes God,” the account is obliged to say who it is that the deified become.¹¹⁸ Bavinck’s refusal of the word is therefore not a preference but a decision — a decision not to incur that obligation, taken for reasons he states and which this chapter has not disputed. What Lee’s account does is incur it. Because the prototype is the firstborn Son and the operation is the Spirit’s — christological in pattern, pneumatological in execution — an account of conformation and glorification cannot remain an account of the creature; it must turn outward to the God whose image is reproduced. That obligation is what makes deification the telos of the pair rather than a name for its middle.

That is the theme Kärkkäinen judged the Reformed tradition never to have made a theme.¹¹⁹ It has been made one here from within Protestant materials — a translator’s annotations, an expositor’s messages — rather than by importing an Eastern vocabulary.

Lee’s own share in it should be stated last, and modestly. The order is Nee’s, and so is the prototype. What Lee added was the word for what stands over against the prototype, the claim that glory waits upon growth in life, and the fixing of the whole at the verse, where any reader who opens the page will find it.

Bibliography

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Berkhof, Louis. Systematic Theology. New combined ed. With a new preface by Richard A. Muller. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996.

Chiu, Brian Siu Kit. “Shepherding According to God: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Pauline Pastoral Theology in Witness Lee’s Reading.” Religions 17, no. 8 (2026): 974. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel17080974.

Chow, Alexander. Theosis, Sino-Christian Theology and the Second Chinese Enlightenment: Heaven and Humanity in Unity. Christianities of the World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Daley, Brian E. “Antioch and Alexandria: Christology as Reflection on God’s Presence in History.” In The Oxford Handbook of Christology, edited by Francesca Aran Murphy, 121–38. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Feng, Jacob Chengwei. “Deification Seen from Three Biblical Metaphors in Watchman Nee and Witness Lee with a Cognitive-Linguistic Interpretive Approach to Metaphors.” In Transformed into the Same Image: Constructive Investigations into the Doctrine of Deification, edited by Paul Copan and Michael M. C. Reardon, 38–62. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2024.

———. “Pneumasis/Pneumafication Based on Romans 8:1–17: Highlighting the Spirit’s Role in Deification.” Religions 14, no. 9 (2023): 1210. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14091210.

———. “Prayer as Embodied Approach to Deification in Romans 8:1–17: An Interdisciplinary Approach Highlighting the Roles of the Holy Spirit and the Human Spirit.” Journal of Spiritual Formation and Soul Care 18, no. 2 (2025): 288–301. https://doi.org/10.1177/19397909251368961.

Fesko, J. V. “Romans 8.29–30 and the Question of the Ordo Salutis.” Journal of Reformed Theology 8 (2014): 35–60. https://doi.org/10.1163/15697312-00801002.

Gorman, Michael J. Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul’s Narrative Soteriology. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009.

———. “Romans: The First Christian Treatise on Theosis.” Journal of Theological Interpretation 5, no. 1 (2011): 13–34.

———. Romans: A Theological and Pastoral Commentary. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022.

Grillmeier, Aloys. Christ in Christian Tradition. Vol. 1, From the Apostolic Age to Chalcedon (451). 2nd rev. ed. Translated by John Bowden. Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1975.

Habets, Myk. “‘As Far as Our Capacity Allows’: Deification in the Baptist Tradition.” In With All the Fullness of God: Deification in Christian Tradition, edited by Jared Ortiz, 155–76. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2021.

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Hou, Jun 侪军. “Jidu renxing shouzao zhengyi zhi shendu jiexi” 基督人性受造争议之深度解析 [An in-depth analysis of the controversy over the createdness of Christ’s humanity]. Jidujiao sixiang pinglun 基督教思想评论 14, no. 1 (2012): 24–37.

———. “‘Dao—chengwei—ren’ Jidulun” “道—成为—人”基督论 [The “Word—become—man” Christology]. Jidujiao sixiang pinglun 基督教思想评论 17, no. 1 (2013): 65–77.

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———. The Conclusion of the New Testament. Anaheim, CA: Living Stream Ministry, 1987.

———. Life-Study of Romans. Anaheim, CA: Living Stream Ministry, 2001.

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———. “‘So also is the Christ’: Ecclesial Deification in Pauline Soteriology.” PhD diss., Wycliffe College and the University of Toronto, 2023.

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1. The present chapter stands alongside three treatments that bound it. Michael Reardon, in the present volume, takes the ecclesial subject of transformation as his theme, working Romans 12 and the corporate Body; this chapter treats the two stages that follow in Romans 8:29–30 and the personal-and-communal telos they serve. Reardon and Chiu’s published study of Nee and Lee on sanctification, union with Christ and deification is the standard account of this material, and concludes that their soteriology amounts to deification as the telos of sanctification; the argument here differs in its point of departure rather than its conclusion, taking conformation and glorification as an ordered pair with its own logic rather than as the last members of a sanctifying sequence. I have myself treated the deification of Romans 8:1–17 in two studies that highlight the roles of the Holy Spirit and the human spirit, and have examined deification in Nee and Lee through three biblical metaphors with a cognitive-linguistic method; the present chapter takes up the adjacent pericope, works a single figure rather than three, and asks after order rather than metaphor. Michael M. C. Reardon and Brian Siu Kit Chiu, “Becoming God in Life and Nature: Watchman Nee and Witness Lee on Sanctification, Union with Christ, and Deification,” Religions 16 (2025): 933; Jacob Chengwei Feng, “Pneumasis/Pneumafication Based on Romans 8:1–17: Highlighting the Spirit’s Role in Deification,” Religions 14, no. 9 (2023): 1210; Feng, “Prayer as Embodied Approach to Deification in Romans 8:1–17: An Interdisciplinary Approach Highlighting the Roles of the Holy Spirit and the Human Spirit,” Journal of Spiritual Formation and Soul Care 18, no. 2 (2025): 288–301; and Feng, “Deification Seen from Three Biblical Metaphors in Watchman Nee and Witness Lee with a Cognitive-Linguistic Interpretive Approach to Metaphors,” in Transformed into the Same Image: Constructive Investigations into the Doctrine of Deification, ed. Paul Copan and Michael M. C. Reardon (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2024), 38–62.↩︎

2. The distance is one of method and address, not merely of conclusion. Berkhof writes confessional Reformed dogmatics from within a single tradition and for it; Kärkkäinen writes A Constructive Christian Theology for the Pluralistic World, whose fourth volume proposes replacing the ordo salutis itself — its chapter on the question is titled “From Ordo Salutis to a Salutary Communion.” Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 415–22; Kärkkäinen, Spirit and Salvation, 201–9. That two such differently situated accounts nevertheless converge on the same two verses is what makes the agreement worth noticing.↩︎

3. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology, new combined ed., with a new preface by Richard A. Muller (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 416.↩︎

4. Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Spirit and Salvation, A Constructive Christian Theology for the Pluralistic World 4 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), 411.↩︎

5. Holy Bible: Recovery Version, New Testament (Anaheim, CA: Living Stream Ministry, 2003), Rom 8:29 n. 3 and 8:30 n. 2, NT pp. 456–57; Witness Lee, Life-Study of Romans (Anaheim, CA: Living Stream Ministry, 2001), 235.↩︎

6. Recovery Version, Rom 8:30 n. 2, NT p. 457. The Spirit’s role in the deification of Romans 8 is the subject of two earlier studies of mine on the preceding pericope, 8:1–17; it is presupposed rather than argued here. See n. 1 above.↩︎

7. Michael M. C. Reardon, “Ecclesial Deification in Romans 12 in Dialogue with Witness Lee’s Understanding of Renewal and Transformation,” in the present volume.↩︎

8. Michael M. C. Reardon and Brian Siu Kit Chiu, “Becoming God in Life and Nature: Watchman Nee and Witness Lee on Sanctification, Union with Christ, and Deification,” Religions 16 (2025): 933, at 3 and 6.↩︎

9. Alexander Chow, Theosis, Sino-Christian Theology and the Second Chinese Enlightenment: Heaven and Humanity in Unity, Christianities of the World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 114; on Lee, 16, 57, 61, and 126. Chow’s single use of a conform- word is “nonconformist” (54), of the English Free Churches rather than of conformation to Christ, and his two references to glorification expound Augustine (137) and the Keswick doctrine of “complete sanctification” (187n27) respectively.↩︎

10. Michael M. C. Reardon, review of Theosis, Sino-Christian Theology and the Second Chinese Enlightenment: Heaven and Humanity in Unity, by Alexander Chow, Orthodoxy in Dialogue, September 13, 2017, https://orthodoxyindialogue.com/2017/09/13/theosis-sino-christian-theology-and-the-second-chinese-enlightenment-heaven-and-humanity-in-unity-reviewed-by-michael-reardon/. The review is unpaginated; the enumeration of Chow’s four references to Lee is Reardon’s own. His constructive suggestion is that “Wang Ming-Dao (1900–1991) would likely have been a more appropriate choice” of prototypical Type A theologian.↩︎

11. See §2 below.↩︎

12. Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 417.↩︎

13. Kärkkäinen, Spirit and Salvation, 201.↩︎

14. Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 417.↩︎

15. Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 416.↩︎

16. Kärkkäinen, Spirit and Salvation, 201.↩︎

17. Kärkkäinen, Spirit and Salvation, 411.↩︎

18. Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 418.↩︎

19. Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 519. The sentence occurs within Berkhof’s argument against a justification from eternity; it is an incidental statement rather than his thesis on glorification.↩︎

20. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 4, Holy Spirit, Church, and New Creation, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 253.↩︎

21. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4:261, where the glorification of the church “starts with regeneration” and believers are described as “sharing in the divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4),” their glory such as to “render it godlike.”↩︎

22. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 3, Sin and Salvation in Christ, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 579.↩︎

23. A. N. Williams, The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 175.↩︎

24. Williams, Ground of Union, 89, citing ST II-II.26,13 s.c. and II-II.24,3 ad 2.↩︎

25. ST III.45,4 resp., quoted in Williams, Ground of Union, 92.↩︎

26. Williams, Ground of Union, 158, where divine simplicity is said “paradoxically” to contain “in nuce the essential elements of a doctrine of deification: it articulates the absolute distinction between Uncreated and created and yet indicates the means by which these distinct entities are to be united in knowledge and love.”↩︎

27. Kärkkäinen, Spirit and Salvation, 201–9.↩︎

28. Kärkkäinen, Spirit and Salvation, 411.↩︎

29. Williams, Ground of Union, 89 and 92.↩︎

30. Williams, Ground of Union, 145, expounding Palamas, Capita 105.↩︎

31. Kärkkäinen, Spirit and Salvation, 411.↩︎

32. Chow, Theosis, 114, 121. Chow’s concern there is the contrast between Augustinian-Reformed monergism and the synergism he finds in Nee and in the Chinese religio-philosophical inheritance alike — “Watchman Nee teaches a synergy of divine and human wills” (121) — rather than the sequence itself.↩︎

33. J. V. Fesko, “Romans 8.29–30 and the Question of the Ordo Salutis,” Journal of Reformed Theology 8 (2014): 35–60, at 50.↩︎

34. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, God and Creation, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), 191 (§199), where a divinization “such as Rome teaches” is said to fit “the system of the Pseudo-Dionysian hierarchy” but to have “no support in Scripture.”↩︎

35. Recovery Version, Rom 8:28–30, outline heading “B. Heirs Conformed,” NT p. 456.↩︎

36. Recovery Version, Rom 8:29 n. 3, NT p. 456.↩︎

37. Recovery Version, Rom 8:30 n. 2, NT p. 457. Ellipses omit the verse references Lee supplies in parentheses (7:24; 8:11; 6:6; Phil. 3:21).↩︎

38. Recovery Version, Rom 8:30 n. 2, NT p. 457. The Spirit’s role in the deification of Romans 8 is the subject of two earlier studies of mine on the preceding pericope, 8:1–17, and is treated here only so far as it bears on the two stages under discussion; see the demarcation at n. 1 above.↩︎

39. Recovery Version, Rom 8:30 n. 1, NT p. 457: “In this acceptance God works to conform them to the image of His Son until He brings them into His glory (Heb. 2:10).”↩︎

40. Recovery Version, NT pp. 456–57: the outline heading “B. Heirs Conformed” governs vv. 28–30; “C. Heirs Inseparable from God’s Love” begins at v. 31.↩︎

41. Recovery Version, Rom 8:29 marg. b (NT p. 456), citing 2 Cor 3:18; 1 Cor 15:49; Phil 3:21; 1 John 3:2; with Phil 3:21 marg. c and 1 John 3:2 marg. b.↩︎

42. Scripture quotations follow the Holy Bible: Recovery Version where Lee’s own reading is under discussion, since his translation and its annotations are themselves the object of study; the New Revised Standard Version is used where the argument assesses that reading against the Greek. Where both appear on a page, the version is named. Scripture quoted inside a quotation from secondary literature retains the version used by the author quoted, which is named at first occurrence.↩︎

43. Recovery Version, Rom 8:29 n. 3, NT p. 456. The same note continues: “It includes the changing of our inward essence and nature, and it also includes the changing of our outward form, that we may match the glorified image of Christ, the God-man.”↩︎

44. On the earlier member of that sequence — the transformation of 2 Cor 3:18 and Rom 12:2, and the corporate Body as its subject — see Michael M. C. Reardon, “Ecclesial Deification in Romans 12 in Dialogue with Witness Lee’s Understanding of Renewal and Transformation,” in the present volume. The present chapter takes up the two stages that follow.↩︎

45. Lee, Life-Study of Romans, Message Twenty, “Heirs of Glory (3),” 235.↩︎

46. Lee, Life-Study of Romans, 235.↩︎

47. Witness Lee, The Conclusion of the New Testament (Anaheim, CA: Living Stream Ministry), Message 148, “The Believers—Their Present (32),” 1607.↩︎

48. Lee, Life-Study of Romans, 240.↩︎

49. Lee, Conclusion of the New Testament, 1607.↩︎

50. Lee, Conclusion of the New Testament, Message 12, “God—His Good Pleasure,” 120–22. 2 Cor 3:18 is paired with Rom 8:29 at 122.↩︎

51. Witness Lee, The Collected Works of Witness Lee, 1994–1997, vol. 1 (Anaheim, CA: Living Stream Ministry), 359. The formula circulates in a fuller form as well, and it is the fuller one that states the restraint most exactly: “God became man that man may become God in life, nature, expression, and function,” at CWWL 1994–1997, vol. 5, 349. Expression and function are activity rather than being, so the longer form places what is shared further still from the divine essence. Brian Siu Kit Chiu, who cites that locus, adds the gloss that on Lee’s account believers “participate only in God’s communicable attributes” and never become objects of worship — a boundary drawn in the same terms as the Reformed distinction taken up in §4 below. Brian Siu Kit Chiu, “Shepherding According to God: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Pauline Pastoral Theology in Witness Lee’s Reading,” Religions 17, no. 8 (2026): 974, at 8 and 14.↩︎

52. For the wording quoted in this paragraph see the notes at its first statement above, in this section and in the Introduction.↩︎

53. The point is not a concession made under pressure but a description of the corpus: the Life-Study volumes are transcribed spoken messages, The Conclusion of the New Testament is a topical compilation, and the Recovery Version’s notes are keyed to verses rather than to loci.↩︎

54. Michael M. C. Reardon and Brian Siu Kit Chiu, “Becoming God in Life and Nature: Watchman Nee and Witness Lee on Sanctification, Union with Christ, and Deification,” Religions 16 (2025): 933, at 6–7. The fullest treatment is Reardon’s dissertation, which takes up conformation and glorification at length, returns repeatedly to Romans 8:29, and prints Lee’s whole sequence — regeneration, sanctification, renewing, transformation, conformation and glorification — quoting Kangas. It reproduces that sequence as a list, in an ecclesial frame, rather than expounding either of its last two members: neither “mass production” nor “growth in life” appears in it, and Romans 8:29–30 is nowhere read as a single unit. The lacuna claimed here is therefore a claim about what the scholarship has expounded, not about what it has noticed. Michael M. C. Reardon, “‘So also is the Christ’: Ecclesial Deification in Pauline Soteriology” (PhD diss., 2023), and see his “Becoming God: Interpreting Pauline Soteriology as Deification,” Currents in Biblical Research 22, no. 1 (2023): 83–107, a survey of the field that reaches Romans 8 through its cluster of syn- compounds without taking up the order of salvation. The figure itself has been quoted in the secondary literature. Reardon and Chiu reproduce Lee’s “prototype for mass reproduction” and call the first God-man “the prototype for deification,” citing a locus not used here. Their purpose there is the ethical and devotional shape of the God-man living — Jesus’ prayer, his solitude, his dependence — and the article does not use the word conformation, does not take up Romans 8:29, and mentions glorification once. What remains unexpounded is therefore not the figure but the work it does in the pericope: how conformation, so understood, issues in glory. Michael M. C. Reardon and Brian Siu Kit Chiu, “The ‘God-Man Living’: Deification in Practical Theology,” Religions 16, no. 4 (2025): 481.↩︎

55. Michael M. C. Reardon and Brian Siu Kit Chiu, “Becoming God in Life and Nature: Watchman Nee and Witness Lee on Sanctification, Union with Christ, and Deification,” Religions 16 (2025): 933, at 3–5. The three stages are at 4; the description of salvation as “conformity to Christ’s image” at 5; “deification as the telos of sanctification” at 3.↩︎

56. Chow, Theosis, 114, 121. Chloë Starr summarizes the same reading: for Chow, “salvation for Nee… is a unity of lives and wills with God, more in line with Eastern Orthodox synergism than Protestant formulations.” Chloë Starr, “Review Article: Alexander Chow. 2013. Theosis, Sino-Christian Theology and the Second Chinese Enlightenment: Heaven and Humanity in Unity,” Studies in World Christianity 19, no. 3 (2013): 271–83, at 274.↩︎

57. Watchman Nee, The Gospel of God, vol. 2, in The Collected Works of Watchman Nee, 62 vols. (Anaheim, CA: Living Stream Ministry, 1992–1994), 29:293.↩︎

58. Nee, The Normal Christian Life, in Collected Works, 33:148.↩︎

59. See Michael M. C. Reardon, “Ecclesial Deification in Romans 12 in Dialogue with Witness Lee’s Understanding of Renewal and Transformation,” in the present volume.↩︎

60. Nee, The Glorious Church, in Collected Works, 34:6.↩︎

61. Nee, Glorious Church, 34:6.↩︎

62. Nee, The Overcoming Life, in Collected Works, 24:173.↩︎

63. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 3:577; Williams, Ground of Union, 145, on Palamas, Capita 105.↩︎

64. Nee, Miscellaneous Records of the Kuling Training, vol. 1, in Collected Works, 59:91–92.↩︎

65. Nee, Kuling Training, 59:92.↩︎

66. Nee, Kuling Training, 59:92.↩︎

67. Nee, Kuling Training, 59:93.↩︎

68. Nee, Kuling Training, 59:93. The heading stands at the head of the section immediately following the passage quoted above.↩︎

69. Lee, The Collected Works of Witness Lee, 1994–1997, vol. 3, 556–57, for “mass production”; and The Collected Works of Witness Lee, 1971, vol. 2, 256, for “corporate reproduction.” The figure is also fixed in the apparatus at Recovery Version, Rom 8:29 n. 3, NT p. 456; see §2 above.↩︎

70. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 2:190–91 (§199).↩︎

71. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 2:191 (§199).↩︎

72. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 2:191 (§199).↩︎

73. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 3:577.↩︎

74. Tang Chongrong 唐崇榮 (Stephen Tong), Tang Chongrong wenti jieda leibian 唐崇榮問題解答類編, vol. 1 [Stephen Tong’s classified compilation of questions and answers] (Taipei: Zhongfu chuban youxian gongsi, 2003), 128: 「『子』表示同生命，『生』表示非受造，『獨』表示沒有與祠一樣的、祠是惟一的。」↩︎

75. Tang (Tong), Wenti jieda leibian, 131.↩︎

76. Recovery Version, Rom 8:3 and n. 3, NT p. 451.↩︎

77. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 2:133, 135 (§187).↩︎

78. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 2:124–32, 137–38 (§§185–86, 188).↩︎

79. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 2:543 (§285).↩︎

80. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4:253.↩︎

81. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4:261.↩︎

82. Bavinck’s own note at 2:191 (§199) traces the divinization he rejects to Dionysius, by way of a Roman Catholic dogmatics. See also Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 1, Prolegomena (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), §98, where θεωσις is the terminus of the donum superadditum “first developed by scholasticism, especially by Hales, Bonaventure, and Thomas,” though with “the seeds of this doctrine … already planted in some pronouncements of the church fathers.”↩︎

83. Williams, Ground of Union, 101.↩︎

84. Hou Jun 侪军, “Jidu renxing shouzao zhengyi zhi shendu jiexi” 基督人性受造争议之深度解析 [An in-depth analysis of the controversy over the createdness of Christ’s humanity], Jidujiao sixiang pinglun 基督教思想评论 14, no. 1 (2012): 24–37, at 27–28: “20 世纪的李常受（Witness Lee）及其‘地方召会’（Local Church）便抓住了这个‘副传统’而且变本加历，公然宣称基督是受造者。” The English glosses of Lee’s name and of 地方召会 are Hou’s own. Translations from this article and from Tseng’s are mine.↩︎

85. Recovery Version, Col 1:15 n. 2, NT p. 665. Hou quotes the note in Chinese and in full at “Jidu renxing shouzao,” 28n7, citing Xinyue shengjing huifuben 新约圣经恢复本 [New Testament Recovery Version] (Anaheim: Shuiliu zhishizhan, 2007).↩︎

86. Hou, “Jidu renxing shouzao,” 29: “因为这个肉身本身虽然仍是受造世界之一个部分，但它却已成为上帝的身体。” Hou quotes Athanasius at second hand, from the Chinese translation of Justo L. González, A History of Christian Thought: Gangchaleisi 冈察雷斯 [González], Jidujiao sixiang shi 基督教思想史 [A history of Christian thought], trans. Chen Zemin 陈泽民 et al. (Nanjing: Jinling xiehe shenxueyuan, 2002), 248. The parallel is close but not exact, and the difference is the one at issue: Athanasius predicates a share in the created order of Christ’s flesh, where Lee predicates it of Christ as man. Whether that difference tells against Lee is precisely what the distinction discussed below decides.↩︎

87. Hou, “Jidu renxing shouzao,” 28: “基督的完整人性即基督的灵魂、肉体，与基督的位格是不能切割的，基督的灵魂与肉体都不在基督位格的范畴以外——我们一旦承认基督人性受造或基督肉体受造，就会影响或贬低基督的非受造的位格，甚至导致基督（位格）为受造者的结论。”↩︎

88. Hou, “Jidu renxing shouzao,” 29n9: “这要一直到 5—6 世纪拜占庭的李安迪（Leontius of Byzantium, 480—543）提出‘实化’（hypostatize）概念才基本解决。简单地讲，就是圣子取了无位格的人性，圣子位格与被造人性结合并作为被造人性的位格”; and, of the fathers’ solution generally, “并不彻底，而是留有可怕的漏洞。” In the same note Hou concedes the patristic case against his own position: of Jerome, who held that Christ’s soul was created in the womb, he writes that “compared with Athanasius, what Jerome holds is an unqualified doctrine of the createdness of Christ’s (complete) humanity,” and that “Jerome’s view is representative” — “耶柔米的观点具有代表性”.↩︎

89. Hou presses a further and distinct charge at the same place, that Lee’s 子化论 — his own gloss is “sonize” — “refuses to acknowledge that the Jesus of the flesh born of Mary is the Son of God,” claiming that Jesus was “sonized” only after the resurrection, and so “not only denies the incarnation, but cleaves Christ’s divinity and humanity in two and splits Christ’s person.” Hou, “Jidu renxing shouzao,” 28. The charge concerns the designation of the Son rather than the glorification of the creature, and is not pursued here; but it misplaces the object of the designation. Lee is expounding Rom 1:4, where Christ “was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead” (NRSV); the Recovery Version renders the participle “designated,” and it is that rendering Lee expounds. What is designated in resurrection is, on his account, not the Son but the Son’s humanity: “Before His incarnation Christ, the divine One, already was the Son of God (John 1:18; Rom. 8:3). By incarnation He put on an element, the human flesh, which had nothing to do with divinity; that part of Him needed to be sanctified and uplifted by passing through death and resurrection. By resurrection His human nature was sanctified, uplifted, and transformed. Hence, by resurrection He was designated the Son of God with His humanity (Acts 13:33; Heb. 1:5).” Holy Bible: Recovery Version, Rom 1:4 n. 1, NT p. 428. The first clause affirms the eternal sonship that the charge requires Lee to deny.↩︎

90. Tseng Shao Kai 曾廋恺, “Dagong jiaohui zhengtong lun Jidu renxing shouzao” 大公教会正统论基督人性受造 [Catholic orthodoxy on the createdness of Christ’s humanity], Jidujiao sixiang pinglun 基督教思想评论 17, no. 1 (2013): 40–64, at 55: “筆者认为，当前华人神学界关于基督人性受造与否的争议，主因之一就是未辨明‘一部分’与‘联合’这两个概念之间的关键差异。” Hou’s rejoinder follows directly in the same issue: Hou Jun 侪军, “‘Dao—chengwei—ren’ Jidulun” “道—成为—人”基督论 [The “Word—become—man” Christology], Jidujiao sixiang pinglun 基督教思想评论 17, no. 1 (2013): 65–77.↩︎

91. Aloys Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, vol. 1, From the Apostolic Age to Chalcedon (451), 2nd rev. ed., trans. John Bowden (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1975), 321, giving the principle in Gregory of Nazianzus’s formulation and noting that Origen and Tertullian had already argued so; Grillmeier traces the same soteriological axiom through Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen and the Cappadocians at 115. Grillmeier’s own λόγος-σάρξ / λόγος-ἄνθρωπος typology, within which the Chinese debate is conducted, has been questioned as a modern imposition; see Brian E. Daley, “Antioch and Alexandria: Christology as Reflection on God’s Presence in History,” in The Oxford Handbook of Christology, ed. Francesca Aran Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 121–38. The point taken here does not depend on the typology.↩︎

92. Tseng, “Dagong jiaohui zhengtong,” 62: “基督所取的人性并非永恒不朳，而是必朳坏的人性；这人性借着他的复活，变成不朳坏的。”↩︎

93. Chow, Theosis, 146; the quoted formulation is Chow’s rendering of the Byzantine reading of 2 Pet 1:4. On the relation of grace and freedom as “a synergy of unequals,” see 139 and 141. Chloë Starr summarizes the move approvingly: an Orthodox account of unity is “a way round problems theologians have seen in the foundational Chinese concept of Tian ren he yi… since in Orthodox thought humans participate in God’s divine energies and do not become God in God’s essence.” Chloë Starr, “Review Article: Alexander Chow. 2013. Theosis, Sino-Christian Theology and the Second Chinese Enlightenment: Heaven and Humanity in Unity,” Studies in World Christianity 19, no. 3 (2013): 271–83, at 280.↩︎

94. Michael M. C. Reardon and Brian Siu Kit Chiu, “Becoming God in Life and Nature: Watchman Nee and Witness Lee on Sanctification, Union with Christ, and Deification,” Religions 16 (2025): 933, at 10 and §7, “What Deification Is Not.”↩︎

95. Tang (Tong), Wenti jieda leibian, 128.↩︎

96. See §2 above on the reconstructive character of the sources.↩︎

97. Williams, Ground of Union, 155.↩︎

98. Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 418.↩︎

99. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4:253.↩︎

100. Kärkkäinen, Spirit and Salvation, 312–67 and 411.↩︎

101. Michael J. Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul’s Narrative Soteriology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 7, repeated at 162; and 150 for the phrase quoted. The count of occurrences is from a search of the whole volume.↩︎

102. Michael J. Gorman, Romans: A Theological and Pastoral Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022), 29 n. 9. Between the two definitions stands a third volume, and it bears out the point rather than complicating it. Participating in Christ gathers a decade of Gorman’s essays and is taken by the survey literature as the fullest statement of his position on Pauline deification; theosis is its governing term throughout. Yet the order of salvation is never brought to it — the phrase does not occur — and where the book works the pericope read here it quotes Romans 8:16-17, 22, 26 and 28-29 and stops at verse 29, treating the participial symmorphous as one of a cluster of syn- compounds that establish participation. Where it does reach verse 30 it pairs glory with justice, as the two attributes humanity lost and regains, rather than with conformation. Michael J. Gorman, Participating in Christ: Explorations in Paul’s Theology and Spirituality (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019), esp. 184-86, 212 n. 15, 219 and 226.↩︎

103. Carl Mosser, “The Gospel’s End and Our Highest Good: Deification in the Reformed Tradition,” in With All the Fullness of God: Deification in Christian Tradition, ed. Jared Ortiz (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2021), 83–108. Deification is the chapter’s governing term throughout, yet “ordo salutis” and “order of salvation” do not occur in it, and a glorif- word appears only within quotations from other authors.↩︎

104. Recovery Version, Rom 8:29 n. 3 and 8:30 n. 2, NT pp. 456–57; Lee, Life-Study of Romans, 235; and see §2 above.↩︎

105. Myk Habets, “‘As Far as Our Capacity Allows’: Deification in the Baptist Tradition,” in With All the Fullness of God: Deification in Christian Tradition, ed. Jared Ortiz (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2021), 156–57, drawing on Gösta Hallonsten. The constituent features of a doctrine of theosis — “a certain view of creation, especially of human beings; a soteriology, including the meaning of the Incarnation; a view of Christian life as sanctification connected to the Church and sacraments; and the final goal of union with God,” the whole “determined by a teleology that implies that creation and human beings from the very beginning are endowed with an affinity and likeness that potentially draws them to God” — are Hallonsten’s, at 156. Hallonsten himself concludes that “the label ‘doctrine of theosis’ should preferentially be reserved for the integral doctrine of deification as presented by the Eastern tradition”; Habets judges that contention “historically incorrect, not to mention offensive to theologians with ecumenical interests,” and answers it by specifying the content of a Baptist doctrine rather than by disputing the criteria. The present section does the same.↩︎

106. Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God, 7.↩︎

107. Kärkkäinen, Spirit and Salvation, 320, citing Donald Fairbairn, “Salvation as Theosis,” 42–43 (Kärkkäinen’s n. 55).↩︎

108. Recovery Version, Rom 8:26 n. 2 and 8:34 n. 3, NT pp. 456–57, and 8:30 n. 2, NT p. 457. The Spirit’s role in the deification of Romans 8 more broadly is the subject of the earlier studies noted above; what is claimed here is only that Lee’s apparatus orders the Spirit’s work specifically to the two stages under discussion.↩︎

109. Kärkkäinen, Spirit and Salvation, 201–9.↩︎

110. Michael M. C. Reardon, “Ecclesial Deification in Romans 12 in Dialogue with Witness Lee’s Understanding of Renewal and Transformation,” in the present volume; and, for the published treatment, Michael M. C. Reardon and Brian Siu Kit Chiu, “Becoming God in Life and Nature: Watchman Nee and Witness Lee on Sanctification, Union with Christ, and Deification,” Religions 16 (2025): 933, §9.↩︎

111. J. V. Fesko, “Romans 8.29–30 and the Question of the Ordo Salutis,” Journal of Reformed Theology 8 (2014): 35–60, at 50.↩︎

112. Fesko, “Romans 8.29–30,” 58, quoting John Murray, Redemption Accomplished and Applied, 79–80.↩︎

113. Michael J. Gorman, “Romans: The First Christian Treatise on Theosis,” Journal of Theological Interpretation 5, no. 1 (2011): 13–34, at 27.↩︎

114. Gorman, “Romans: The First Christian Treatise on Theosis,” 27.↩︎

115. Fesko, “Romans 8.29–30,” 58–59.↩︎

116. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 3:577; Williams, Ground of Union, 145, on Palamas, Capita 105.↩︎

117. Nee, The Glorious Church, in Collected Works, 34:6; and see §3 above.↩︎

118. Williams, Ground of Union, 155.↩︎

119. Kärkkäinen, Spirit and Salvation, 411.↩︎