Ecclesial Deification in Romans 12 in Dialogue with Witness Lee’s Understanding of Renewal and Transformation

Ecclesial Deification in Romans 12 in Dialogue with Witness Lee’s Understanding of Renewal and Transformation

Michael M. C. Reardon

Introduction

Recent decades have witnessed a remarkable shift within Pauline scholarship. What was once dismissed as an unfortunate Hellenistic infiltration into the apostle’s intellectual topography is now the subject of sustained scholarly attention: a growing company of interpreters, including Michael Gorman, Ben Blackwell, M. David Litwa, and Stephen Finlan contends that Paul’s soteriology is participatory, transformative, and in some meaningful sense deiform.¹ Gorman has gone furthest, arguing that Romans itself is best read as “the first Christian treatise on theosis (θέωσις).”² Others, while not employing the technical vocabulary of deification, similarly identify deiform themes in Paul’s corpus. L. Ann Jervis, for instance, argued decades earlier that for Paul, believers’ “becoming like God through Christ” takes concrete shape in the corporate life described in Romans 12.³

Despite this increased interest in deification, a lacuna exists in modern scholarship. No sustained argument in modern biblical studies has identified Romans 12:1–21 as a locus of ecclesial deification: that is, a deification whose proper subject is not autonomous, individual humans but the aggregate of believers comprising the church as the Body of Christ. Past discussions of Pauline deification gravitate toward Romans 8 and 2 Corinthians 3–5, and even where Romans 12 has received attention, its transformation language is near-universally folded into discussions surrounding ethical paraenesis rather than being descriptive of a corporate ontological change. Nor has Pauline exegesis been brought into sustained conversation Witness Lee (Lǐ Chángshòu 李常受, 1905–1997), a Chinese Christian teacher whose voluminous corpus articulates precisely such an expansive understanding of corporate deification.⁴ Lee contends that the terms ἀνακαίνωσις (“renewed”) and μεταμόρφωσις (“transformed”) represent stages within a salvific trajectory he refers to “organic salvation.” On this account, transformation is defined as “an inward metabolic process in which a new and living element gradually discharges and replaces our old element.”⁵ That a twentieth-century interpreter operating entirely outside the guild of biblical studies should shrewdly identify deiform language in Romans 12:2, I suggest, merits serious scholarly consideration.

The crux of my argument is as follows: Romans 12:1–21 provides a decisive exegetical foundation for understanding Pauline soteriology as ecclesial deification, and this foundation may be placed in constructive dialogue with Lee’s account of renewing and transformation. On this reading, Romans 12 is not merely rhetorical flourish or ethical paraenesis but a vision of corporate ontological transformation grounded in the believers’ participation in the ascended Christ. To demonstrate these claims, my argument unfolds in three movements. First, Romans 12:1–2 is interpreted as describing a present, ontological transformation (μεταμορφοῦσθε) that parallels 2 Corinthians 3:18 and corresponds with what Lee articulates as the renewing and transformation of the believers’ mind. Second, Romans 12:3–8 clarifies the ecclesial dimension of this transformation: the many are “one Body in Christ” (12:5), and this corporate σῶμα constitutes a unified (id)entity identified with and participating in the ascended Christ. Third, Romans 12:9–21 demonstrates that ecclesial agapic love is one of the foremost manifestations of this shared ontological reality. Understood in this way, Pauline ‘ethics’ is, in fact, the expression of an inward metabolic change which allows for the bringing forth of an organic, divine-human (id)entity, the church as the Body of Christ.

A brief methodological note is in order. In exegetical portions of this essay, synthetic proposals are constructed primarily from interpreters who do not read Paul in a deiform manner, yet advance insights coherent with and suggestive of deification (the principal exception is Gorman, who is referenced in relation to especially important core features of the doctrine in Romans). While unorthodox, this exercise demonstrates how scholars from multiple theological and methodological vantage points implicitly recognize aspects of Paul’s theology that best correspond with a deiform soteriology.

Our dialogue with Lee, meanwhile, is constructive rather than genealogical; no claim is made that Lee’s reading derives from or feeds into the modern participatory turn within the academy. Rather, I suggest that his account of renewal and transformation illumines exegetical features of Romans 12 that the guild has been slow to apprehend. The warrant for such a dialogue is well-established in hermeneutic theory. As Hans-Georg Gadamer persuasively illumines, all interpretation is formed and informed by the Wirkungsgeschichte (effective history) of a text; foregoing interpretations determine “in advance what seems to be worth inquiring about and what will appear as an object of investigation.”⁶ The modern guild of biblical studies operates within a horizon of expectation shaped by Enlightenment-based ideals, notably the prioritization of historicism over canonical coherence; interpreters operating external the academy do not. Engaging such interpreters, as Hans Jauss, a student of Gadamer, argues may reshape our present horizons and extract further meaning from the Pauline corpus.⁷

Romans 12 in Its Epistolary Frame

Before turning to the text, we briefly situate Romans 12:1–21 within the epistle as a whole. Traditionally, Romans has been understood as a “compendium of Christian teaching,” a summary or exposition of Paul’s theological outlook.⁸ Numerous commentators have pushed back against this understanding. Günter Klein argues that Paul did not consider the church in Rome a genuine ἐκκλησία because it lacked an apostolic foundation;⁹ yet Paul’s laudatory comments about the Roman church (1:8; 15:14–15) make it quite unlikely that he deemed the church to be lacking anything essential.¹⁰ R. A. Horsley, N. T. Wright, and others propose that Romans is an anti-imperial gospel challenging the rule of Caesar. However, this conception is unconvincing in light of the sparse usage of εὐαγγέλιον in Hellenistic political literature as well as Paul’s explicit encouragement to submit to political authorities in Romans 13:1–7.¹¹ Francis Watson suggests that Romans is directed toward Jewish Christians whom Paul exhorts to disengage from Judaic practices; yet, this narrow reading fails to account for Paul’s exhortations to Gentile believers and his cautionary comments about Gentile pride in Romans 11.¹² Robert Jewett proposes that Paul writes the epistle to garner support for his Spanish mission by ridding the gospel of the “honor system that dominated the Greco-Roman and Jewish world.”¹³ While provocative, evidence of such intent is lacking in the text, and this lens ultimately fails to provide an adequate framework to interpret the totality of the epistle.¹⁴ Jervis, comparing the formal features of Romans with the remainder of the corpus, concludes that Paul writes to “exercise his apostolic mandate” toward the Roman believers,¹⁵ and Thomas Schreiner adds that Paul’s ultimate aim in unifying the church and promoting his mission is to glorify God.¹⁶

While many of these proposals, especially those proposed by Jervis and Schreiner, capture aspects of Paul’s potential rationale for writing the epistle, a question remains: what gospel content does Paul desire to share to fulfill his apostolic commission, and how does the epistle conceive of humanity glorifying God? A novel proposal by Gorman addresses this question. For Gorman, Romans is not primarily an occasional epistle but a “peculiar kind of treatise,” a “sustained coherent treatment of a subject, both argumentative and narrative…in form,” whose overarching subject is theosis, defined as “becoming like God by participating in the life of God.”¹⁷ Anticipating the charge of anachronism, Gorman appeals to Bakhtin’s insight that “semantic phenomena can exist in concealed form, potentially, and be revealed only in semantic cultural contexts of subsequent epochs that are favorable for this disclosure”; theosis, thus, “should not be seen as anachronistic but as retrospectively appropriate,” but is indeed “retrospectively accurate.”¹⁸

On Gorman’s reading, the body of the epistle unfolds in five core pericopes. Romans 1:18–3:20 depicts the human condition as the failure to attain righteousness, glory, and eternal life; 3:21–4:25 and 5:1–8:39 narrate the divine solution, climaxing in Romans 8, where co-crucifixion, co-glorification, and conformation to Christ mark the restoration of fallen humans to righteousness and glory.¹⁹ Of import to our discussion, Gorman titles the final major section (12:1–15:13) “Communities of Righteousness and Glory: Spirit-Enabled Christlike Godlikeness,” and identifies key deiform elements in Romans 12: believers embodying the “‘en-Christed,’ righteous humanity” of Romans 6; the relationship between μεταμορφοῦσθε (12:2) and conformity to Christ (συμμόρφους, 8:29); the correspondence between being “one Body in Christ” (12:5) and manifesting the oneness of God (3:30); and the re-narration of Christ’s suffering, hospitality, and humility in the community’s common life.²⁰ His interpretation follows Jervis who argues that the believers’ likeness to God is a corporate life with concrete ethical features, where “life in Christ is a life of others who are in Christ.”²¹

Although Gorman, Blackwell, Jervis, and others have carefully noted both the presence of God-likeness in Romans and its ecclesiological reference point, none has adequately explored the relationship between Paul’s emphasis upon the believers’ salvific transformative process and the church’s identity as the Body of Christ beyond a few passing comments. It is to this task that we now turn.

Romans 12:1–2 and the Renewing of the Mind

1 Παρακαλῶ οὖν ὑμᾶς, ἀδελφοί, διὰ τῶν οἰκτιρμῶν τοῦ θεοῦ παραστῆσαι τὰ σώματα ὑμῶν θυσίαν ζῶσαν ἁγίαν εὐάρεστον τῷ θεῷ, τὴν λογικὴν λατρείαν ὑμῶν· 2 καὶ μὴ συσχηματίζεσθε τῷ αἰῶνι τούτῳ, ἀλλὰ μεταμορφοῦσθε τῇ ἀνακαινώσει τοῦ νοός, εἰς τὸ δοκιμάζειν ὑμᾶς τί τὸ θέλημα τοῦ θεοῦ, τὸ ἀγαθὸν καὶ εὐάρεστον καὶ τέλειον.

1 Therefore, I exhort you, brothers, through the compassions of God to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, well pleasing to God, which is your reasonable service. 2 And do not be fashioned according to this age but be transformed by the renewing of the mind so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and well pleasing and perfect. (translation adjusted from Recovery Version)

A majority of commentators note that these verses introduce the theme and thesis of the epistle’s ensuing three chapters.²² Wright, for instance, contends that “Paul’s whole written work, in fact, can be seen as an extended application of Romans 12:1–2.”²³ Because διὰ τῶν οἰκτιρμῶν τοῦ θεοῦ references the immediately preceding pericope, οὖν must be backward-looking; Paul’s ensuing paraenesis, per Douglas Moo, is “built firmly on the theology of chaps. 1–11.”²⁴ This hierarchy within Paul’s intellectual topography, theology engendering ethical commitments (and not vice versa) governs everything that follows: the commands of 12:3–21 are wholly grounded in Paul’s soteriology, Christology, and ecclesiology.

Two features of verse 1 warrant attention. First, Paul paradoxically designates the believers’ offering to God as being a θυσία ζῶσα (“living sacrifice”). Scholars are divided as to whether Paul evokes the Jewish sacrificial cultus or Hellenistic sacrificial language,²⁵ but that discussion may be set aside for another venue. For our purposes, the striking element is the pairing itself. The paradoxical pair highlights what Gorman calls “a constant process of dying yet living or resurrectional cruciformity,”²⁶ a lived experience constitutive of Pauline deification. Second, and of greater importance, is the shift between σώματα (bodies; plural) and θυσίαν (sacrifice; singular). Per Gorman, “the singular ‘sacrifice’ suggests both the corporate participation of believers being incorporated into a single, communal offering.”²⁷ For Paul, multiple bodies of believers are corporately presented to God as a single sacrifice and, in some sense, assimilated into this corporate identity—individual believers do not possess the totality of God’s holiness uniquely within themselves. Rather, these multitudinous bodies are deemed holy and well pleasing to God only after they have been corporately assimilated into a greater whole, a singular θυσία.

Already in the Rom. 12:1, then, the tenor of Paul’s exhortation is implicitly corporate. The closing phrase, τὴν λογικὴν λατρείαν ὑμῶν, reinforces the noetic register of the passage: while commentators and English Bibles often render λογικήν as “spiritual,” it is unclear why Paul would not have used πνευματικήν had he wished to convey that notion, since the πνεῦμα word group is exceedingly common in Paul and λογικός occurs only here.²⁸ Intriguingly, the term was a favorite among Greek philosophers; for example, Epictetus declares “I am a rational (λογικός) being, therefore I must be singing hymns of praise to God.”²⁹ “Reasonable” or “rational” is thus the more fitting translation, and it anticipates the renewing of the νοῦς in the following verse.

Verse 2 is subordinate to verse 1, explicating how believers may present their bodies as a corporate sacrifice: namely, by refusing to be fashioned according to this age and by being transformed by the renewing of the mind.³⁰ Older commentators posited a stark distinction between συσχηματίζεσθε as external, superficial conformity and μεταμορφοῦσθε as inward transformation.³¹ Scholars such as Cranfield, Dunn, Moo, Barrett, Schreiner, Jewett, and Kotansky have persuasively challenged this dichotomy.³² Per Barrett, for Paul “conformity to this age is no superficial matter.”³³ To be sure, the instinct of the older commentators was not wholly mistaken: they rightly apprehended that the positive transformation of believers is of a different order of importance; yet, they ultimately erred in trivializing the believers’ relationship to the present age. Modern commentators often commit the inverse error, downplaying the radical significance of transformation within Paul’s theological outlook.

Paul’s use of μεταμορφοῦσθαι is striking, both for its rarity in the New Testament and its ubiquity in Greco-Roman religious and philosophical writings. Its basic meaning is to “remodel” and “change into another form.”³⁴ Of its established pagan usages, the second is of import here: μεταμορφοῦσθαι denoted “the movement of initiates in the mystery religions through various stages toward apotheosis,” and how practitioners of magic, through union with the sacred form of the deity, could possess a god-like nature.³⁵ Importantly, the Latin equivalent was employed by Seneca, who argued that one is not wise “until his mind is transformed into the shape of what he has learned.”³⁶ In brief, the link among transformation, knowledge, and the reshaping of the mind found in contemporary Greco-Roman philosophical writings closely resembles Romans 12:1–2. Moreover, in Jewish apocalyptic literature the verb describes Enoch’s transformation (1 En. 71:11) and the saints’ transformation “into the glory of angels” (2 Bar 51:5). In nearly all these occurrences, the transformation described is profound: humans change into another form and obtain divine characteristics, identity, or appearance.

I am not suggesting that Paul’s use of μεταμορφόω is completely in line with his religious and philosophical contemporaries. Against conceptions of apotheosis in Greco-Roman mystery cults, Paul conceives of the believers’ transformation as never being self-originating or being carried out in a self-directed manner. The passive imperative Paul renders the verb in indicates that this remodeling “is not the Christians’ own doing but the work of the Holy Spirit.”³⁷ Moreover, per Jewett and Kotansky, “the Pauline concept of transformation is oriented to this life rather than the next, and in contrast to the philosophers and mystery religions, it is corporate rather than individual.”³⁸ Perhaps most importantly, Paul’s conception is wholly predicated upon believers being continually united with and participating in the one unique God from whom they derive any divine attributes, whereas the mystery religions posited an innate divine spark within all humans that, when actuated, transformed initiates into independent gods.

Notwithstanding these substantive differences, the material content of Pauline μεταμορφόω, as delineated even by Johannes Behm—who himself denies that Paul espouses mystical deification—includes transformative righteousness, participation in the divine δόξα, refashioning after the likeness of the Lord, and the eschatological redemption of the body.³⁹ These are the exact attributes identified by Litwa, Blackwell, and Gorman as core constitutive elements of Pauline deification.⁴⁰ While each of these authors possesses nuances in respect to the exact ramifications of Pauline deification, the posited present and future experiences of deified believers match across their models: a present moral transformation accompanied by noetic enlightenment, and a future somatic transformation in glory. What interpreters of previous generations have either been reluctant to name or outright reject deification in Paul’s writings, their own historical and linguistic analyses repeatedly describe much of the content of what Christian deification entails.

The instrument of this transformation is the renewing of the mind (τῇ ἀνακαινώσει τοῦ νοός). Paul’s use of ἀνακαίνωσις here is the first known instance of the word in Greek literature.⁴¹ Three factors reveal its weight: (1) its juxtaposition with τῷ αἰῶνι τούτῳ earlier in the verse; (2) Paul’s use of the related καινός to describe the eschatological age presently invading this age (2 Cor 5:17; Gal 6:15; Eph 2:15; Col 3:10); and (3) his use of the cognate καινότης in Romans 6:4 and 7:6 to describe the believers’ restored relationship with God. Together these indicate that the renewing of the mind is intimately related to, or equivalent with, believers becoming a “new creation” and the “new (corporate) man.”⁴² This is evidenced elsewhere in the Pauline corpus—Ephesians 2:15–16 the one new man is identified with the Body of Christ, and in Colossians 3:10–11 the new man names a corporate identity in which cultural, religious, and class distinctions are abrogated. In Romans 12:2, then, we observe that believers are being transformed by the Spirit to fully match an identity they already possess: they are a new creation and simultaneously be(com)ing a new creation; they are the one new man and are be(com)ing that new man.

The final clause of verse 2 describes the result of the believers’ transformation: εἰς τὸ δοκιμάζειν ὑμᾶς τί τὸ θέλημα τοῦ θεοῦ (so that you may prove what the will of God is). The verb δοκιμάζειν signifies that which is approved after a process of testing and examination, yet this is not merely an intellectual exercise; per Moo, it is to “understand and agree with what God wants of us with a view of putting it into practice: ‘discern-and-do the will of God.’”⁴³ Although the transformation occurs inwardly, in the mind, it is outwardly expressed in moral decision-making and a way of living that embodies righteousness; both the inward and outward aspects are paradigmatic of what Blackwell, Litwa, and Gorman articulate as the believers’ present experience of deification.

The Witness of 2 Corinthians 3:18

The corporate transformation nascent in Romans 12:1–2 is present elsewhere in the Pauline corpus in 2 Corinthians 3:18, a verse which contains the only other Pauline use of μεταμορφοῦσθαι. Frances Young has argued that “a number of difficulties in grasping the nub of Paul’s argument may be resolved if we come to Romans with the insight into Paul’s thinking that 2 Corinthians provides.”⁴⁴ The organic linguistic relationship between the two verses is significant precisely because, while study of Romans 12:2 has been deficient in relation to deification, 2 Corinthians 3:18 has been a focal point for scholars affirming deification in Paul. Wilhelm Bousset judged the verse “saturated with mystical piety,” hearing in it “the great theme…deification through the vision of God”;⁴⁵ Finlan calls it “the most frankly theotic passage in Paul”;⁴⁶ Litwa, Blackwell, and Gorman have each devoted extended analyses to it.⁴⁷

Three findings from that scholarship bear directly upon Romans 12. First, believers are the mirror: they behold and reflect the glory of the Lord and “are transformed into that same image which they reflect.”⁴⁸ Second, the image into which believers are transformed is the whole Christ. Litwa persuasively argues, against attempts to confine the believers’ conformity to Christ’s humanity, that believers cannot participate in Christ’s humanity without participating in his divinity: “amazingly, Paul teaches that believers are being transformed into this one image which Christ is. This image is the whole Christ—his humanity and his deity.”⁴⁹ Third, the phrase ἀπὸ δόξης εἰς δόξαν is best read progressively. Per Murray Harris, the ultimate δόξα in the series will be the believers’ acquisition of τὸ σῶμα τῆς δόξης (Phil 3:21), “a body suffused with the divine glory”;⁵⁰ Fee likewise sees in the phrase the “ever-increasing dimension of the glory” experienced by believers as they move from the present age to the eschaton.⁵¹ Litwa draws the connection to our passage explicitly:

The moral transformation begins with a full cognitive transformation, and is accompanied by a gradual physical transformation. The full cognitive transformation is the “renewal of the mind” (ἀνακαινώσει τοῦ νοός) which leads to moral thinking and acting (Rom. 12:2-21)….Therefore Pauline soteriology includes at least two levels of transformation: one moral, the other material….Moral and material transformation cannot be neatly partitioned off as present and eschatological. They both operate simultaneously until the full eschatological transformation occurs.⁵²

Particularly striking in Litwa’s line of reasoning is the uninterrupted soteriological continuity between the present and the coming age; the renewal of the mind in Romans 12:2 is not an isolated ethical datum but the leading edge of a transformation that consummates in the believers’ glorified bodies. Gorman adds that this transformation is “for the entire church,” is “not static but dynamic,” and is “not merely about personal transformation in a privatistic sense.”⁵³ The cumulative picture is, thus, of a transformation that is real, progressive, corporate, and ontological. Even with engaging just the first two verses of Romans, it behooves us to take E. P. Sanders’ commentary on Paul at face value: we should “understand Paul as saying what he meant and meaning what he said: Christians really are one body and Spirit with Christ…Christians really are being changed from one stage of glory to another.”⁵⁴

In Dialogue with Lee: Renewing and Transformation in Organic Salvation

At this juncture we introduce our principal interlocutor. Witness Lee, laboring first alongside Watchman Nee (Ní Tuòshēng 倪柝聲) in China and later in Taiwan and the United States, developed over seven decades of ministry an account of salvation whose center of gravity lies precisely where our preceding exegesis arrived: that for Paul, the Spirit’s inward, progressive, corporate transformation of believers. Lee describes believers as “united, mingled, and incorporated with the Triune God.” These three terms denote levels of the singular relationship believers and God: they are united with God in life, mingled with him in nature, and incorporated into him as persons.⁵⁵ The church as the Body of Christ is the aggregate of believers constituted by this union, mingling, and incorporation.⁵⁶

Within what Lee designates as “organic salvation,” renewing and transformation occupy the central position between regeneration and glorification, terms deployed by Lee that derive much of their meaning from their usage in Romans 12:2. Transformation, Lee writes, is “an inward metabolic process in which a new and living element gradually discharges and replaces our old element (Rom 12:2)”; it “takes place by eating, not by teaching.”⁵⁷ The metabolic figure is exegetically apt. Romans 12:2 does not exhort believers to imitate Christ by moral exertion; it exhorts them to be transformed, in the passive voice, by an agency that is not merely their own. Lee’s metabolism names precisely this: the divine life, received at regeneration, progressively spreads throughout the believers’ inward constitution, discharging the natural element and imparting the divine, so that the renewing of the mind issues in not extrinsic moral conduct alone but a genuine dispositional reconstitution, a replacement of the natural life with the divine life that results in progressive conformity to Christ’s image. Where much modern commentary treats the renewing of the mind as noetic reorientation toward new patterns of moral reasoning, Lee’s account presses toward what the apostle Paul’s employment of these verbs actually suggests: an ἀνακαίνωσις that makes the believer ontologically other than before.

In the final years of his ministry Lee explicitly affirmed the doctrine of deification, referring to it as “the high peak of the divine revelation” and consciously situated the doctrine in its patristic lineage: “Athanasius, who was one of the church fathers, said concerning Christ, ‘He was made man that we might be made God.’ This means that we are made God in life and in nature but not in the Godhead.”⁵⁸ The boundary is stated with equal force in both directions: “To say that we are the same as God in His Godhead is a great blasphemy, but to say that we cannot be the same as God in life, nature, expression, and function is unbelief.”⁵⁹ Lee’s account thus preserves the essential Creator-creature distinction while affirming the realistic character of the believers’ transformation, precisely the balance our exegesis of μεταμορφοῦσθε required: a transformation dependent at every point upon participation in the divine life, never self-originating, never issuing in independent divinity, yet genuinely ontological.

Romans 12:3–8 and the One Body in Christ

3 Λέγω γὰρ διὰ τῆς χάριτος τῆς δοθείσης μοι παντὶ τῷ ὄντι ἐν ὑμῖν μὴ ὑπερφρονεῖν παρ’ ὃ δεῖ φρονεῖν, ἀλλὰ φρονεῖν εἰς τὸ σωφρονεῖν, ἑκάστῳ ὡς ὁ θεὸς ἐμέρισεν μέτρον πίστεως. 4 καθάπερ γὰρ ἐν ἑνὶ σώματι πολλὰ μέλη ἔχομεν, τὰ δὲ μέλη πάντα οὐ τὴν αὐτὴν ἔχει πρᾶξιν, 5 οὕτως οἱ πολλοὶ ἓν σῶμά ἐσμεν ἐν Χριστῷ, τὸ δὲ καθ’ εἷς ἀλλήλων μέλη. 6 ἔχοντες δὲ χαρίσματα κατὰ τὴν χάριν τὴν δοθεῖσαν ἡμῖν διάφορα, εἴτε προφητείαν κατὰ τὴν ἀναλογίαν τῆς πίστεως, 7 εἴτε διακονίαν ἐν τῇ διακονίᾳ, εἴτε ὁ διδάσκων ἐν τῇ διδασκαλίᾳ, 8 εἴτε ὁ παρακαλῶν ἐν τῇ παρακλήσει, ὁ μεταδιδοὺς ἐν ἁπλότητι, ὁ προϊστάμενος ἐν σπουδῇ, ὁ ἐλεῶν ἐν ἱλαρότητι.

3 For I say, through the grace given to me, to everyone who is among you, not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think, but to think so as to be sober-minded, as God has apportioned to each a measure of faith. 4 For just as in one body we have many members, and all the members do not have the same function, 5 So we who are many are one Body in Christ, and individually members one of another. 6 And having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, whether prophecy, let us prophesy according to the proportion of faith; 7 or service, let us be faithful in that service; or he who teaches, in that teaching; 8 or he who exhorts, in that exhortation; he who gives, in simplicity; he who leads, in diligence; he who shows mercy, in cheerfulness. (Rom 12:3–8, translation adjusted from Recovery Version)

The γάρ at the beginning of verse 3 links Paul’s ensuing exhortations with verses 1–2; per Moo, “vv. 3–8 are concrete instances of the transformed way of life to which the believer is called.”⁶⁰ Paul articulates his first admonition through what Jewett and Kotansky call “witty wordplay based on a fourfold paronomasia with the stem φρον-”: μὴ ὑπερφρονεῖν παρ’ ὃ δεῖ φρονεῖν, ἀλλὰ φρονεῖν εἰς τὸ σωφρονεῖν.⁶¹ The wordplay is significant for three interrelated reasons.

First, there is a clear relationship between the believers’ ἀνακαίνωσις τοῦ νοός (v. 2) and their φρονεῖν (v. 3). The believers’ transformation, whatever else it may entail, includes the reconfiguration of their way of thinking; renewal of the mind issues in an divinely transformed self-estimation in which believers recognize themselves as members as opposed to autonomous individuals, each of whom are necessary for the creation of a greater whole.

Second, the φρονεῖν Paul calls believers to possess is neither abstract nor drawn from classical Greco-Roman pagan poets; it is concrete and identifiable, the φρονεῖν “which was also in Christ Jesus” (Phil 2:5). The result of the believers’ transformation by the renewing of their mind is nothing less than the duplication of the mind of Christ within them. This noetic duplication is the core of Gorman’s initial argument for Pauline theosis, which he defines as “the transformative participation in the kenotic, cruciform character of God through the Spirit-enabled conformity to the incarnate, crucified, and resurrected/glorified Christ.”⁶² The logic within Romans 12 is precise: the ‘way of thinking’ of the individual Christ is reproduced in believers so that they may function as members of the corporate Christ.

Third, Paul’s privileging of σωφρονεῖν aligns with a long philosophical tradition in which sober-mindedness marked human likeness to the divine. Plato argues that “the one who would be dear to God must become like God, so far as possible,” and that “the sober-minded among us is dear to God, for he is like God”; Aristotle exhorted humans to make themselves “immortal, so far as possible”; the late Stoics proposed that sober-mindedness expresses humanity’s kinship with the divine; and Philo held that sober-mindedness originates in the divine realm.⁶³ Helen North contends that this tradition flowered into the concept of ὁμοίωσις Θεῷ (likeness to God) among the Greek fathers, a core concept in Christian conceptions of deification.⁶⁴ Paul’s usage is simultaneously continuous with and subversive of these antecedents; the divine ‘way of thinking’ revealed in Christ is not high or mighty but lowly, humble, and cruciform.

Verses 4–5 supply the ontological ground of the admonition. The comparative καθάπερ γάρ introduces the ecclesial/body analogy, and verse 5 delivers the claim: οὕτως οἱ πολλοὶ ἓν σῶμά ἐσμεν ἐν Χριστῷ, τὸ δὲ καθ’ εἷς ἀλλήλων μέλη (so we who are many are one Body in Christ, and individually members one of another). While the phrasing differs from “the Body of Christ” in 1 Corinthians 12:27, the two verses do not speak of two different realities but of the same reality from different perspectives.⁶⁵ That is to say, the believers’ oneness is actuated ἐν Χριστῷ, a spontaneous result of their incorporation into Christ.⁶⁶ From a Pauline perspective, identifying the ecclesial body as Christ’s own is not reducible to Greco-Roman ὁμόνοια rhetoric, nor is it a mere metaphor; it is the ontological sphere in which the Spirit’s renewing issues in the corporate Christ. Gorman advances a novel reading whereby the believers as “one Body in Christ” manifest “their confession that God is one (3:30)”;⁶⁷ the unity of believers is the ecclesial manifestation of the unity of God. The unity of verse 5 is thus the result of the aggregate of deiform processes already discussed: the presentation of the believers’ σώματα as a single θυσία (v. 1), their μεταμορφοῦσθε and noetic renewal (v. 2), and the shaping of their φρονεῖν to match Christ’s own (v. 3). We may rightly propose that for Paul, the telos of the believers’ moral, noetic, and eventual physical transformation is to be(come) constituents of the Body of Christ. Stated differently, sanctification and ecclesial constitution coincide, with the former being the means of achieving the latter as God’s goal.

Verses 6–8 delineate the χαρίσματα (gifts) that enable the flourishing of the corporate σῶμα, grounded through wordplay in the one χάρις from which they derive.⁶⁸ Two observations suffice. First, Paul’s grounding of variegated gifts in a single source demonstrates that unity does not entail uniformity; diversity is necessary for the health of the greater whole.⁶⁹ Second, all seven gifts—prophecy, service, teaching, exhortation, giving, leading, and the showing of mercy—were exhibited during the earthly ministry of Jesus. In other words, the actions performed by Jesus of Nazareth as an individual during His earthly ministry are being duplicated on a grand scale by believers as members of Christ’s corporate Body: the church renarrates the ministry of its Head.

In Dialogue with Lee: The Organic Body and the Goal of Transformation

Lee’s insistence that organic salvation culminates in the building up of the Body of Christ illuminates Paul’s argument here: transformation is not individualistic but intrinsically ecclesial. Three features of his account warrant attention.

First, Lee affirms without qualification the ontological character of the church’s identity as the Body:

I was instructed that the term the Body of Christ was merely a metaphor signifying what the church is to Christ. I accepted this teaching at that time, but gradually, after many years, I found out that the Body of Christ is not a metaphor; it is a great reality in the universe. Rather, our physical body is a metaphor portraying the Body of Christ.”⁷⁰

Commenting on 1 Corinthians 12:12, Lee goes on to observe that “in Greek Christ in verse 12 is ‘the Christ,’ referring to the corporate Christ, composed of Christ Himself as the Head and the church as His Body with all the believers as its members. All the believers of Christ are organically united with Him and constituted with His life and element and have thus become His Body, an organism, to express Him.”⁷¹ The convergence of these readings with our examination of Romans 12:5 is readily evident: the corporate σῶμα constitutes a unified (id)entity identified with and participating in the ascended Christ.

Second, Lee guards the claim against its obvious misconstrual. Identifying believers as members of the Body, and even as Christ, does not entail that they become an object of worship: “We can be only the Body and cannot be the Head…We worship God in His Godhead; we do not worship those who have His divine nature…the Head is a matter related to the Godhead.”⁷² The distinction between Head and Body preserves precisely what Paul’s ἐν Χριστῷ preserves: the derived, participatory character of the church’s ontological identity.

Third, and most significantly for the present argument, Lee construes the Body as an organism that must grow. “Christ is the essence of His Body and His Body is an organic entity which lives, grows, and matures with Himself until it eventually expresses Him.”⁷³ The growth of God within individual believers is linked directly to the church’s corporate growth: “The church grows with the growth of God until it reaches maturity. When it reaches maturity, it arrives at the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ (4:13). By then the church will be Christ’s expression in full.”⁷⁴ Nor may growth be partitioned individualistically. Per Lee,

Apparently, growth is for individual believers and building is corporate. Actually, both growth and building are corporate. The feet do not grow at one time, and the hands at a later time, as if the two were autonomous. The entire body grows together as a corporate entity.⁷⁵

Individual deification is merely the means to God’s ultimate goal, the producing of a corporate deified entity: in this age the Body of Christ, and in eternity the New Jerusalem where believers “are being constituted with the processed and consummated Triune God…to be His corporate expression for eternity.”⁷⁶

It is notable that Lee, unlike interpreters such as Emile Mersch and John Zizioulas who develop comparable accounts of ecclesial transformation, does not situate ecclesial deification within visible institutional structures or sacramental mediation.⁷⁷ For Lee, the universal Body of Christ comprises all regenerated believers throughout the ages, irrespective of denominational location or theological orientation; any believer experiencing the growth of God contributes to the growth of the Body.⁷⁸ This feature renders his account peculiarly serviceable for reading Romans, an epistle addressed to believers whose common life predates any developed institutional apparatus. What Paul describes in Romans 12:3–8 is not an ecclesiastical polity but an organism; Lee’s non-institutional framing keeps the exegetical focus precisely there, and as an addendum, allows this reading of Paul’s letter to be more palatable to non-Roman Catholic and non-Eastern Orthodox audiences.

Lee’s account thereby answers the question that the aforementioned participatory turn in Pauline studies left largely unaddressed. If believers are being transformed, to what end? Gorman and Blackwell rightly emphasize the communal context of transformation, yet neither develops the claim that the corporate Body is itself the object of the transformative process. Lee does: the μεταμορφοῦσθε of Romans 12:2 has as its directed end the ἓν σῶμα of Romans 12:5. Read in this light, the sequence of Romans 12:1–8 is not a loose chain of exhortations but a single soteriological arc, from the corporate presentation of the believers’ bodies, through their metabolic renewal and noetic conformation to Christ, to their constitution as the one Body in Christ.

Romans 12:9–21 and the Manifestation of Agapic Love

9 Ἡ ἀγάπη ἀνυπόκριτος. ἀποστυγοῦντες τὸ πονηρόν, κολλώμενοι τῷ ἀγαθῷ· 10 τῇ φιλαδελφίᾳ εἰς ἀλλήλους φιλόστοργοι, τῇ τιμῇ ἀλλήλους προηγούμενοι…12 τῇ ἐλπίδι χαίροντες, τῇ θλίψει ὑπομένοντες, τῇ προσευχῇ προσκαρτεροῦντες, 13 ταῖς χρείαις τῶν ἁγίων κοινωνοῦντες, τὴν φιλοξενίαν διώκοντες. 14 εὐλογεῖτε τοὺς διώκοντας, εὐλογεῖτε καὶ μὴ καταρᾶσθε. 15 χαίρειν μετὰ χαιρόντων, κλαίειν μετὰ κλαιόντων. 16 τὸ αὐτὸ εἰς ἀλλήλους φρονοῦντες, μὴ τὰ ὑψηλὰ φρονοῦντες ἀλλὰ τοῖς ταπεινοῖς συναπαγόμενοι. μὴ γίνεσθε φρόνιμοι παρ’ ἑαυτοῖς…20 ἀλλὰ ἐὰν πεινᾷ ὁ ἐχθρός σου, ψώμιζε αὐτόν· ἐὰν διψᾷ, πότιζε αὐτόν· τοῦτο γὰρ ποιῶν ἄνθρακας πυρὸς σωρεύσεις ἐπὶ τὴν κεφαλὴν αὐτοῦ. 21 μὴ νικῶ ὑπὸ τοῦ κακοῦ, ἀλλὰ νίκα ἐν τῷ ἀγαθῷ τὸ κακόν.

9 Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil; cling to what is good. 10 Love one another warmly in brotherly love; take the lead in showing honor one to another… 12 Rejoice in hope; endure in tribulation; persevere in prayer. 13 Contribute to the needs of the saints; pursue hospitality. 14 Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. 15 Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep. 16 Be of the same mind toward one another, not setting your mind on the high things but going along with the lowly… 20 But “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him a drink…” 21 Do not be conquered by evil, but conquer evil with good (translation adjusted from Recovery Version).

The final section of Romans 12 is a fine example of Pauline paraenesis, and it exhibits the same pattern of discourse observed throughout this essay: any notion of Paul’s ‘ethical framework’ is subsequent to, and derived from, statements about the believers’ corporate identity. This is because imperatives of κοινωνία, enemy-love, and blessing persecutors are only intelligible within a framework in which the divine life has been inwardly wrought into the believers comprising the corporate Christ.

Consider first Paul’s deployment of ἀγάπη. In verse 9 he uses the definite article, signifying a well-known virtue,⁷⁹ and the love in question must be ἀνυπόκριτος (without hypocrisy). Strikingly, whereas Paul uses ἀγάπη in the first eleven chapters of Romans to exclusively refer to God’s love (Rom 5:5, 8; 8:35, 39), he begins in Romans 12:9 (also 13:10; 14:15) to use the term in respect to the love believers have for others.⁸⁰ Without pressing this point too far, it is certainly notable that the first transference of ἀγάπη from the divine to the human realm in Romans occurs in close proximity to verses discussing the believers’ corporate transformation (v. 2), the right shaping of their φρόνησις (v. 3), and their corporate identity (vv. 4–5). The love commanded in verses 9–21 is, thus, not an ideal imported from elsewhere; it is the divine love now resident in, and expressed through, a transformed corporate (id)entity.

Verse 10 specifies a familial register: τῇ φιλαδελφίᾳ εἰς ἀλλήλους φιλόστοργοι. The φιλόστοργος word group denoted the tender affection between members of the same family,⁸¹ between individuals sharing the same ancestry and life. This is entirely appropriate for believers, who jointly share the life of God and inhabit the same ontological identity. It is a family constituted not by natural kinship but by common participation in the divine life. The accompanying exhortation, to “out-do” one another in showing honor,⁸² would been understood especially countercultural to an audience whose interest could be characterized as a race to accumulate honor for the self.⁸³ According to Gorman, “as practitioners of love and good who show honor to others (12:9–10), they embody the image of Christ the new Adam, reversing the consequences of life in Adam depicted in Rom 1–2.”⁸⁴

Verses 12–21 extend this logic outward. Believers who patiently endure suffering renarrate the pattern of Jesus, who suffered prior to glorification; endurance is a central component of Christ’s cruciform φρόνησις (Phil 2:5–8), which is being duplicated in believers by the renewing of their minds.⁸⁵ Verse 16, with its threefold recurrence of the φρον- stem (τὸ αὐτὸ εἰς ἀλλήλους φρονοῦντες, μὴ τὰ ὑψηλὰ φρονοῦντες…μὴ γίνεσθε φρόνιμοι παρ’ ἑαυτοῖς), loudly echoes verse 3 and recapitulates Paul’s concern that the believers’ φρόνησις be properly shaped;⁸⁶ the phrase τὸ αὐτὸ εἰς ἀλλήλους φρονοῦντες is also found in Philippians 2:2, another explicit reminder of the necessity of possessing the mind of Christ.⁸⁷

Most remarkable is Paul’s extension of the community’s love beyond its own boundary, a consideration not found in the parallel passage in 1 Corinthians 12: members of the Body are to bless persecutors (v. 14), live at peace with all (v. 18), feed their enemies (v. 20), and conquer evil with good (v. 21).⁸⁸ The believers’ initiation into the Christic σῶμα creates controversy with the surrounding society in the form of persecution, and Paul, motivated by what Longenecker calls “the Christian love ethic,”⁸⁹ directs believers into a love-filled outward witness to the non-Christic world. Gorman states the theological ground: inasmuch as believers are hospitable to strangers and live peaceably without practicing evil or revenge, “they express the character of the One who graciously loved and righteoused us while we were still sinners and enemies of God (5:1-11).”⁹⁰ Enemy-love is possible for the community precisely because the community is deified—the shared life they possess is the life of the God who loves enemies.

In Dialogue with Lee: Ethics as the Outflow of the Divine Life

Lee’s account renders this final movement fully intelligible. In his terminology, transformation is not mere extrinsic ethicality or mimesis but the spontaneous outflow of Christ lived corporately. Because transformation is metabolic (i.e., a new element replacing the old), its manifestation in conduct is organic rather than imposed: the church’s love is the expression of what the church has become, not conformity to outward regulations or rules. Lee had articulated this vision in the earliest years of his ministry: “The church is the enlargement of the manifestation of God in the flesh, the enlargement of the mingling of God and man…The church is both man and God, and God and man.”⁹¹

A community so constituted does not perform divine love as an external assignment; it expresses divine love spontaneously based upon its inward constitution. This is why, for Lee, the divine economy is centered on the building up of the “the organic Body of Christ,”⁹² and why the practices he commends for believers are not techniques of moral self-improvement, but spiritual practices designed to assist believers in receiving and assimilating the divine life. Building upon the common observation that one is what one eats, Lee locates the actuation of transformation in the believers’ daily eating and drinking of the Lord: exercising the human spirit to contact God in prayer, in the words of Scripture, and in the songs of the church, so that the divine element is continually received and metabolized.⁹³ However idiomatic the formulation, its exegetical instinct corresponds to the passive voice of Romans 12:2; believers do not transform themselves, but they may position themselves to receive the One who transforms. ‘Ethics,’ for Lee, is therefore the expression of an inward metabolic change: the divine life expressed through the church as the Body of Christ.

Herein lies the exegetical payoff of the dialogue. Modern commentary on Romans 12:9–21 oscillates between isolating the passage as descriptive of generic early Christian paraenesis and mining it for contemporary social ethical mandates. Lee’s reading, in concert with the deiform exegesis pursued above, restores the passage’s internal logic: verses 9–21 describe the visible life of a community whose members have been inwardly reconstituted by the divine life (vv. 1–2), noetically conformed to Christ (v. 3), and corporately constituted as the one Body in Christ (vv. 4–8). The love commands are not the point of the chapter; they are offered, yes as exhortations, but even moreso as evidence of ecclesial agapic love being the manifestation of a shared ontological reality.

Conclusion

The foregoing discussion has argued that Romans 12:1–21 provides a decisive exegetical foundation for understanding Pauline soteriology as ecclesial deification. The three movements may be briefly recapitulated. In Romans 12:1–2, Paul describes a present, ontological transformation: believers are corporately presented to God as a single living sacrifice and are being transformed, by the Spirit’s renewing of the mind, into a new corporate creation. The verb μεταμορφοῦσθαι, whose only other Pauline occurrence describes believers’ progressive transformation into the image of the whole Christ “from glory to glory” (2 Cor 3:18), carries connotations of profound, deiform change that Paul’s carefully qualifies as not exceeding the Creator-creature distinction. In Romans 12:3–8, the ecclesial dimension of this transformation becomes explicit: the renewed mind is the duplicated mind of Christ, and its telos is the believers’ constitution as “one Body in Christ,” a unified corporate (id)entity derived from and participating in the ascended Christ, such that sanctification and ecclesial constitution coincide, and with the former being the means by which the latter is achieved. In Romans 12:9–21, what are normally read as straightforward ethical imperatives—unfeigned love, familial affection, endurance in suffering, hospitality, and enemy-love—are the manifestation of this shared ontological reality: ἀγάπη, which once was reserved in Romans 1–11 only for the love of God is now flowing through the aggregate of deified believers constituting the Body of Christ for the remainder of the epistle.

The constructive dialogue with Witness Lee was illuminating at each stage of our discussion. His designation of renewing and transformation as metabolic processes of the indwelling, life-giving Spirit captures the passive, progressive, and ontological character of μεταμορφοῦσθε more adequately than other interpretative accounts largely confined to moral reorientation. His insistence that individual transformation has a directed end, the building up of the Body of Christ, supplies the ecclesiological teleology that the modern participatory turn in Pauline studies has intimated but not elaborated upon. Lee’s account of ethics as the spontaneous outflow of the divine life renders the paraenesis of verses 9–21 internally coherent with the soteriology and ecclesiology of verses 1–8. And lastly, his carefully bounded affirmation that believers become God “in life and nature but not in the Godhead” demonstrates that a robust doctrine of ecclesial deification can be maintained without compromising the Creator-creature distinction or the uniqueness of the incarnate Son.

Two contributions and one avenue for further inquiry may be named. First, this essay has identified Romans 12:1–21 as a locus for ecclesial deification, extending the deiform reading of Romans beyond its customary locus in chapter 8. Second, it demonstrates that Witness Lee merits a place among serious interlocutors of Pauline scholarship; his convergence, from outside the guild and its Enlightenment-formed horizon of expectation, anticipated decades prior significant aspects of Pauline theology the guild is only now approaching. Future research might extend this dialogue in at least two directions. Exegetically, Lee’s reading of Romans 8, where his account of the Spirit’s dispensing intersects with the co-glorification texts at the center of current deification debates, awaits the same treatment given here to Romans 12. Ecumenically, the plasticity of ecclesial deification across chronological, geographic, linguistic, and denominational frames of reference, affirmed by patristic interpreters, by Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox theologians, and by a Chinese Christian wholly detached from sacramental frameworks, suggests that the doctrine may prove serviceable for endeavors toward visible Christian unity. The church, Paul insists, is “one Body in Christ.” With this in mind, I humbly propose that the core message of Romans 12 is that this corporate, ontological identity is not a figure of speech awaiting demythologization but a genuine reality into which believers are, even now, being progressively and corporately transformed.

Bibliography

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

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

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———. The Purpose of Romans: A Comparative Letter Structure Investigation. Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991.

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1. Michael J. Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul’s Narrative Soteriology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009); Ben C. Blackwell, Christosis: Engaging Paul’s Soteriology with His Patristic Interpreters (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016); M. David Litwa, We Are Being Transformed: Deification in Paul’s Soteriology (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012); Stephen Finlan, “Can We Speak of Theosis in Paul?” in Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions, ed. Michael J. Christensen and Jeffery A. Wittung (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 68–80.↩︎

2. Michael J. Gorman, “Romans: The First Christian Treatise on Theosis,” Journal of Theological Interpretation 5, no. 1 (2011): 17. Gorman defines theosis as “becoming like God by participating in the life of God.”↩︎

3. L. Ann Jervis, “Becoming like God through Christ: Discipleship in Romans,” in Patterns of Discipleship in the New Testament, ed. Richard N. Longenecker (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 143–162; see also Morna D. Hooker, From Adam to Christ: Essays on Paul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 13–69.↩︎

4. Apart from his Life-Study commentaries spanning all sixty-six books of Scripture, The Collected Works of Witness Lee (hereafter CWWL) comprises 138 volumes spanning over 78,000 pages (Anaheim: Living Stream Ministry, 2004–2018). For his life, see A Bondslave of Christ to Carry Out the Divine Revelation in the Present Age: A Brief Description of the Life of Witness Lee (Anaheim: Living Stream Ministry, 1997). Today, an estimated 1.5–2 million Christians meet in churches directly established by the ministry of Watchman Nee and Witness Lee, with millions more in underground Chinese churches formatively shaped by their teachings.↩︎

5. Witness Lee, “Eating Christ for the Building Up of the Church as His Body,” in CWWL 1972, vol. 3 (Anaheim: Living Stream Ministry, 2004–2018), 401–403.↩︎

6. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed. (London: Continuum, 2004), 311.↩︎

7. Hans Jauss, Toward An Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 59; cf. Robert Evans, Reception History, Tradition and Biblical Interpretation: Gadamer and Jauss in Current Practice (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 2–26. Broadly speaking, modern textual engagement is often shaped by Enlightenment ideals of objectivity and historicity (e.g., the quest for the historical Paul and questions of the antecedents of his theology).↩︎

8. Leon Morris, The Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), 8; Thomas Schreiner, Romans, ed. Robert W. Yarbrough and Joshua W. Jipp (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018), 16; L. Ann Jervis, The Purpose of Romans: A Comparative Letter Structure Investigation (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991), 15–17.↩︎

9. Günter Klein, “Paul’s Purpose in Writing the Epistle to the Romans,” in The Romans Debate, ed. Karl P. Donfried (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 29–43.↩︎

10. Schreiner, Romans, 18.↩︎

11. R. A. Horsley, Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society (Harrisburg: Trinity, 1997); N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), 1271–1319; Michael Wolter, Der Brief an die Römer (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2014), 83.↩︎

12. Francis Watson, Paul, Judaism, and the Gentiles: Beyond the New Perspective (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 175–191.↩︎

13. Robert Jewett and Roy David Kotansky, Romans: A Commentary, ed. Eldon Jay Epp (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006), 1.↩︎

14. For a thorough critique of Jewett’s approach, see John Barclay, “Is It Good News That God Is Impartial? A Response to Robert Jewett, Romans: A Commentary,” JSNT 31, no. 1 (2008): 89–111.↩︎

15. Jervis, The Purpose of Romans, 163.↩︎

16. Schreiner, Romans, 26: Schreiner maintains that “too many studies consider the purpose of Romans only at the sociological or horizontal level.”↩︎

17. Gorman, “Romans,” 16–17.↩︎

18. Gorman, “Romans,”18.↩︎

19. Gorman, “Romans,”22–26. The deiform character of Romans 8 has also been noted by Hooker and Blackwell; see Hooker, From Adam to Christ, 45.↩︎

20. Gorman, “Romans,” 30–31.↩︎

21. Jervis, “Becoming like God,” 154.↩︎

22. Ernst Käsemann, Commentary on Romans, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), 323; Douglas J. Moo, The Letter to the Romans, ed. Ned B. Stonehouse et al. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018), 766–767; C. E. B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, vol. 2 (London: T&T Clark International, 2004), 595; Schreiner, Romans, 622. Gorman argues that the brief exhortation in Rom 12:1–2 “governs the entire discussion found in 12:1–15:13” (Michael Gorman, Romans: A Theological and Pastoral Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022), 243).↩︎

23. Wright, Faithfulness of God, 1123.↩︎

24. Moo, Romans, 767.↩︎

25. Moo suggests it is linked to the Old Testament sacrificial system (Romans, 769); against this view, Jewett and Kotansky argue that the phrase derives from Hellenistic sacrificial technical language (Romans, 727). The use of λατρεία later in the verse suggests the former.↩︎

26. Gorman, Romans, 244; cf. Gorman, Participating in Christ: Explorations in Paul’s Theology and Spirituality (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019), 22, 74–76.↩︎

27. Michael J. Gorman, Apostle of the Crucified Lord: A Theological Introduction to Paul and His Letters (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), 456.↩︎

28. Schreiner, Romans, 627.↩︎

29. Epictetus, Diss. 1.16.20–21.↩︎

30. Moo, Romans, 773.↩︎

31. E.g., William Sanday and Arthur C. Headlam, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (New York: Scribners, 1913), 353.↩︎

32. Cranfield, Romans, 605–608; James D. G. Dunn, Romans 9–16 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988), 712–713; Moo, Romans, 773–775; Schreiner, Romans, 629; Jewett and Kotansky, Romans, 731–733. On an exegetical level, Paul’s usage of the closely related verb μετασχηματίσει in Phil 3:21, describing the eschatological glorification of believers’ bodies, cannot denote merely extrinsic fashioning.↩︎

33. C. K. Barrett, The Epistle to the Romans (London: Continuum, 1991), 214. Per Schreiner, “Paul is not merely concerned that believers will outwardly conform to this age. He is especially worried that their adaptation will shape them in every dimension of their lives” (Romans, 629).↩︎

34. Johannes Behm, “μορφή, μορφόω, μόρφωσις, μεταμορφόω,” in TDNT, ed. Gerhard Kittel et al. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967), 755.↩︎

35. Jewett and Kotansky, Romans, 732; Behm, “μεταμορφόω,” 757.↩︎

36. Seneca, Ep. 94.48 (italics mine).↩︎

37. Cranfield, Romans, 607; cf. Behm, “μεταμορφόω,” 766.↩︎

38. Jewett and Kotansky, Romans, 733 (italics mine).↩︎

39. Behm, “μεταμορφόω,” 758–759. Behm denies that Paul espouses “mystical deification,” aligning that term with pagan conceptions; yet the elements he identifies as central to Pauline μεταμορφόω are precisely those which recent scholarship identifies as constitutive of Pauline deification.↩︎

40. Regarding transformative righteousness: Litwa, We Are Being Transformed, 290; Blackwell, Christosis, 218; Gorman, Inhabiting, 6n16, 166–168. Regarding refashioning after the likeness of the Lord: Blackwell, Christosis, 167–168; Gorman, Participating in Christ, 218; Litwa, We Are Being Transformed, 119–151. Regarding eschatological transformation and participation in the divine δόξα: Blackwell, Christosis, 218; Gorman, Participating in Christ, 217.↩︎

41. Cranfield, Romans, 609; Johannes Behm, “καινός, καινότης, ἀνακαινόω, ἀνακαίνωσις,” in TDNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964), 453.↩︎

42. Schreiner, Romans, 629–630; Jewett and Kotansky, Romans, 733.↩︎

43. Moo, Romans, 757; cf. Schreiner, Romans, 630; Blackwell, Christosis, 160.↩︎

44. Frances Young, “Understanding Romans in Light of 2 Corinthians,” SJT 43, no. 1 (1990): 433. Young further notes that “some points of connection between Romans and the Corinthian letters are obvious, most obvious of all the ‘body’ passages in Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12” (438).↩︎

45. Wilhelm Bousset, Kyrios Christos, trans. John E. Seely (Nashville: Abingdon, 1970), 227n68.↩︎

46. Finlan, “Can We Speak of Theosis,” 75.↩︎

47. M. David Litwa, “2 Corinthians 3:18 and Its Implications for Theosis,” Journal of Theological Interpretation 2, no. 1 (2008): 117–133; Blackwell, Christosis, 183–193; Gorman, Participating in Christ, 216–221, 225–227.↩︎

48. Blackwell, Christosis, 188. Blackwell answers seven contested questions concerning the verse over the span of eleven pages; the conclusions summarized here are drawn from Christosis, 183–188.↩︎

49. Litwa, “2 Corinthians 3:18,” 133. Litwa notes that later theologians called this notion the communicatio idiomatum, the interchange of properties (129).↩︎

50. Murray J. Harris, The Second Epistle to the Corinthians: A Commentary on the Greek Text (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 316–317.↩︎

51. Gordon D. Fee, God’s Empowering Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Letters of Paul (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1994), 318.↩︎

52. Litwa, We Are Being Transformed, 220–221.↩︎

53. Gorman, Participating in Christ, 221; cf. 217–218.↩︎

54. E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1977), 522.↩︎

55. Witness Lee, “The Issue of Being Glorified by the Father with the Divine Glory,” in CWWL 1994–1997, vol. 5, 348–349.↩︎

56. Witness Lee, The Conclusion of the New Testament: Experiencing, Enjoying, and Expressing Christ, vol. 2 (Anaheim: Living Stream Ministry, 2015), 3408.↩︎

57. Lee, “Eating Christ,” 401–403.↩︎

58. Witness Lee, “The Spirit with Our Spirit,” in CWWL 1993, vol. 2, 126.↩︎

59. Lee, The Conclusion of the New Testament, vol. 3, 4373.↩︎

60. Moo, Romans, 778; cf. Cranfield, Romans, 611; Jewett and Kotansky, Romans, 738.↩︎

61. Jewett and Kotansky, Romans, 739. Due to the frequency and stability of such wordplay in Hellenistic literature, Jewett and Kotansky note that “Paul’s formulation would have evoked delight and immediate comprehension in his hearers.”↩︎

62. Gorman, Inhabiting, 162.↩︎

63. Helen North, Sophrosyne: Self-Knowledge and Self-Restraint in Greek Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), 194, 211, 226–231; Jewett and Kotansky, Romans, 740–741.↩︎

64. North, Sophrosyne, 211.↩︎

65. Sang-Won Son, Corporate Elements in Pauline Anthropology: A study of selected terms, idioms, and concepts in the light of Paul’s usage and background (Roma: Editrice Pontificio Istituto Biblio, 2001), 93; cf. Moule’s contrary reading in C. F. D. Moule, The Origin of Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 72.↩︎

66. Schreiner, Romans, 636.↩︎

67. Gorman, “Romans,” 30.↩︎

68. Jewett and Kotansky, Romans, 745: The shift from πνευματικά to χαρίσματα may indicate Paul’s move away from ecstatic manifestations toward “the sober expressions of congregational leadership mentioned in Romans.”↩︎

69. Moo, Romans, 783.↩︎

70. Witness Lee, “The Move of God in Man,” in CWWL 1993, vol. 1, 484.↩︎

71. Witness Lee, Life-Study of First Corinthians (Anaheim: Living Stream Ministry, 1984), 520.↩︎

72. Witness Lee, “One Body, One Spirit, and One New Man,” in CWWL 1977, vol. 3, 295–301.↩︎

73. Lee, Life-Study of First Corinthians, 555–556.↩︎

74. Witness Lee, “The Organic Building Up of the Church as the Body of Christ to Be the Organism of the Processed and Dispensing Triune God,” in CWWL 1989, vol. 4, 286.↩︎

75. Witness Lee, “The Organic Union in God’s Relationship with Man,” in CWWL 1993, vol. 2, 432.↩︎

76. Lee, The Conclusion of the New Testament, vol. 3, 4362.↩︎

77. Émile Mersch, The Theology of the Mystical Body, trans. by Cyril Vollert (B. Herder Book Co., 1951); John D. Zizuoulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007); John D. Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church (London: T&T Clark, 2006).↩︎

78. Witness Lee, “Crucial Truths in the Holy Scriptures, Volume 6,” in CWWL 1932–1949, vol. 4, 401–442. On the reception of all genuine believers irrespective of denominational background, see Witness Lee, “Experiencing Christ as the Spirit for the Recovery of the Church as the Body of Christ and the House of God,” in CWWL 1971, vol. 3, 308.↩︎

79. Moo, Romans, 793–794.↩︎

80. Cranfield, Romans, 629.↩︎

81. Cranfield notes that the φιλοστοργεῖν word group, “represented only here in the NT, was in quite frequent use both in earlier and in contemporary Greek, to denote tender affection, particularly family affection” (Romans, 632).↩︎

82. Dunn, Romans 9–16, 741; Colin G. Kruse, Paul’s Letter to the Romans, ed. D. A. Carson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 476.↩︎

83. Gorman, Romans, 249.↩︎

84. Gorman, “Romans,” 30–31.↩︎

85. Per Gorman, “as those who are prayerful, hopeful, and patient in suffering (12:12), they renarrate the pattern of Jesus, who suffered prior to glorification” (“Romans,” 31); cf. Gorman, Inhabiting, 162.↩︎

86. Moo, Romans, 800–801; Jewett and Kotansky, Romans, 768; Schreiner, Romans, 649.↩︎

87. Numerous commentators note the relation between Rom 12:16 and Phil 2:1–5: Gorman, Romans, 250; Schreiner, Romans, 649; Moo, Romans, 801.↩︎

88. Reardon, “The Corporate Σῶμα,” 182.↩︎

89. Longenecker, Romans, 932; Reardon, “The Corporate Σῶμα,” 183.↩︎

90. Gorman, “Romans,” 31.↩︎

91. Witness Lee, “Crucial Truths in the Holy Scriptures, Volume 6,” in CWWL 1932–1949, vol. 4, 413.↩︎

92. Witness Lee, “Crystallization-Study of the Epistle to the Romans,” in CWWL 1994–1997, vol. 1, 359.↩︎

93. Lee, “Eating Christ,” 401–403. Lee’s notion of eating and drinking the Lord references exercising the human spirit to engage in Christian practices such as praying the words of Scripture, reading and memorizing Scripture, and singing hymns.↩︎