Can someone explain Catholic beleifs about theosis or divinization?

[tdefender]

Isaiah 43:10 makes it very clear that God has no gods were created before him or here after.
“You are my witnesses, says the Lord, and my servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me.”
Yes, the Lord called men gods in Psalm 82 but this word gods in this case refers to Judges ie people who are in authority over other people etc and in no way had any spiritual power.
Satan tried to convince Eve that they would become like God in Genesis 3:5 The mere fact that Satan is behind this statement and his whole moto is to lie, gives even further credance to the fact that man is not a god. Man calling himself a god is a complete heresy.

 

[Judas_Thaddeus]

I don’t know much, Peter talks about how the Saved in Heaven shall share in or be partakers
of the divine nature, I heard from my to–be priest brother something about (I can’t remember
how it was worded) that God wants us at the center of the Trinity, but of course we know that
we are not to become divine deities like God.

Speaking of which … DO NOT LISTEN TO MORMONS IN REGARDS TO THIS SUBJECT!

 

[MattofTexas]

Doctor of the Church St. Cathrine of Siena has God say in her The Dialogue:

They are like the burning coal that no one can put out once it is completely consumed in the furnace, because it has itself been turned into fire. So it is with these souls cast into the furnace of my charity, who keep nothing at all, not a bit of their own will, outside of me but are completely set afire in me. There is no one who can seize them or drag them out of my grace. They have been made one with me and I with them.

From what I’m seeing here it seems Theosis in the Western understanding suggests that the saints are so united with God that they actually live with Him, in Him, and by Him, and that He lives in them. The phrase about men becoming gods found among Orthodox and Catholic sources may refer to the gift of immortality (an attribute that was understood as belonging to the gods among the pagans…this is the explination I ran across on an Evangelical ministry to Mormons) or refer to a being that is fundamentally not God (thus separate from God) sharing in His life and nature by grace (but still retaining the human essence), making them vessels of God: or gods. There were/are no gods before or after THE LORD (cf. Isa 43:10, Mark 12:28-34), He and He alone is the First and the Last (cf. Isa 44:6 and Rev 22:13), but those who dwell in Him, those who He fills with Himself share in Him by virtue of Him. A glass bottle of wine is no so much described by the material or design of the bottle, but by what the bottle contains, though the nature of the glass itself is never lost or even changed. So it is with the saints. The saints are defied/divinized by being filled with God and their relationship with God (as adopted sons (cf. Rom 8:15)). If they are called gods it is not because of a change in their fundamental nature, but of the presence of the Living God in them, or they in the Living God, and the characteristic of sanctity in the saint:

The grace of Christ is the gratuitous gift that God makes to us of his own life, infused by the Holy Spirit into our soul to heal it of sin and to sanctify it. It is the sanctifying or deifying grace received in Baptism. It is in us the source of the work of sanctification
-CCC 1999

This is how I am coming to understand it, anyone agree/disagree?

 

[Blue_Horizon]

Humans do NOT become divine. Humans do NOT become gods. To say otherwise is heresy.

Thistle, come on settle down.
We are all well aware that Humans cannot become Divine in essence.
So you must therefore be bristling over the literal sentence construction.

This is silly. Many posters here educated in the mainstream teachings of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church have made it plain to you that even these literal formulations are quite acceptable.

Indeed not only the Ancient Eastern Church (when it was in Communion with Rome) hold to these literal formulations, but also Western Dominican and Carmelite sub-traditions as well. Aquinas has no doubt on the matter. His famous dictum on this is even quoted in the CCC:

CCC 460: The Word became flesh to make us “partakers of the divine nature”:78 “For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God.”79 “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.”80 “The only–begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods.”81 (1265, 1391, 1988)

Thistle are you by any chance from a Protestant background?
This may explain your gut-antipathy to this very Catholic theology.
Your view seems to align perfectly with this Protestant website which castigates CCC 460 for teaching a new truth not in the Bible!

 

[jimmy]

Only God is divine. While we might share in that divinity when we reach Heaven that does not make us divine/gods.
I believe David Filmer is correct. For anyone to suggest we will be God or a god is a heresy.

Then every saint is a heretic including Justin, Irenaeus, Athanasius, Gregory Nazianzen, Augustine, Cyril of Alexandria, and etc.

Contarini made an essential point in that orthodox Christianity makes an absolute distinction between God and creation, and that chasm can never be crossed. God is incomprehensible according to Christianity, because he is absolutely other than what we are.

 

[jimmy]

Partakers in the divine nature does NOT change our human nature into divine nature. We do not become divine. Only God is divine. We do NOT become God or gods.

By the same logic God didn’t become man. Your argument only works if we accept some form of Arianism, Eutychianism or docetism, because they said essentially the same thing, except about God. Any way you have it you are forced to deny either the divinity or the humanity of Christ.