Chapter 29

Additional Christological Problems: Beatific Vision, Theosis, and Sanctification

Up to this point, we have looked at the big Christological problems that physicalism creates. We have seen how physicalism struggles with Holy Saturday, with the death and resurrection of Jesus, with His sinless life, with His permanent incarnation, and with the doctrine of the Trinity itself.¹ In this chapter, I want to bring three more doctrines into the conversation. None of them, on their own, would be quite as devastating as what we have already seen. But each one adds another crack to a foundation that is already crumbling.

The three doctrines are the beatific vision, theosis, and sanctification. They sound technical, and two of them are. But the basic idea behind all three is simple. The Christian life is not just about behavior. It is about becoming. We are made to know God, to share in His life, and to be transformed into the image of His Son. And every one of those three things — knowing God, sharing in His life, being transformed — runs into a wall when we try to explain it on physicalist terms. I will close the chapter by returning to a theme that has run through the whole book: Christ Himself is the model of what redeemed humanity looks like. If His human nature includes a soul, then ours does too.

The Beatific Vision: Can a Brain See God?

Let us begin with the beatific vision. The Latin phrase visio beatifica simply means "the blessed sight." The Christian tradition has long taught that the highest joy of the redeemed is to see God face to face — not with physical eyes, but with the eyes of the soul. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13:12: "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known." And 1 John 3:2 promises, "When he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is."²

The Catholic tradition, and a large part of the Protestant tradition, has gone further than this. They have argued that Christ's own human soul enjoyed the beatific vision from the very beginning of the Incarnation. As a man, Jesus saw the Father directly — not through faith only, as we do now, but with an immediate, intuitive knowledge that perfectly fitted His role as the Son of God in human flesh. Joshua Farris notes that figures as different as Aquinas, Calvin, Turretin, Owen, Hodge, and Edwards all agreed that this seeing of God is fundamentally an act of the soul, not of the body.³ Edwards put it especially clearly: the soul has powers by which it can apprehend spiritual realities far more directly than any bodily eye, because God is spirit and cannot be seen with physical eyes.⁴

Now what does this look like on the kryptic model that I follow? In Andrew Loke's framework, the divine attributes — including the Son's eternal knowledge of the Father — are not surrendered during the Incarnation. They are concealed at a "preconscious" level.⁵ The human consciousness of Jesus could "access" the divine knowledge when the Father willed it, but in His ordinary daily life, He grew, learned, and walked by faith like the rest of us.⁶ This is one way the beatific vision works in Christ: His human soul had a unique kind of communion with the divine that no other human soul has had during earthly life. As I argued in Chapter 17, this is what allowed Jesus to know the thoughts of His critics, to predict events, and to perform miracles — without giving up genuine human limitations in His ordinary experience.

Now here is the problem for physicalism. If a human being is nothing but a physical organism, then any "vision" of God is, at the end of the day, a particular pattern of neurons firing in the brain.⁷ The "intellectual sight" that Aquinas, Edwards, and Owen all spoke of must be reduced to a brain state. But can a brain state really constitute direct knowledge of the infinite God? When Edwards said the soul can see God "more immediately and more certainly, and more fully and gloriously, than the eye of the body" — what is he describing if there is no soul?

Some physicalists may respond that brain states can be about God, just as my brain state right now is "about" the keyboard in front of me. But this response runs into the well-known problem of intentionality, which I discussed in Chapter 4. Physical states do not intrinsically refer to anything.⁸ A pattern of sodium ions is not about the Trinity. Reducing the beatific vision to brain chemistry is like reducing a Beethoven symphony to the vibrations of the air. It misses the whole point.

A thoughtful Christian physicalist could say, "In the resurrected state, the glorified brain might do things ordinary brains cannot." Perhaps. But this answer relocates the problem rather than solving it. What about Jesus during His earthly ministry, who (according to the historic tradition) had the beatific vision in His human soul from the moment of conception? On physicalism, His infant brain would have to host the beatific vision — which strains credibility past the breaking point. The simpler explanation is the traditional one: His human soul beheld the Father.

Theosis: Can a Physical Organism Share the Divine Nature?

The second doctrine is theosis, or deification. This sounds like a foreign word in Protestant ears, but it is solidly biblical. The classic text is 2 Peter 1:4: "He has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature." That phrase "partakers of the divine nature" — theias koinōnoi physeōs (θείας κοινωνοὶ φύσεως) in Greek — has captured the Christian imagination for two thousand years.

Eastern Orthodox theology has made theosis the heart of its soteriology. But it would be a mistake to think this doctrine is only Eastern. Even Reformed and evangelical theologians have a place for it, especially when they describe the final goal of the redeemed.⁹ Athanasius gave us the most famous summary: "God became man so that man might become God." He was not saying we become God by nature. He was saying that, through the Incarnation, human beings can be lifted up to a real participation in the divine life — without ever ceasing to be creatures.

The Incarnation is the engine of theosis. The Son took our nature so that, by union with Him, we could share His. As Maximus the Confessor explained, in the Incarnation the divine and human natures are united in one Person, and the result is a real "communication of properties" — Christ's humanity is filled with divine glory, and through Him, redeemed humanity participates in the divine life.¹⁰ This is what gives theosis its grounding. We are not partakers of the divine nature on our own. We are partakers because we are joined to the One who is, by nature, both God and man.

Now ask the question: what exactly is being deified on a physicalist account? A purely physical organism? Atoms and molecules? Can carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen "participate in the divine nature"? When Peter says we will share in the divine nature, surely he is not saying that our cellular tissue is being lifted up into communion with God in any direct way. He is talking about something deeper — something inward, something that bears the image of God and can be drawn into ever-closer fellowship with Him.

On the dualist view, the answer is straightforward. The soul — the immaterial dimension of the person — is the primary locus of theosis. The soul is what God breathes life into (Gen. 2:7); the soul is what bears the image; the soul is what survives death (2 Cor. 5:1–8); and the soul is what is being progressively transformed into the likeness of Christ. The body, in the resurrection, will share in this glorification — but it shares in it because the soul, now reunited with the body, communicates the new life to the whole person.¹¹

On the physicalist account, none of this has a clear home. There is no inner person to lift up. There are only physical processes. And while physicalists often want to talk about "spiritual" transformation, the language begins to sound metaphorical at best — and empty at worst. R. Scott Smith makes this point well in Christian Physicalism?: physicalism reduces all our talk of the inner life to language about the brain, and it is hard to see what is left of theosis once that reduction is complete.¹²

Sanctification: More Than Neural Rewiring

The third doctrine — sanctification — is the most practical of the three. Every Christian who has prayed, "Make me more like Jesus," is asking for sanctification. It is the long, slow process by which the Holy Spirit changes us into the image of Christ. And the New Testament describes this process in language that is unmistakably inward.

The most striking text is 2 Corinthians 4:16: "So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day." Paul draws a clear contrast between two parts of who we are. The "outer self" (ho exō hēmōn anthrōpos, ὁ ἔξω ἡμῶν ἄνθρωπος) — the body — is breaking down. The "inner self" (ho esō hēmōn anthrōpos, ὁ ἔσω ἡμῶν ἄνθρωπος) — the soul — is being made new. These are not two ways of looking at the same thing. They are two real dimensions of the human person, and they are moving in opposite directions during this life. One is decaying. The other is growing.

Romans 8:16 is similar: "The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God." Notice the language. The Holy Spirit communicates with our spirit. There are two spirits in view here — the Spirit of God and the human spirit — and they meet at a level deeper than the body. This is sanctification language. The Spirit speaks to the spirit; the inner person is renewed; the heart is softened; the mind is renewed (Rom. 12:2). Pastors and ordinary believers have always read this naturally as a description of the soul. And I think they have read it rightly.

Now suppose physicalism is true. Then sanctification can only be the rewiring of neural pathways. Becoming more patient is just developing better synaptic connections in the prefrontal cortex. Loving your enemy is just a particular firing pattern in the amygdala. Growing in love for God is just neurochemistry. R. Scott Smith — writing as a Christian philosopher who takes the New Testament seriously — argues that this picture cannot do justice to the biblical vision of being changed into Christ's likeness.¹³ Sanctification, on the historic Christian view, involves real intentional states — beliefs, desires, intentions, virtues — and these states have content. They are about things. They aim at God. On physicalism, intentionality dissolves, and with it dissolves any meaningful account of what it is to grow in love for the Lord.¹⁴

Let me put this in plain terms. If sanctification is just neural rewiring, then it is, in principle, no different from learning a new language or breaking a bad habit. It is a matter of patterns and repetition. But Scripture does not describe sanctification this way. Scripture describes it as the Spirit dwelling in us, the heart being made new, the mind being renewed, the inner man being strengthened. This is not the language of behavioral conditioning. It is the language of an immaterial inner life being transformed by an immaterial Spirit. Take away the immaterial dimension, and the whole doctrine begins to flatten out.

Christ as the Paradigm of Sanctified Humanity

This brings us to the climax of the chapter. There is one more reason all three of these problems matter. The Christian doctrine of the new humanity is grounded in Christ. He is, as Paul says in Romans 8:29, "the firstborn among many brothers" — and our destiny is to be "conformed to the image of his Son." Christ's glorified human nature is the template for what our redeemed humanity will look like.¹⁵

This is the heart of what Michael Wilkinson calls a Chalcedonian anthropology. His argument, which I have referenced throughout this book, is groundbreaking: instead of starting with our own self-understanding and applying it to Christ, we should start with Christ — the man par excellence — and let His person-nature constitution govern how we understand ours.¹⁶ Christ's human nature, as defined by the ecumenical councils, consists of a "rational soul and a body."¹⁷ If His human nature is body-and-soul, and if our humanity is patterned on His, then our humanity is body-and-soul too. This is not a bold inference. It is a straightforward implication.

I find this argument remarkably persuasive. We have already seen, in Chapter 12, that the early church condemned Apollinarius precisely for denying that Christ has a human soul. Gregory of Nazianzus's principle — "what is not assumed is not healed" — means that whatever Christ did not take up cannot be saved. If He did not assume a human soul, the soul cannot be saved. But the New Testament is full of language about the salvation of the soul (1 Peter 1:9; James 1:21). The most natural reading is that Christ assumed a soul precisely so He could save ours.

Wilkinson presses this further. Christ accomplished His work as a true human being for other true human beings. He came to identify with sinners, to atone for them, to redeem them, and to bring them to glory.¹⁸ All of this works only if His human being is the kind of thing that ours is. As Hebrews 2:14–17 says, the Son took on flesh and blood to be made "like his brothers in every respect." And the church has consistently understood "every respect" to include both body and rational soul. As Cyril of Alexandria put it, the Word united Himself "to flesh enlivened by a rational soul, and so became man."¹⁹

So here is the puzzle for Christian physicalism. The councils define Christ's human nature as body and rational soul. The whole tradition has read this as a normative definition of what human nature is. And the New Testament tells us that we will be conformed to Christ's image, becoming partakers of the divine nature, growing in our inner self, and one day seeing God face to face. If we deny that Christ has a human soul — or that we have one — then which of those promises remain intact? On the dualist view, all of them work. On the physicalist view, every one of them needs to be re-described in language Scripture itself does not use.

A Brief Counterargument and Response

Let me try to state the strongest physicalist response. The Christian physicalist could say: "You are loading the dictionary against me. The biblical writers used dualistic-sounding language because that was the cultural vocabulary available. But the realities they were pointing to — inner renewal, growing in Christ, seeing God — can be redescribed in physical terms. The whole-person view actually preserves the biblical emphasis on the unity of the human being against an overly Greek dualism."

I take this seriously. There are real worries about hyper-Cartesian dualisms that treat the soul as a ghost in a machine. John Cooper's Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting is one of the best treatments of how to avoid those errors. He defends a "holistic dualism" — body and soul are deeply integrated in this life, deeply distinguishable in death and afterward.²⁰ I am not arguing for a body-hating spiritualism. I am arguing for the same modest dualism that the Bible itself assumes — the kind that lets Paul say "absent from the body, present with the Lord" (2 Cor. 5:8) without flinching.

And the redescription strategy has limits. When 2 Corinthians 4:16 contrasts the outer self that is wasting with the inner self that is being renewed, the text is not just using cultural shorthand. It is making an ontological distinction. The outer is dying; the inner is growing. If both "selves" are really just one physical organism, the contrast collapses. Whatever Paul is trying to say falls apart.

Conclusion: Three More Reasons to Believe in the Soul

I want to bring this chapter back to the larger argument of the book. We have seen that physicalism creates serious trouble for the doctrine of the Incarnation at every major point — Holy Saturday, the resurrection, the permanent ascension, the sinless life, and now the beatific vision, theosis, and sanctification. None of these difficulties is, by itself, a knockout blow. But they accumulate. Each one is a place where the physicalist must redescribe traditional doctrine in non-traditional language. Each one is a place where the dualist account fits naturally and the physicalist account requires philosophical contortion.

Here is what strikes me most. These three doctrines — beatific vision, theosis, sanctification — are precisely the doctrines that point to our highest end. They describe what God made us for. We were made to see Him, to share His life, and to be remade in His Son's image. If the immaterial soul is removed from the picture, all three of these flatten into something less than what Scripture promises. Seeing God becomes a brain state. Sharing in the divine nature becomes a metaphor without a referent. Sanctification becomes a slow chemical change.

I do not believe the gospel is asking us to settle for that. I believe Scripture and the historic faith are pointing us to something far richer: real inner transformation by a real Spirit, real participation in the divine life, real eternal beholding of the face of God. And all of this — every bit of it — depends on there being something in us that can be transformed, be a partaker, and be a beholder. That something is what the Bible and the church have always called the soul.

And what is true of us must first be true of Christ. He is our Head, our Forerunner, our pattern. If His human nature includes a body and a rational soul, ours does too. If His soul saw the Father, our souls will one day see the Father. If His soul was filled with the divine glory, ours will one day be filled with the divine glory. The physicalist must deny that Christ has a human soul (or stretch the meaning of "soul" until it breaks). The dualist simply confesses what the church has always confessed. The Word became flesh, and the flesh He took included a soul — for ours, for our salvation, and for our glory.