This essay is part of an ongoing series from the Department of Philosophical Theology at Christ School of Theology. The series asks how Christian faith can speak truthfully of God’s presence in the finite, ordinary, and everyday without reducing God to one more feature of the world or removing God into a distance where presence becomes only metaphor. At stake is a basic theological question: how can God be truly present to creatures without ceasing to be the living God who is not contained by what God creates?
One of the unexpected privileges of growing older as a scholar is discovering that a question asked many years earlier was perhaps better than the answer one was then able to give. In 1993, at the American Academy of Religion meetings in St. Paul, I presented a paper on the Lutheran understanding of theosis. The paper arose within the context of the growing interest in the Finnish interpretation of Luther and its insistence that justification involves not merely the imputation of Christ’s righteousness but the real presence of Christ in faith. I recognized at the time that the historical question—whether Luther could speak of deification—could not finally be separated from a philosophical one. What must reality be like if Christ is genuinely present in the believer and the believer thereby participates in the divine life without ceasing to be a creature?
More than thirty years later, I have come to think that the question posed there was substantially correct, even though the conceptual resources available to me were not yet sufficient for answering it. The issue was never simply whether Luther used the language of deification, nor even whether the Finnish interpretation had properly reconstructed the relevant texts. The more fundamental difficulty concerned the ontological structure of divine presence. If the believer participates in the divine essence itself, the distinction between Creator and creature appears endangered. If, on the other hand, participation is restricted to divine effects or energies understood as something less than God’s own presence, it becomes difficult to see how the resulting account constitutes genuine deification. The problem is to affirm a divine presence strong enough to transform the believer without construing that presence in such a way that the believer becomes an instance or portion of deity.
Said of and Present in
The distinction that first allowed me to formulate the problem came from Aristotle’s Categories. Aristotle distinguishes between what is “said of” a subject and what is “present in” a subject. When human being is said of Socrates, Socrates is identified as an instance of humanity. The name and definition of the universal apply to the particular: Socrates is a human being, and what it is to be human applies to him. When whiteness is present in Socrates, however, the relation is different. Socrates is not an instance of whiteness in the same sense in which he is an instance of humanity. Whiteness inheres in him as a property or accident inheres in a substance.
This distinction has immediate theological importance. If God were “said of” the believer in the Aristotelian sense, then the believer would fall under divinity as Socrates falls under humanity. The believer would become a specimen of God, a token of the divine type. Whatever theosis means, it cannot mean this without surrendering the distinction between Creator and creature. The believer does not become a finite instance of a universal deity, nor does salvation elevate the creature into membership within the divine species.
The biblical language of indwelling points instead toward the “present in” relation. Paul does not ordinarily say that the believer becomes an instance of divinity. He says that Christ lives in the believer, that the Spirit dwells in us, and that those who are in Christ have become new creations. The governing structure is not classification but presence. God is not said of the believer as humanity is said of Socrates, bur rather God is present in the believer as that which gives the believer a new life. This is why the language of indwelling is theologically more basic than the language of participation whenever participation is construed as a particular’s falling under a universal.
Yet the analogy with Aristotelian inherence produces its own difficulty. An ordinary accident depends upon the substance in which it inheres. Socrates’ particular whiteness is present in Socrates and cannot continue to exist once Socrates no longer exists. The substance is the locus of the accident, but it is also the ontological ground upon which the accident depends. God’s presence in the believer cannot possess this structure. God is genuinely present in the believer, but God does not depend upon the believer for being. Indeed, the dependence runs in precisely the opposite direction: the believer depends upon the divine presence for the believer’s new mode of existence.
The Inversion of Inherence
This is what I have come to call the inherence inversion problem. The theological case preserves the location characteristic of inherence while reversing its ordinary direction of dependence. God’s presence is located in the believer, but it is not grounded in the believer. Moreover, the believer does not possess God in the way Socrates possesses his whiteness. Divine presence cannot become one more property belonging naturally to a human substance, something accumulated, controlled, or held as the believer’s own. The believer is the locus of the presence but not its owner and certainly not its source.
I remember speaking about this during a short presentation at the International Luther Congress in Minneapolis in August of 1993. I told the room that this was a problem, and that we were dealing with a theological accident which allows the believer to be the believer that he is apart from the accident -- this is necessary, I said, to avoid collapsing the creature into the Creator -- while nonetheless not depending upon the believer for its being. Far from being simply an aspect of the believer, divine presence transcends the being of the believer, I averred, but cautioned that such a way of being seemed impossible on strictly philosophical grounds.
The 1996 continuation of the argument approached this problem by examining seven models of the unity between Christ and the believer. In "The Ontology of Deification" written for the Mannermaa Festschrift published the next year, I concluded that the traditional language of the Mystical Personal Union, understood through the category of perichoresis, provided the least inadequate account. The union had to be stronger than juxtaposition or moral association but weaker than merger or identity. Christ could not remain merely external to the believer, since the language of indwelling and transformation would then lose its force. Yet neither could Christ and the believer collapse into one substance or one person, since the difference between Christ and the Christian must remain.
The difficulty was that perichoresis named the required relation without explaining its metaphysical structure. To say that two realities mutually indwell one another is to identify the phenomenon in need of explanation, not yet to provide the explanation. The final footnote of the 1996 paper gestured toward the idea of the “theological accident" I had spoken about at the Luther Congress, but the concept remained undeveloped. I knew that the divine presence must somehow be genuinely present in the believer while not depending upon the believer, but I still did not yet possess a philosophical account capable of holding these affirmations together.
The conceptual resources needed for such an account emerged only gradually through work on questions that initially appeared quite different: Luther’s Christology, trope theory, divine agency, Davidson’s anomalous monism, metaphysical grounding, model-theoretic semantics, and, more recently, constitutive divine causality. Over time it became clear that these investigations shared a common structural question. How can one reality be genuinely present within another without either becoming identical with it or remaining merely externally related to it? The question arises in the union of divine and human natures in Christ, in sacramental presence, in the relation between divine and creaturely agency, and in the indwelling of Christ within the believer. These are not identical theological problems, but they exhibit a common metaphysical form.
Location and Grounding
The distinction that now seems decisive is the distinction between location and grounding. In ordinary cases of inherence, the two coincide. Socrates’ whiteness is located in Socrates and grounded in Socrates. It belongs to his particular bundle of properties and perishes with the dissolution of that bundle. But there is no obvious reason why every property-instance must be located in the same substance in which it is ontologically grounded.
During the past three decades, however, contemporary analytic metaphysics has witnessed the emergence of a sophisticated account of grounding as a primitive relation of ontological dependence. Associated especially with the work of Kit Fine, Gideon Rosen, Jonathan Schaffer, and others, grounding seeks to answer a question distinct from those of causation or logical implication. One thing may obtain because of, in virtue of, or on the basis of another without standing to it either as a causal effect or as a logical consequence. Grounding thus articulates relations of explanatory priority within reality itself. It asks not merely what caused something to occur or what propositions entail it, but what features of reality make it the case that it exists or obtains at all. Once grounding is distinguished from both causation and location, the possibility immediately arises that a property-instance might be located in one substance while remaining ontologically grounded in another. It is precisely this possibility that proves decisive for the theological problem before us.
The distinction that eventually proved decisive is the distinction between location and grounding. Accordingly, I now call a property-instance whose location and grounding belong to different substances an ectopic trope. The adjective ectopic is borrowed from medicine, where it identifies something situated outside its ordinary or proper location. Only the structural feature is intended here. An ectopic trope is present in one substance while grounded in another. Its locus and its ontological home do not coincide.
At this point a brief explanation of trope theory is necessary. Over the past half century, a number of philosophers have proposed that the basic constituents of reality are not abstract universals but particularized properties, or tropes. Rather than speaking of redness as a universal instantiated in many objects, trope theory speaks of this particular redness of this rose and that particular redness of that fire truck—numerically distinct property-instances that resemble one another without being identical. Individual substances are then understood as structured bundles of such particularized properties. Whether or not one accepts trope theory as a complete ontology is not important for the present argument. What matters is that it provides a natural way of speaking about particular instances of properties or presences without treating them either as abstract universals or as independent substances. The divine presence in the believer is not God's essence abstractly considered, nor is it another substance alongside the believer. It is, rather, a particular presence of God in this believer at this time. Trope theory supplies an ontological vocabulary for describing such particularized presences.
The divine presence in the believer can be thus understood as being genuinely located in the believer, so that the language of indwelling need not be reduced to metaphor or to the extrinsic attribution of a new status, yet the presence remains grounded in God. It exists and acts in virtue of God’s being and giving, not in virtue of the believer’s natural capacities. The believer is accordingly the site of a divine presence whose source remains beyond the believer. God’s presence conditions and transforms the believer without becoming dependent upon the believer or reducible to one of the believer’s naturally possessed properties.
This account gives philosophical content to the claim that divine-human union is stronger than mingling but weaker than merger. It is stronger than mingling because the divine presence is not merely adjacent to the believer or externally related to the believer. It is genuinely present within the believer and constitutive of the believer's new life. It is weaker than merger because the location of the presence does not become its ground. God and the believer remain ontologically distinct even within their union. The finite does not become infinite, nor is the infinite diminished through its presence in the finite. Rather, to borrow Luther's own language, the infinite is truly in, under, around, and beyond the finite. Finitum capax infiniti: the finite is capable of bearing the infinite precisely because the infinite can be genuinely present within it without ceasing to be infinite.
The formula that emerged from the earlier work can now be stated more precisely: God became a human being while remaining God so that a human being might become God while remaining human. The “while remaining” clauses are not pious qualifications attached after the fact; they identify the ontological structure that any adequate account must preserve. The believer remains human because the believer remains a distinct creaturely substance. God remains God because the divine presence continues to be grounded in God even when genuinely located within the believer.
Christ Lives in Me
Galatians 2:20 provides the paradigmatic expression of this structure: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God.” The verse neither eliminates the human subject nor leaves that subject unchanged. Paul continues to speak of the life that “I now live in the flesh,” but this continuing human life has received a new ground: “Christ lives in me.” The believer remains the subject who lives, believes, acts, suffers, and hopes; yet the believer no longer understands this life as grounded autonomously in the self.
The non ego, sed Christus is therefore not the destruction of the human “I” but the displacement of its claim to self-grounding. Christ is present in the believer in such a way that the believer’s life becomes genuinely new, while the believer continues to live as a finite human being. The divine presence is not possessed as an achievement or a stable spiritual acquisition. It is received and lived by faith. The believer is constituted by what the believer did not make and cannot own.
Whether the language of the ectopic trope will finally prove adequate remains an open question. Philosophical concepts do not master the realities to which theological language refers, and the success of a model must never be confused with the truth of the reality modeled. Yet theology cannot responsibly affirm that God is genuinely present in the believer while refusing every question about what such presence might mean. The first task of philosophical theology is not to replace confession with metaphysics, but to ask what must be true of reality if the confession itself is true.
The question that first appeared in 1993 was therefore not merely a question about the interpretation of Luther or the historical legitimacy of speaking about theosis. It was a question about the ontology of divine presence. How can the infinite be genuinely present in the finite without absorbing it? How can the finite be transformed by the infinite without becoming infinite? The distinction between location and grounding may offer the beginning of an answer. The believer becomes the home of what the believer does not own, the locus of a presence whose source infinitely exceeds its location. Perhaps this is what it means to say that Christ lives in us while we continue to live our lives in the flesh by faith in the Son of God.
