While reading a very interesting volume on theosis within Roman Catholicism, I encountered the following comments from Scott Hahn on how salvation is much more than simply being forgiven from sins and from death—it is truly much more. As Hahn writes:
But what do we mean when we speak of salvation? Ask a hundred Christians today, and you will hear many answers, but most come down to this: Jesus saves us from sin and death. Rescue from sin and death is indeed a wonderful thing—but the salvation won for us by Jesus Christ is incomparably greater . . .Salvation is much more than most people believe and hope it could be. For we are not merely saved from sin; we are saved for sonship, to be divinely adopted sons and daughters of God. Forgiveness is the precondition for God’s greater gift, the gift that will last beyond your death: the gift of divine life.
God adopts us as children, so that we can share the life of the eternal Son, Jesus Christ. He can only adopt us, however, when we have come to share his nature. Adoption and fatherhood imply a certain commonality, a degree of sameness. I can be a father to any living human being by means of adoption; but I cannot adopt my pets, no matter how much affection I feel toward them. Adoption requires a sharing of life; and so God gives us by grace what the eternal Son possesses from all eternity. God gives us a created share of his uncreated nature. When we are saved, we participate in Jesus’ divinity. We become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4). (Scott Hahn, “Foreword,” in Called to be the Children of God: The Catholic Theology of Human Deification, eds. David Meconi and Carl E. Olson [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2016], 7-8)
Hahn has an excellent book that addresses these and other issues which I highly recommend:
