“According to the Preface for Christmas the ultimate goal of the Incarnation is man’s ‘divinization’: ‘You have brought about a wondrous exchange; your divine Word became a mortal man, and in Christ we mortal men receive your divine life.'[…]
The Christian ideal of man’s divinization does not indicate a path of self-divinization: it is in fact man’s healing from the ‘God-complex’, from the compulsion of wanting to be like God; it is man’s healing from a view of God which projects the reverse image of his own powerlessness on to a despotic, omnipotent God.
The Christmas theme of the ‘wondrous exchange’ gives the direction in which we should look for the Christian idea of how man can ‘become God’. Paul shows the way: ‘You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich’ (2 Cor 8:9). Thus the Christian path of divinization can only be a path which makes man like God, like him in his ‘self-emptying’ (Phil 2:7) which makes us rich. The goal of God’s Incarnation is man’s divinization. And as for the path to this goal, it can be none other than the path taken by the Son of God in becoming man for us.
Gregory of Nyssa once formulated the Pauline theme in this way: ‘God takes on the poverty of my flesh so that I may receive the riches of his godhead’ (PG 35, 325).”
Christoph von Schönborn, The Mystery of the Incarnation, trans. Graham Garrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), 51-52.
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