Demarcating deification and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in Reformed theology
Date
02/06/2020Author
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Abstract
The recent interest in exploring whether authoritative figures of the Reformed tradition employed a concept of theōsis or deification in their soteriology continues to grow. However, it is yet unclear how the supposed implicit Reformed doctrine of deification relates to the more explicit concept of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Moreover, many of the arguments for theōsis in the theology of John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, or T. F. Torrance seem to rely on confusing these two soteriological concepts. This makes it almost impossible to assess if it is theōsis or the indwelling of the Holy Spirit (or some interesting combination) that is being appealed to in Reformed thinking. This paper makes a step towards unpicking the knot between the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and theōsis in Reformed theology by offering five possible ways to demarcate these two concepts. It is concluded that the final ‘Mereological Demarcation’ is currently the most acceptable
Citation
Leidenhag , J 2020 , ' Demarcating deification and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in Reformed theology ' , Perichoresis , vol. 18 , no. 1 , pp. 77-98 . https://doi.org/10.2478/perc-2020-0005
Publication
Perichoresis
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2284-7308Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2020 Emanuel University of Oradea. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
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