Called to Be the Children of God: The Catholic Theology of Human Deification

This book gathers fourteen Catholic scholars to present, examine, and explain the often misunderstood process of "deification". The fifteen chapters show what becoming God meant for the early Church, for St. Thomas Aquinas and the greatest Dominicans, and for St. Francis and the early Franciscans. This book explains how this understanding of salvation played out during the Protestant Reformation and the Council of Trent. It explores the thought of the French School of Spirituality, various Thomists, John Henry Newman, John Paul II, and the Vatican Councils, and it shows where such thinking can be found today in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. No other book has gathered such an array of scholars or provided such a deep study into how humanity's divinized life in Christ has received many rich and various perspectives over the past two thousand years. This book seeks to bring readers into the central mystery of Christianity by allowing the Church's greatest thinkers and texts to speak for themselves, demonstrating how becoming Christ-like and the Body of Christ on earth, is the only ultimate purpose of the Christian faith.