Augustine and participation: Some reflections on his exegesis of Romans

[Extract] In the second half of the twentieth century, critical questions have arisen from a couple of different quarters about whether the Western Christian traditions, and especially Protestantism, have marginalized or ignored a valuable theological notion, namely, participation, which aims to express the union of believers and God. Eastern Orthodox theologians such as Vladimir Lossky press this issue in polemical engagements with the West, charging the West with neglecting the teaching of the Eastern Fathers, who portray Christ’s work as bearing its ultimate fruit in the believer’s participation in God, or the deification of the human person.1 This critique presupposes that there is a fairly stark contrast between the theological positions of the Eastern and Western Fathers, and that subsequent Western traditions have followed sources that offer relatively meager resources for depicting the depth of the transformation that is brought about in human beings. From the point of view of some in the East, Western soteriologies have done this by limiting themselves to notions such as justification, which falls short of communicating the richness of an intimate union.