Divine Filiation - Meaning and Significance

Meaning and Significance

Christians are said to be children of God because they have the same nature as God the Father. St. Peter referred to Christians as "partakers of the divine nature." (2 Peter 1:4)

Thus, the Fathers of the Church referred to the deification or divinization of the baptized. We are made gods, said St. Augustine.

St. Thomas Aquinas explained the terminology of the Fathers that Christians are "sons in the Son." He said that Christians enter the trinity through the Son, and they "have a certain participation in the filiation of the Second Person."

Thus, John Paul II said that divine filiation is "the culminating point of the mystery of our Christian life. In fact, the name 'Christian' indicates a new way of being, to be in the likeness of the Son of God. As sons in the Son, we share in salvation, which is not only the deliverance from evil, but is first of all the fullness of good: of the supreme good of the sonship of God."

Divine filiation is at the core of Christianity. "Our divine filiation is the centerpiece of the Gospel as Jesus preached it. It is the very meaning of the salvation He won for us. For he did not merely save us from our sins; He saved us for sonship."

Thus the incarnation and the redemption is for this:

The Word became flesh to make us "partakers of the divine nature": "For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God." "For the Son of God became man so that we might become God." "The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods." (CCC 460)

The Christian then is another "Christ": "We can adore the Father because he has caused us to be reborn to his life by adopting us as his children in his only Son: .. through the anointing of his Spirit who flows from the head to the members, he makes us other "Christs." "...you who have become sharers in Christ are appropriately called "Christs." (CCC 2782)

The divinization of man through sonship is real and metaphysical. It is not metaphorical, i.e. a mere comparison with a real thing that is similar. In the Christian religion, God is really Father, and does not just act like human fathers. And God really made us share in his nature, and thus we are really children. Not in the same level as the Only Begotten Son, but truly sharing in his filiation and his divinity.

And so St. John the Evangelist said with a tone of amazement, "See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are!" (1 John 3:1)