God - the Destiny of Man

One of the themes that we seem to forget in the Anglican Church is
"the Son of God was made man so that man might become the son of God." As St Iranaeus of Lyons once said against heretics. The idea of Theosis seems almost blasphemous in its idea, but the fact is that our destiny in our existence is to pertain to our Creator. St Maximus the Confessor says, "Having become God by deification, human beings would have been able to contemplate, with God Himself, the works of God. They would have received knowledge of them in God."

Our receipt of the Body and Blood of Christ at Mass builds our substance into Him. We are not gods because of ourselves - we become God because that's the gift He has given us. The trouble is that Masses in the Anglican Communion have tended to be so congregation-centred that our deification is seen as something blasphemous. This is only a result of the demystification and iconoclasm begun in the Enlightenment and continued apace in the 20th and now early 21st centuries. Time for reversus apsidem, methinks.

Fr. Hart has written an excellent article on this on the Anglican Continuum blog.