Four Hundred Texts on Love (Fourth Century) 7

25.  Christ is by nature both God and man. In an ineffable and supernatural manner we participate by grace in Him as God, while He in His incomprehensible love for men shares as man in our lot for our sake by making Himself one with us with a form like ours. The saints foresaw Him mystically in the Spirit and were taught that the glory to be revealed in Christ in the future because of His virtue must be preceded by the sufferings which He would endure for the sake of virtue (cf. 1 Pet. 1:11).

I wanted to include this text because it’s another way of expressing the heart of Christian faith. God became man that man might become God, as Athanasius wrote. (Essentially God became ‘enfleshed’ so that we might become ‘en-Godded’ is the sense of his statement.) A lot of Christians talk about what it takes to be ‘saved‘ without ever realizing that they hold sometimes very different definitions of salvation. As a result, they are really talking right past each other. Ultimately, the only way I think I could summarize salvation would be as union with Christ. But as with any summary, it’s prone to be misunderstood. Among other things, I mean a union as real, as tangible, and as bodily as his union with us.