Is “theosis” Biblical? What does it mean to become more like Christ? Is there anything to genetic determinism? Are our bodies a part of us that is transformed through life in Christ?

Picture this: you and your new Hillsdale friends whom you met in your first college classes are hanging out in the TV room of the student union. Suddenly, your mixed group of Baptists, Presbyterians, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Lutherans, Methodists, and non-denominational Christians gets on the subject of theology. Before you know it, one of your friends is standing before you, passionately defending predestination. A second, sitting rigidly upright on one of the couches, is quick to defend free will with logical syllogisms. Several of the others chime in sporadically on one side or the other. One tries desperately to change the subject, while another mutters something to you about how this is why he never gets involved in theological debates in groups.

Many of us can not only picture this scene but also personally relate to it. Like many of my classmates, as a freshman at Hillsdale I became intimately acquainted with our sometimes amazing, sometimes amazingly frustrating proclivity to engage in theological debates along denominational lines. Yet in the years since then, as I have made more friends whose views differ from my own, I have found myself reflecting more and more on the foundational ideas that we do predominantly agree on—some of which have thought-provoking consequences.

For example, almost all Christians agree that we are commanded to become more like Christ. We hear this command articulated in different ways in the Bible and in our sermons and homilies: Follow Christ. Imitate Christ. Imitate Paul who imitates Christ. What would Jesus do? We still manage to disagree on what the command means. Is it attending to the corporal and spiritual acts of mercy? Is it resting all on faith in the will of the Father and subordinating all to His glory? Still, though, we know we are to strive to become more like Him, at least as best as we can through our own efforts and the grace of God, whatever may be the proportion and order involved.

My Eastern Orthodox friends introduced me to a specific term articulating this concept: theosis, or, put in more familiar terms, becoming more and more like God. When I first heard this term, I recoiled at it. I know I’m a sinner. God is divine, infinitely good, and altogether perfect. How dare we think—how proud we must be!— that we could actually become like Him! Wasn’t that the original temptation and the original sin?

With time, I’ve come to a different perspective on the idea of theosis. To fully explain, I must change topics and share an incident that happened at a hairdresser’s about ten years ago.

My family has a friend back home who runs her own small salon to whom we’ve long gone for haircuts. Every few months, my father and brother and I would all go and my mother would meet us there on her way home from work. Usually, when she walked in, I would look up to greet her from behind the miniature mountain of schoolwork that I had brought with me in an effort to not waste any time (yes, I was that kid even before high school). One time, however, when I was either lacking or avoiding schoolwork, a magazine on the side table caught my attention. One of its feature articles presented a recent study that analyzed genetic similarities among a sample of incarcerated criminals.

Since I was already interested in law and the justice system, I picked it up. Long story short, the authors reported on a study that analyzed families with a high rate of violent crime—murder, rape, assault, etc.—and then a sample size of convicted criminals in general. The researchers in the study claimed to have found specific genes that predispose people to be violent criminals or to have tendencies toward criminal aggression. At the time, I was curious, but also skeptical. However, I have since learned of other support for the idea—in 2014, the BBC reported on a similar study out of Finland, and even before that, in 2009, some Italian courts actually reduced prison sentences based on defendants’ successful arguments of genetic predisposition to violent behavior.

Could there be something to these arguments? Is it really possible that some people can be more genetically predisposed—just by birth and nature—to courses of action including violence? How would such a possibility affect our understanding of free will and the way we hold people accountable for their actions? I don’t think that it’s the case that some people are genetically determined to be criminals, nor do I have even the slightest respect for eugenicist ideas that some groups of people are inherently genetically superior to others. Yet, I still wanted more of an explanation for this genetic phenomenon. It seemed somehow significant.

My own further understanding of the topic came when a conversation a few years later led me to the concept of epigenetics. I was passing an evening in conversation with my grandfather and his friends when the subject of genetics came up. I heard a physician in the group claim to have recently seen a study supporting the idea that being addicted to pornography can change people genetically. The comment felt significant and stuck in my mind. Eventually, I learned that what was happening in such cases was a phenomenon in the field of epigenetics, defined by the CDC as “the study of how our behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work.” In essence, this example of changes caused by pornography—and perhaps also the criminology findings—can be explained by heritable gene expression.

In the case of the pornography study, the effects on people’s brains alone seem bad enough. After all, pornography consumption hacks our brain’s mechanism for making a habit out of seemingly good experiences. The dopamine released inspires the habit as the protein DeltaFosB goes about its normal job of strengthening the neural pathways over which dopamine travels. 

In fact, most habits, even ones less compulsive and destructive than pornography or substance abuse, affect the overall chemical functioning of people’s brains. Dopamine and DeltaFosB are driving forces acting on neural plasticity. According to Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry with the Ethics & Public Policy Center, neuroplasticity is a competitive process in which some processes and parts of your brain benefit at the expense of others. (So yes, side note especially for all my fellow procrastinators out there: know that your habits change your brain. Literally.)

Yet habits do more than affect your brain chemistry: they also cause epigenetic changes. These changes in your gene expression, or how your cells read DNA sequences and create proteins, either allow the body to read a DNA sequence or hinder the body from reading it, and in turn affect overall health. Think about it as “turning genes on and off.” Such changes can happen with three main mechanisms. First, DNA methylation can add a chemical group to the DNA strand to turn a gene “off,” while its opposite, demethylation, removes the extra chemical group to turn it back “on.” Changes in histones (a type of cellular protein around which DNA can be wrapped) can also determine whether the DNA can be read. Third, changes in non-coding RNA can block or unblock its readability. There are many different triggers for these changes, but to further explain our example of addictive behavior, a 2020 study on cocaine found that the dopamine involved in the addictive behavior can produce alterations through the second mechanism.

Less dramatic factors and experiences also affect our epigenetics, including diet, exercise, and environment. A study in the Philippines reported by Smithsonian Magazine found that childhood environments can affect the level of inflammation-related proteins in the blood of adults via epigenetic changes. Another study, this time focused on children who had been conceived and born during the Dutch Hunger Winter of 1944, found that the children of women who had only been able to eat 400-800 calories a day during their pregnancies had higher rates of obesity and cardiovascular disease from prenatal epigenetic changes. Modern medicine even targets epigenetics to treat certain genetic diseases.

In short, our environment, our actions, and our habits affect us down to the core of our physical being. When we make choices, they change not only our character or spiritual state but also what we physically are. Our choices affect the way our unique set of DNA—our human blueprint—is expressed in every cell of our bodies. It changes what version of the potential that lies within our genes we end up being. Those choices and their results may be more obvious than you’d think, affecting your appearance, your health, and even your proclivities.

Additionally, if our experiences and every choice we make are that significant to us, we should realize that how we treat others and alter their environments likely affects them too. Further, since epigenetic changes are heritable, we should note that our choices are a legacy we may pass on to our children not just by what we teach them but even on a genetic level.

 All these ideas about the human body, its changeability, and even its relevance to others bring me back to the idea of theosis. Can we actually become more like God?

I have often seen the tendency to think of spirituality and goodness—and even our vocation to follow Christ—as realities that are limited to the soul and, to a lesser extent, the mind. But to me that’s far too dismissive of the human body. As Christians, we are not Gnostics who believe the material part of our human nature is evil. After all, we have the wonder of the Incarnation. God took on human nature (and a human body); elevated it through uniting it with His divinity; and, in His human body, suffered death in order to destroy death. Jesus, being God, is perfect, in Himself and in all His choices, and He had a human body too. Because His divine nature and human nature were united in His single Person, His human body had to be in perfect harmony with His divine nature. When we make the choices that He made or would have made or has commanded us to make, I think that in some way, since our choices cause epigenetic changes, we change ourselves a little at a time to be—even on a physical level—more like Him. 

Of course, we are genetically different. I consider variety to be a wonderful hallmark of God’s creation. Yet, in our humanity and in our Lord’s humanity we have much in common, and this epigenetic mechanism for transformation is part of all of us.

Even if epigenetically approaching Jesus sounds like a stretch, good choices are still causing changes, though perhaps subtle, in our physical matter, conforming us to the versions of ourselves that not only honor and serve Him best but also are themselves living testaments to our following Him. Isn’t that what we’re called to do?

Over the course of its development in these past several months, this pondering has led me to realize just how interconnected we are. We are interconnected personally, soul and body. We are interconnected communally to each other and to future generations. I see in epigenetics and its theological implications a new way of looking at my life as a Christian. It’s a testament to our free will; it’s a sign of our responsibility for who we—and perhaps those around us—become; and it’s a marvelous proof of the goodness of both creation and God’s grace which together provide us with not only this biological mechanism but also the example and guidance to use it well.

---

Victoria Kelly is a senior majoring in Political Economy, minoring in Spanish, and hoping to head to law school.