The Call to Holiness is an invitation by God to gain a proper perspective on the Eastern view of salvation. The Eastern Church has a distinctive anthropological outlook which has definite implications. In the main, Eastern anthropology looks forward to the renewing of the image of God. The underlying anthropology is not necessarily more positive but, instead of operating mainly in guilt-concepts, it looks upward, so to speak, to the image of God to be fulfilled in mortal human beings. This sets the tone for the rest of our understanding of salvation.
The view of the human being in the Christian East is based upon the notion of “participation” in God.” This “natural” participation, however, is not a static givenness; rather, it is a challenge, and the human being is called to grow in divine life. Divine life is a gift, but also a task which is to be accomplished by a free human effort.
A person becomes the perfect image of God by discovering his or her likeness to God, which is the perfection of the nature common to all human beings. The Greek term homoiousios, which corresponds to likeness in Genesis 1:26, means precisely that dynamic progress and growth in divine life and implies human freedom. In Greek patristic thought there is no opposition between freedom (likeness) and grace (God’s image in human beings): the presence in man of divine qualities, of a “grace” (God’s image) which makes him fully man, “neither destroys his freedom, nor limits the necessity for him to become fully himself by his own effort: rather it secures that cooperation, or synergy between the divine will and human choice which makes possible the progress “from glory to glory” and the assimilation of man to the divine dignity for which he was created.”
I’m not sure whether this is all making more sense or not. I’m also not sure whether my readers see the real difference between Western and Eastern spirituality. The way that the Eastern Church sees humans and the way that the Western Church does is considerably different.
Think about this!