Catherine Mowry LaCugna embraces a robust, but deeply relational and trinitarian, account of deification: to be saved is to be drawn into and to “live God’s life with one another,” participating in the triune communion of love revealed in the economy.[1][2][3][4]
## Basic thesis
– Her programmatic claim in *God for Us* is that “**the life of God—precisely because God is triune—does not belong to God alone**,” so God’s own trinitarian life is inherently self‑communicative and other‑oriented.[3]
– Because there is no hidden God behind the God revealed in Christ and the Spirit, God’s being is encountered as God’s saving self‑communication; this is the ground for humans being “made sharers in the very life of God, partakers of divinity as they are transformed and perfected by the Spirit of God.”[2][4][1]
## Theosis as relational participation, not essence‑sharing
– LaCugna rejects speculative accounts of an “immanent” Trinity cut off from history and instead insists that “God’s way of being in relationship with us is God’s personhood… God for us is who God is as God.”[2]
– On that basis, divinization means **participation in God’s relational life and love**, not access to an abstract divine substance: what is shared is communion, personhood‑in‑relation, and agapic life.[5][1][2]
## Eschatological fulfillment of personhood
– She links theosis to the fulfillment of human personhood: “The concept of person in relationship implies dynamism, change and growth. **The concept of divinization sets our sights on eschatological fulfillment of our personhood.**”[2]
– Here deification names the Spirit’s work of perfecting us for “return to the Father” in Christ, so that our being‑in‑relation mirrors the perichoretic life of the Trinity.[3][2]
## Practical and ecclesial orientation
– LaCugna repeatedly insists that Trinitarian theology is “an eminently practical teaching,” and speaks of Christian existence as “**living God’s life with one another**,” which is effectively her pastoral idiom for theosis.[6][7][1]
– Participation in the divine life has concrete ethical and ecclesial shape: a community of equality, mutuality, reciprocity, and shared praise that images the “shared rule of equal persons in communion” that is God’s own life.[7][8][3]
In short, LaCugna affirms deification strongly, but recasts it as relational, trinitarian participation in God’s self‑giving life—“partakers of divinity” as we are drawn by the Spirit into the Son’s life with the Father—rather than as ascent into a metaphysical realm behind the economic Trinity.[4][1][3][2]
Sources
[1] Catherine LaCugna – Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
[2] The Dimensions of God’s Life – Religion Online https://www.religion-online.
[3] [PDF] God For Us – -ORCA – Cardiff University https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/
[4] Participating in the Life of the Triune God: Towards a Trinitarian … https://imtglobal.org/
[5] Trinity: Loving relationship defines God’s very being https://www.ncronline.org/
[6] The “Practical” Trinity – Catherine Mowry LaCugna https://theologyandchurch.com/
[7] God for Us – Uniting Church Australia https://uniting.church/god-
[8] 7 Inspiring Women: Catherine Mowry LaCugna – Graham Joseph Hill https://grahamjosephhill.com/
[9] Catherine Mowry LaCugna’s feminist theology of the Trinity inspired … https://www.americamagazine.
[10] [PDF] CATHERINE MOWRY LaCUGNA’S CONTRIBUTION TO … https://theologicalstudies.
[11] Remembering the theologian Catherine Mowry LaCugna. Her book … https://www.facebook.com/
[12] Book God For Us by Catherine LaCugna https://www.stevethomason.net/
[13] Collegeville Institute Greats: Catherine Mowry LaCugna https://collegevilleinstitute.
[14] Ten Terrific Tomes (7) God For Us: the Trinity and Christian Life … https://www.tobefrank.com.au/
[15] Deification in Augustine: Plotinian or Trinitarian? – Academia.edu https://www.academia.edu/
