THE SANCTIFICATION DIVERGENCE

The progressive insight into the union with God in Christ, experienced a detour arising from the Augustinian formulation of the doctrine of original sin based on a mistranslation of Romans 5:12 from Greek into Latin. From there, especially the Latinized western Christianity which gave birth to Protestantism, Evangelicalism, Pentecostalism and Charismatism dived into more of how to please God by becoming more sanctified from sin. That means theosis got stagnated at catharsis. A quotation from The Wesleyan Articles of Religion reads, "We believe that sanctification is that work of the Holy Spirit by which the child of God is separated from sin unto God and is enabled to love God with all the heart and to walk in all His holy commandments blameless. Sanctification is initiated at the moment of justification and regeneration. From that moment there is a gradual or progressive sanctification as the believer walks with God and daily grows in grace and in a more perfect obedience to God …" This level of understanding also hardly gives certainty to our union in God through Jesus Christ. Therefore, though this sanctification divergence is an advancement of catharsis of a sort, there is more ahead of the body of Christ on our path of Ephesians 4:13, hence the progression into the divinity of the sons of God.