Mark Roberts-Seymour Ofs

Final Theosis for the Western Church Mark Roberts-Seymour Ofs

A progressive exposition of Gospel Revelation has been built by successive generations of catholic and apostolic adherents. This work outlines a recurrent theme of universal (catholic) inclusion of the living and the dead, by eventuality, into the Body of Christ and by extension to God. it is established that Scriptural citations from earliest sources identify the afterlife in terms of sheol and gehenna from which Hellenistic copyists, working texts into Koine Alexandrian Greek, loosely substituted Hades for both, and in translations from Greek through the Latin inferos to English again (from 1358 to 1611AD) substituted Hell for Hades. The presence of souls in both sheol and gehenna are time limited and form circumstances of purgation or final theosis, rather than eternal separation from God (or of any annihilation of the soul). It is proposed here that the emulation of Christ must result from the adoption of Christo-centric Orthopraxy in precedence over historically mutable Orthodoxy. What actions and liturgy we practice in this life and hereafter form the 'process' of deifiication fundamental to man's nature. In this plane there are functional demands on the individual to emulate virtues such as charity, forebearance, hope, faith, generosity, care for those ill or in prison, together with a litany of other corporeal acts. After death there is no diminution of striving for unification with God, all be it in soul-terms.