Daily Reading, May 2

By becoming incarnate in Jesus, the Logos had enabled human beings to transcend themselves and, in a pregnant phrase of the New Testament, “to become partakers in the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4). “The Logos of God has become human,” [Athanasius] would say, “so that you might learn from a human being how a human being may become divine.” The original creation in the image of God, in which true human greatness consisted, had been brought about through the Logos; that creation would now achieve not only restoration but consummation and perfection through the same Logos: his incarnation would achieve our deification. And the whole cosmos would have its proper share in that consummation; for “the establishment of the church is a re-creation of the world,” in which “the Logos has created a multitude of starts,” a new heaven and a new earth.

From Jesus Through the Centuries by Jaroslav Pelikan (Harper & Row, 1985).