"And GOD said, let's make humankind [ADAM:  Ánthrōpos] according to our ICON ["image, likeness"] and according to Assimilation" . . . whose form shows that it was an energy term for the 72  bilingual Alexandrian rabbis that translated the LXX . . . and rather like English words ending in -ization or -ification]."

     ". . . He has given us wonderful and very great promises, so that through them you all may become partakers of the divine NATURE [by] having escaped the perishability―literally "decay"―in longing [that is inherent] in this world."

     If your mind works according to the premises of any Western version of Christianity that does not separate God's NATURE (His uncreated ENERGIES through which He relates to created beings) from his unknowable, changeless, and imparticipable ESSENCE, . . . you cannot accept the foregoingverse literally.

      If however, you can think like a writer in the first century, when Aristotle's concept of "energy" was as modish as Kirkegaard's, Honegger's, and Barth's slogans were fifty years ago―so fashionable in fact that the Apostle Paul used energy terms 26 times as well as nouns derived from energizing verbs that are more or less equivalent to English words ending in the formatives -ization and-ification―you will see a connection between the items in the rows and columns of the following, . . . at least if you have a systematic mind that is able to connect the dots.      Two points merit comment.  First, While energy was a very fashionable term in the Apostle Paul's day, the Hebrew Bible speaks rather of the two purest forms of energy―light and fire. The first formed being was light (Gen. 1:3), i.e. the energy from which everything else came into being.  Light is creative; fire is cleansing.  Second, a person cannot be guilty for Adam's or anyone else's sin unprovoked and unwilled by ourselves; but we can be and are  born into the STATE of deprivation (of the divine uncreated Energies of Grace) that resulted from Adam's disobedience, a state that all infants―guiltless, to be sure―are born into.  THE TABLE SHOWS THAT THE SALVATION SPOKEN OF IN 2 PETER 1:4 IS THE RESTORATION OF THE LOSS OF THE ASSIMILATION TO GOD BY EVE AND ADAM, i.e. ASSIMILATION TO/BY THE DIVINE ENERGIES OF GRACE.  If you connect the dots, they go together the way -x and +x match each other in reverse.

[The connection cannot be made by Western Christians because of their having
always rejected the distinction between God's imparticipable Essence and His Energies (Nature),something that has always required a non-literal interpretation of 2 Pet. 1:4--covenantalunity in the case of
Protestants, a conceptual unity for the Thomist RCs.]   

     These relationships between a changeless essence shared by all members of a species and the energies through which they related to other beings. are no problem in traditional Orthodox Christianity . . . but, as is being suggested . . . are insurmountable in any of the Western paradigms, all deviating radically from the original, conservative, Greek-language paradigm.

RELIGION:  WORSHIP, i.e. through a GIFT ("sacrifice") to God of the most
perfect part of Creation, in acknowledgment of His creation of all that exists
MORALITY:  Human-oriented help and human behavior

The confusion of
a perfect GIFT to God (Christ's Body and Blood)―WORSHIP,
with

gifts to human worshipers―SERMONS and HELPS
of various kinds ≈ MORALITY

results fromm failing to realize that, while religion (worship) and
human moral behavior often go together, they don't have
to go together and not seldom do not go together, not to
speak of their going together with the humanward benefits
overshadowing the Godward priority of WORSHIP*

―――――――――
     A technical observation is that a state, condition, or thing belongs to ontic reality.  The term in modal logic for moral obligation is deontic (from a Greek word for "required").  The ontic state that resulted from the first sin is hamartia in Greek; sin itself, hamártēma is deontic.  The plural of hamartía does not mean "sins" but "kinds of deprivations of uncreated Energy."  (Cf. the plural of sugar or salt.)

    *The matter under discussion is a separate issue from the traditional (historically conservative emphasizing of the GIFT that one gives TO God (worship, the sacrificial GIFT of Jesus's Body and Blood) to acknowledge the Creator's ownership of all that exists

VS.

an overwhelming emphasis on the humanward side--what God gives to His worshipers, what they receive FROM Him―SALVATION―and how His worshipers react to that in moral behavior (the deontic side) and in missionizing, etc.―which are of course very important matters.   It should not be forgotten that Jesus effectively replaced emphasis on the Ten Commandments of the Old Law with the Two New Commandments and the Beatitudes.

     Let's now connect the dots of what has been said:

CONNECTING SOME ESSENTIAL DOTS

     And essence and a nature (the energies of the essence through which it relates to other beings) are different. 
     God’s Essence is unapproachable in I Tim. 6:16.
     The Old Testament that the Apostles used and quoted from was the LXX the Greek OT, translated by 72 rabbis over 200 years before Christ,  known through the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls to be older than the oldest existing Hebrew text.  Cf. Gen. 1:26:  A human being was made “according to the Icon (image, likeness) of God [that is, human essence, what all humans share] AND according to Assimilation” [whose Greek form, ending in -sis, shows it to be an energization like Engl. -ization).  The Assimilation is a forfeitable part of human nature that can get/got lost.
     Incidentally, the purest form of energy is Light (the first thing created); fire is a purifying and hardening form of energy.  Grace is not energy for Catholics or Protestants (who say salvation is “forensic” or “juridical”—virtual righteousness, not ontic holiness at all).  Light was the first thing created in the Bible narrative.
     The result of sin (hamártēma) was hamartía, which all Western mistranslate as “sin.”  But hamartía is an ontic condition RESULTING FROM sin, not an ontic activity (volitional, what logicians call deontic). The state is inheritable, the sin is of course not; both Testaments say the children don’t inherit the sins of the fathers. 
     A problem is found in the way all Western translations mistranslate the ontic state of hamartía as “sin”—e.g. the verse(s) in John that say Jesus came to take away the hamartía of the cosmos, the hamartía being what newborns are born into; they are not sinful or guilty of anyone’s sin.  Note that, just as the plural of sugar is sugars (meaning different kinds of sugar), the plural of hamartía means different kinds hamartía, different ways of getting into that state.
     The West has always rejected the difference between essence and energies (nature), at least, in the Trinity.  Pope Honorius I was excommunciated by the sixth or seventh Ecumenical Synod for saying that Jesus has only one energy—not both a divine and a human energy.
      Once the uncreated Energies (of Grace, God’s Life in Eastern thinking) are lost, how does the state of hamartía get reversed?  2 Pet. 1:4 says by partaking of the divine Nature (not the imparticipable Essence, which is aprósiton Light, “unapproachable” Light in 1 Tim. 6:16.  The verse cannot be accepted literally in the West.  The Latins say unity with God is a unity of human and God’s idea; Protestants of course resort to a legal—covenantal unity.  The Orthodox say that if you share Christ’s Life, you are his member literally.  What he did you did.  When you offer His Body and Blood, He in you, His member, offers it.
     All conservative religions say that worship is this:  offering a perfect part of creation to the God as an acknowledgment of His ownership of all.  That is what the Crucifixion on the Altar of the Life-giving Cross was.
     Ending a short story by saying that because of different paradigsm—formed with energy vs. juridically/forensically formed—the words we use mean DIFFERENT things to the conservative Orthodox and the (by paradigm definition unconservative) Papalists and Protestants.  If you premise (assume as an axiom that there is no gravity), you can take credit for gravity when you drop something; it is true by definition.  If someone premises that one day (say of creation is 24 fours), then when we speak of “Paul’s day,” it is by definition that he lived 24 hours.  If you someon premises that matter (Mysteries = Sacraments; matrimony is one, according to Paul in I believe Ephesians—even a “great” Mystery/Sacrament) and time (evolution of creation, revelation (tradition), and salvation (3 phases in the Orthodox noûs, mistranslated as “mind” in Western Bibles, though in “the mind of Christ” it has the Greek sense of “point of view, outlook, paradigm,” etc.  If one  premises that there is no religious role for materiality (sacraments of soterial function) or of time (evolution, tradition, and non-instantaneous salvation), then they are true BY DEFINITION.  Many of the arguments for or against saving the child’s life or the mother’s (when both cannot be saved) are proved “by definition.”  When people confuse natural with normal, that is a worseconfusion, seeing that what is normal is often not nature-promoting—i.e. natural.
      It is then unarguable.  An ideologue, in my view, confuses his axioms or definitions with things that are true or not; by refusing to look at all sides of an issue, an ideologue snows oneself.
     Incidentally, Orthodox authors writing in English mistranslate phthorá as (deontic) "corruption" when it is ontic and has the force of "perishability, transience, evanescence," in short (physical) "decay."  Such mistranslations, due to replacing ontic terms of the Easter with deontic or moral-volitional terms of the West beset Orthodox translations made by non-naive speakers of English.

CONNECTING ALL OF THE DOTS THE RIGHT WAY
WHAT SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY SHOULD HAVE ACHIEVED
NOTE THE CONNECTION OF GEN. 1:26 & 2 Pet. 1:4 

where Divinization is salvation, the restoration of the uncreated Energies of Grace, God's Life, that Adam lost through his disobedience. 

   Other pages of this website discuss what is conservative―say, the rôle of energy in everything―and what is radically innovative in Christianity, e.g. the psychospeak of "intimate relation with Jesus."  An attempt has been made to show why it is pointless to discuss differences in belief among various forms of Christianity when one should be considering the assumptions of paradigm that (even while being neither true nor false) determine what can be accepted as true or false, e.g. belief x means "y" to some and "z" to others. 

     Consider Christ's Crucifixion.  As in most religions, a SACRIFICE is the offering of as perfect a created being as possible to the Creator to acknowledge the divine ownership of all that is; it is thus a latreutic Act (an act of worship).  The Sacrifice on Calvary had the important side-effect of object of taking away the hamartía ("deprivation of the uncreated Energies of Grace lost by Adam with the result of alienation"--a basic sense of hamartía or, where plural, "kinds of" alienation)―that engulfs all newborns (except the Theotókos).  Calvary's main purpose was hardly to "propitiate" the divine Wrath, as juridical paradigms require; it was rather to cleanse or expiate the world's alienation or deprivation of the uncreated Energies of Grace by making it possible for worshipers to be re-assimilated (Gen. 1:26) to God and become partakers of the divine Nature (2 Pet. 1:4).  The Church, Christ's Bride, offers His Body and Blood as a latreutic sacrifice, i.e. as worship―not a re-offering of Calvary with symbols for immolation or "suffering" but simply offering Christ, the only perfect Creature, to acknowledge the divine ownership of all that is.  What makes the eucharistic sacrifice worthwhile is of course Jesus' efficacious Offering and Suffering of Himself on the Life-giving Cross.  But if one's paradigm calls human-addressed acts (sermons, etc.) "worship" and is thus more interested in human benefits of the Cross than in worship―""holy Gifts" to God―this conservative-traditional view will be foreign.