What is the Doctrine of Participation? Andrew Davison and Matthew Barrett

“For from him and through him and to him are all things…” (Rom. 11:36)

What does it mean to participate in God? In what ways do we share in Christ? Protestants today are oftentimes unfamiliar with or even suspicious towards the doctrine of participating in God. As some claim, does participation confuse the creation and the Creator?

In this episode, Andrew Davison joins Matthew Barrett to show how this doctrine is in fact essential to our understanding of Christian theology itself. Participation in God affects everything in theology from the doctrine of creation and the image of God to salvation and the telos of the Christian life. What is the happy life? What is virtue? How do these inform our eschatology? All of these questions and more are the focus of this week’s episode on participation in God. Ultimately, everything in the world has God as its origin—and as we will see, our final destination of happiness in seeing God is nothing less than a participation in God himself.

Andrew Davison serves as Starbridge Associate Professor in Theology and Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge, where he is a fellow in Theology and Dean of Chapel, Corpus Christi College. He is also a 2022-24 Visiting Fellow of the Center of Theological Inquiry at Princeton. He is the author of Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (Cambridge University Press).

Matthew Barrett is the editor-in-chief of Credo Magazine and host of the Credo podcast. He is associate professor of Christian theology at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and Director of the Center for Classical Theology. He is the author of the award-winning Simply Trinity and his new book is called, The Reformation as Renewal. He is currently writing a Systematic Theology (Baker Academic).