Reconstructing Evangelical Soteriology and Missiology: A Theology of Human Flourishing

Abstract

Contemporary Evangelicalism faces a paradox: despite its historical and demographic vitality, a soteriological imbalance in many (though by no means all) of its expressions—an overemphasis on afterlife-centred salvation relative to present flourishing—has contributed to a crisis of meaning for believers navigating present-day realities. This gap can leave the faith an insufficient bulwark against secular nihilism and radical ideologies, both of which thrive (however perversely) by addressing present suffering. This article argues not for the replacement of Evangelical soteriology but for its recovery and enrichment through a Theology of Human Flourishing, centred on the human person-in-communion conformed by grace to Christ—what it terms, with deliberate qualification, the Divine Individual. The theotic dimension developed here complements rather than supplants the forensic categories of justification, regeneration, and reconciliation. The argument proceeds in five moves. First, it grounds the Divine Individual in the New Testament “Son of Man” tradition, drawing on Walker’s exegesis of John 1.43–51 and Moule’s argument for Johannine individualism. Second, it deploys Jordan Peterson’s phenomenology of meaning as a modern grammar through which the patristic doctrine of theosis can be re-articulated, while critically assessing where Peterson’s anthropology of the autonomous subject diverges from a theology of grace and must be corrected by it. Third, it shows—with Henrich and Duchesne—that the Divine Individual is not a colonial construct but a long civilizational inheritance with deep biblical and Greco-Christian roots. Fourth, it answers the standard critiques: Pelagianism, syncretism, atomistic individualism, and the post-colonial objection. Fifth, it sketches the missiological implications: mission as the formation of Christ-shaped persons whose transformation ripples outward into the renewal of culture, institution, and civilization.

1. Introduction: The Evangelical Paradox—Influence and Irrelevance

Evangelicalism stands on deep historical foundations, emerging from the Protestant revivals of the eighteenth century with a distinct theological profile. Historians often define evangelical faith by conversionism, crucicentrism, biblicism, and activism—the so-called “Bebbington Quadrilateral” (Bebbington 1989). In practice, this means evangelicals emphasise personal conversion, the centrality of Christ’s atoning crucifixion, the supreme authority of Scripture, and active evangelism and service. These commitments give the movement a remarkable internal coherence; from the beginning, evangelicals have preached that individuals must be “born again” and reconciled to God through the cross of Christ, grounding their message in Scripture and expressing their faith in vigorous outreach. As Bebbington observes, three of these marks—conversionism, biblicism, and crucicentrism—were as characteristic of earlier Protestantism as of the evangelical movement itself, so that evangelicals perceived themselves not as innovators but as renewers of the original gospel emphases of the Reformation.

Far from being a relic of the past, evangelical Christianity exhibits extraordinary global vigour. The centre of gravity of world Christianity has shifted southward in recent decades, due in large part to evangelical and Pentecostal growth in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. As Miroslav Volf observes, within about a century, the Pentecostal faith of Azusa Street “engulfed the entire globe, shaped the lives of more than half a billion human beings.” (Volf 2016). Evangelical churches are thriving on every continent, frequently outpacing older Christian traditions. By every sociological measure—numbers, geographic spread, cultural influence—evangelical Christianity displays a remarkable vitality.

A key source of evangelicalism’s enduring strength lies in its experiential appeal—its power to change lives. Evangelical faith is not mere doctrine; it is expected to be a lived, transformative experience of conversion and new birth. Alister McGrath speaks of an “evangelical conversion of the imagination”—“a fundamental reorientation in the way we see ourselves, our desires, and our world, as a result of a transformative encounter with Christ.” (McGrath 2024, p. 18). This transformative ethos has profound resonance with the biblical theology of human flourishing. As Jonathan Pennington puts it, “This vision of human flourishing… is at the core of God’s redeeming work”; God’s saving action from the Fall to New Creation can be read as “God restoring the creational state of human flourishing.”1

The Here-and-Now Crisis of Meaning

And yet, alongside this vitality, evangelicalism faces a paradox. In many (though by no means all) of its expressions, its soteriology has tilted so heavily toward the afterlife that it offers a curiously thin response to present human suffering. The gospel comes to be heard—especially by those outside the movement, but increasingly by those within it—as fire insurance for the soul rather than as good news for the body, the polis, the institution, the culture. The result is a generation of believers who can articulate why they are going to heaven but cannot articulate why their work, their politics, their suffering, or their flourishing matter to God now. Charles Taylor has called this condition the malaise of immanence—a meaning-vacuum that affluent late-modern societies cannot fill from their own resources (Taylor 2007, pp. 299–313). This afterlife-tilt is, moreover, only one strand in a more tangled diagnosis. The prosperity gospel, a moralistic-therapeutic reduction of faith, a voluntarist and consumerist ecclesiology, the erosion of thick community, and the broader cultural drift toward expressive individualism each compound the malaise—even as a substantial and growing body of evangelical social engagement pushes vigorously against it. The argument here is therefore not that present-day Evangelicalism is monolithically otherworldly, but that its dominant soteriological grammar under-resources the very this-worldly intentionality that its best practice already exhibits.2 Into that vacuum rush ideologies of left and right, both of which are recognisably religious in form: both promise present salvation through participation in a totalising story, and both, to varying degrees, deliver real psychological goods that the afterlife-only gospel has tacitly conceded.

The argument of this article is that evangelicalism does not need to abandon its convictions to address this paradox; it needs to recover the fuller biblical anthropology that already lies within its own tradition. The thesis is that the figure of the Divine Individual3—the human person made in the image of God, called to participate in the divine life by being conformed to Christ, the perfect Son of Man—is the proper centre of a recovered and enriched soteriology and missiology. The Divine Individual is not a Petersonian invention; Peterson supplies a useful modern grammar, but the figure is biblical, patristic, and civilizational.

2. Jordan Peterson and the “Here-and-Now” Theology of Meaning

Jordan Peterson’s work—particularly Maps of Meaning (Peterson 1999), We Who Wrestle with God (Peterson 2024), and his essay “Religion, Sovereignty, Natural Rights, and the Constituent Elements of Experience” (Peterson 2019)—offers a phenomenological and existential account of human existence that has, almost despite itself, become a quasi-theological framework for millions of late-modern hearers. Peterson reads human experience as inhabited rather than merely observed: we do not encounter a neutral world but a “forum for action,” structured by hierarchies of value and oriented toward (or away from) a highest good he is increasingly willing to call God. Sin, in his framework, is the voluntary collapse into self-deception, the refusal of responsibility, the embrace of meaninglessness. Salvation is the courageous confrontation with chaos, the construction of habitable order through truthful speech and sacrificial action, the conformation of the self to the archetype of the hero who descends into the underworld and returns transfigured.

Peterson’s framework is profoundly anti-fundamentalist even as it is passionately moral and soteriological. It seeks to save individuals from meaninglessness and vice—not by offering absolute certainty or a rigid creed, but by encouraging a dynamic balancing of opposites and a humble search for meaning through trial and error. By extolling voluntary transformation over coercive transformation, questions over dogmatic answers, and individual conscience over groupthink, Peterson’s framework acts as a deradicalising force on those who engage with it. In Peterson’s own framing, the human being is properly subordinate to a transcendent good, which entails that no human is infallible and no idea is final. In a fragmented world, such an anti-totalitarian, open-ended approach to meaning can itself be seen as salvific. It guards the soul (and society) against the false salvation of extreme ideologies, directing us toward a more humble, compassionate, and realistic path of redemption.

What makes Peterson theologically interesting is not that he provides new content but that he provides a new grammar—a phenomenological vocabulary in which classical theological categories (sin, salvation, image of God, theosis) become intelligible again to hearers who have been catechized out of the older language. The key move of this article is to take that grammar seriously as a translation device, not as a replacement, and to read it back into the biblical and patristic categories from which, at its best, it is a distant echo.

3. Reconstructing Soteriology: The Divine Individual as Theosis

3.1. The Biblical Foundation: The Son of Man as Archetype of the Divine Individual

Before the Divine Individual can be deployed as a theological category, its biblical credentials must be established. The standard objection—that the Divine Individual is a Western, Petersonian, or modern liberal construct smuggled into the New Testament—can only be answered exegetically. The exegetical case is in fact strong, and it converges on the title “Son of Man” as it is used across the Synoptic and Johannine traditions. The foundational essays drawn on below (Walker, Moule, Davies, Burkill) are mid-twentieth-century, but their central exegetical observations have been reaffirmed and refined in more recent Johannine and Son-of-Man scholarship, on which the present argument also leans.4

William O. Walker’s analysis of John 1.43–51 offers the cleanest statement of the structure.5 Walker observes that this single pericope, early in the Fourth Gospel, contains the first occurrence of three titles for Jesus: “Son of God” (v. 49), “Son of Joseph” (v. 45), and “Son of Man” (v. 51). Their juxtaposition, Walker argues, cannot be coincidental. Each title carries a precise theological weight. “Son of God” in the Johannine vocabulary names the heavenly origin and divine nature of Jesus. “Son of Joseph… from Nazareth” names his earthly origin and human nature—and is precisely the title against which the Johannine controversies erupt (“Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” Jn 6.42). “Son of Man” is the synthesis: the figure who, in the language of Genesis 28.12 reworked through Daniel 7.13–14, is the ladder upon which the angels of God ascend and descend, the bridge between heaven and earth, the one in whom the divine and the human meet. Walker’s conclusion is worth quoting: “It is precisely as ‘Son of Man’—a figure both earthly and heavenly, both human and divine—that Jesus is the ‘ladder’ between the heavenly and the earthly. He is both ‘Son of God’ and ‘Son of Joseph’ because he is ‘Son of Man.’” Two clarifications are needed at once, lest this formula be misread in a manner the present argument does not intend. First, the unity named here is not a Hegelian fusion of two prior terms into a third, but the Chalcedonian confession of one person in two natures, united without confusion, change, division, or separation. Jesus is not “Son of God” and “Son of Joseph” as a synthesis resolving a dialectic; he is the eternal Son who assumes full humanity without ceasing to be what he eternally is, so that the priority of grace and the asymmetry of the incarnation are preserved. Second, Christ is the Son of Man uniquely and by nature. The believers who follow are not further instances of a generic divine–human type, nor is Christ a mere manifestation of a prior anthropology; rather, persons are conformed, by grace and the indwelling Spirit, to the one Son of Man. The argument of this article depends on holding both together: the figure is christologically singular before it is anthropologically exemplary.6

This exegetical observation has anthropological consequences that the Fourth Evangelist does not shy away from. C. F. D. Moule, in his classic essay “The Individualism of the Fourth Gospel” (Moule 1962), argues that John is “one of the most strongly individualistic of all the New Testament writings” and that its realised eschatology is the consequence rather than the cause of this individualism.7 Moule shows that the Johannine “coming” of Christ to the disciple is, in John 14.21–23, a radically personal event: the Father and the Son make their dwelling not first with the corporate Church but “with anyone who loves and obeys.” The Lazarus narrative confirms this: where Paul speaks of resurrection as a cosmic event in which Christ is the firstfruits of the whole human race, the Johannine Christ says, “I am the resurrection and the life,” and what follows is the raising of one named individual whose life is given back. “It is a one-by-one salvation that is here envisaged,” Moule writes; the Johannine vision is not a substitute for the corporate but a refusal to let the corporate evacuate the personal.

The same trajectory is visible across the Synoptic source strata. Paul E. Davies’s comparative survey of Mark, Q, M, and L finds that in every layer Jesus characteristically addresses, calls, and forms individuals—the rich young ruler, the woman who anointed him, the Samaritan woman, the publican Zacchaeus, the blind man whose “thy faith hath saved thee” is the recurring refrain.8 Davies’s conclusion is that the universal reach of the Christian gospel follows from—not against—this personal address: “Since this relation to God is founded on the faith-response alone, and since with him there is no respect of persons—a man’s a man if he has faith—then Paul’s universal gospel outreach follows.” The biblical individual is not the modern Cartesian self-bounded subject; he is what Davies calls the “religious individualism” of the person standing exposed before God, capable of response.

T. A. Burkill’s study of the hidden Son of Man in Mark adds the dimension of mystery and concealment.9 For Burkill, the Markan messianic secret is not a narrative trick but a divine-predestinarian motif: the Son of Man’s identity as the divine–human bridge is hidden during the earthly ministry precisely because its full disclosure must await the cross and resurrection. In Mark, as in John, the Son of Man title bears a freight that simple “Messiah” cannot carry; it is the title that reaches back into Daniel 7 to identify Jesus with the heavenly figure who comes “with the clouds of heaven” and is given dominion, and forward into the resurrection appearances to identify that same heavenly figure with the crucified human being.

Three things follow from this exegetical convergence. First, the figure of the divine–human individual is not a Petersonian or Jungian projection back onto the New Testament; it is the New Testament’s own central christological grammar, particularly in the Son of Man tradition. Second, the New Testament’s individualism is not the atomistic individualism of late modernity; it is a personalism in which the human person is constituted by direct, unmediated address from God and direct, unmediated response. Third—and this is the patristic move—because Christ is the perfect Son of Man, the proper human, the second Adam, the pattern of his life becomes the pattern of every life that is grafted into him. This is theosis: the human person, by grace and participation in the Son of Man, comes to share by gift in what the Son of Man is by nature—never collapsing the distinction between the one who deifies and those who are deified.10

It is at precisely this point that Peterson’s reading of “Son of Man” in his “Religion, Sovereignty, Natural Rights” essay rejoins the patristic tradition. Peterson, in his most theologically dense footnote, argues that the Son of Man functions as something like an archetypal ideal of the human being who voluntarily confronts chaos, orders the world through logos, and embodies a sovereignty that grounds human dignity.11 Peterson reaches this through a comparative move: he reads the Egyptian Osiris–Horus mythologem (in which the divine sonship once predicated only of the dead Pharaoh becomes, by what Egyptologists call the “democratization of Osiris,” in principle predicable of every deceased human being) as the proto-grammar that the Danielic “Son of Man” fulfils and the Christian gospel universalises. The structure is precisely Walker’s structure, in psychological key: a figure who is both divine and human becomes the proper value, the sovereign archetype, of every human person. What Peterson states in archetypal terms, the patristic tradition states ontologically: Christ is what we are called to become, by grace, what he is by nature.

The Divine Individual, then, is the human person understood as called to participate, by grace, in the life of the Son of Man. It is theosis under another name. And it is on this biblical-patristic foundation—not on Peterson’s phenomenology, which is a useful but secondary translation—that the rest of the argument stands or falls. Precisely because Peterson is invoked as a translation device and not as a theological authority, the points at which his anthropology diverges from a theology of grace must be named and corrected rather than passed over; this is the task of Section 3.6 below.

3.2. Redefining Sin: From Legal Transgression to the Refusal of Likeness

Once the Divine Individual is established as the goal of salvation, sin must be redescribed accordingly. Classical Evangelical soteriology, shaped by post-Reformation juridical categories, often construes sin primarily as a forensic transgression against divine law. While indispensable, this framing fails to capture the phenomenological and existential depth of hamartia—“missing the mark.” Peterson’s analysis of human action, perception, and deception provides a penetrating re-articulation: sin is fundamentally self-deception, refusal of responsibility, and the collapse into psychological chaos. In Maps of Meaning, Peterson argues that human beings continually confront an effectively unbounded space of possible actions and interpretations, and that failure to orient oneself toward a meaningful hierarchy of value results in disintegration and anxiety. Meaninglessness, in this account, is not merely a psychological state but an ethical condition—an erosion of the self caused by voluntary or habitual avoidance of truth.

This resonates deeply with patristic and medieval theological accounts of sin as failure of likeness, rather than merely legal violation. For Aquinas, sin is a privation—a falling short of the good toward which the person is ordered.12 Likewise, contemporary Orthodox theologians interpret sin as resisting participation in God’s life (Papanikolaou 2012; Purboadji 2023). Bringing these traditions into dialogue with Peterson clarifies the existential dimension: to sin is to refuse the call to become fully actualised, truthful, courageous, and oriented toward the good. In this reconstructed soteriology, sin denotes a failure to fulfil one’s God-given vocation as Son or Daughter of Man—a deliberate shrinking from responsibility, the construction of ideological or psychological defences to avoid confronting suffering, limitation, and finitude. Peterson’s critique of self-deception as a universal human vulnerability underscores this point: sin is the collapse into ideological rigidity, nihilism, or chaos when one refuses the demand to grow, mature, and transform into the likeness of the Son of Man. It must be stressed, however, that this phenomenological redescription does not displace the more fundamental, relational definition of sin and is not offered as a substitute for it. Sin is first and foremost the rejection of God himself—of his rule, his address, and his way—and the substitution of idols in his place (Rom 1.21–25; Eph 4.17–19). Self-deception, the refusal of responsibility, and collapse into psychological chaos are the existential consequences and symptoms of that prior God-ward rupture, not its essence. Peterson’s analysis is valuable precisely as a description of how that rupture is lived and concealed; it neither explains nor replaces the divine command and the personal estrangement from God that Scripture names as sin’s root.

3.3. The Supremacy of Meaning: The Architecture of Salvation

Peterson’s cognitive-evolutionary account of meaning offers a sophisticated framework for reinterpreting salvation as the restoration of meaning in the life of the believer. In “Three Forms of Meaning and the Management of Complexity,” Peterson (2013) distinguishes between implicit, narrative, and propositional meaning, showing that human beings inhabit a world structured by value-laden perception. On his account, human beings perceive a world of meaningful, value-laden phenomena rather than a neutral field of bare objects. Salvation must therefore be understood as fundamentally about the reconstitution of meaning. A reconstructed soteriology integrates four pillars.

3.3.1. Perception and Story

Human beings do not encounter a neutral environment but a narrative-laden world—a “forum for action.” Salvation rewrites the story through which the believer interprets their existence. This aligns with biblical theology’s emphasis on re-narration (Wright 2013) and Pauline “renewal of the mind” (Rom 12.2).

3.3.2. Action and Hierarchy of Values

For Peterson, moral transformation demands the construction of a proper hierarchy of values, governed by the highest good (the Logos). In Thomistic terms, this is consonant with the ordering of the will toward God as the summum bonum. Salvation requires this reorientation—not as a juridical fiat from outside the self, but as the actual healing of the disordered will.

3.3.3. Order and Chaos

Peterson’s central anthropological axiom—that human flourishing requires navigating between Order and Chaos—maps elegantly onto biblical patterns of creation, fall, and redemption. Salvation is the dynamic process through which the individual confronts chaos (suffering, death, anomaly) and generates habitable order through truth and responsibility. Thus salvation is neither mere legal acquittal nor moral self-improvement but a transformation of being through meaning-making, value-alignment, and courageous confrontation with the realities of existence. This formulation must not be misheard as making salvation a human achievement, nor as rendering the events of the gospel dispensable. The transformation in view is wrought by Christ and applied by the Spirit; meaning-making, value-alignment, and courageous confrontation with reality are its phenomenological signature in the believer’s experience, not its efficient cause. The objective acts of incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and Pentecost remain its ground and source: without them there is no transformation to describe.

3.3.4. Grace as the Power of Transformation

Lest this account drift toward Pelagianism, the fourth pillar must be made explicit. The capacity to perceive truthfully, to construct a right hierarchy of values, and to confront chaos courageously is not a native human power; it is a gift of grace. The patristic distinction between “by nature” and “by grace” is decisive here.13 Christ alone is the Son of Man by nature; we become sons and daughters of Man only by participation in his nature, which is to say, only by grace. Peterson’s phenomenology describes the shape of transformation; it cannot, on its own resources, supply the power for transformation. That power is christological and pneumatological—the indwelling Spirit conforming the believer to the image of the Son. To miss this is to misread the entire proposal as moralistic self-help; to grasp it is to see why theosis is the proper theological category and why it is the structural opposite of Pelagian self-divinisation.

3.4. Redefining “Believe in Christ”: A Call to Embodied Participation

Traditional Evangelical theology emphasises “belief in Christ,” but often in a narrowly propositional sense. Peterson’s reading of Christ—as the archetype of the fully realised human being—recasts belief as embodied imitation. In We Who Wrestle with God, Peterson describes Christ as the exemplar of voluntary suffering, moral responsibility, and transformative ascent. Belief is therefore not assent but participation.

Critically, Christian theology must hold what Peterson’s framework, on its own, cannot. Peterson treats Christ as the perfect archetype of the heroic ideal—the pattern that the human person can, in principle, instantiate. Christian orthodoxy insists that Christ is not merely the pattern but the ontological source of human transformation—the Logos made flesh, the one in whom and through whom the believer is conformed to the divine image. We are not merely imitating an archetype; we are being grafted into the Son of Man himself. This resonates with patristic and Eastern Orthodox notions of theosis, where salvation is the process of becoming “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet 1.4) (Lossky 1957, ch. 6–7). Peterson’s phenomenological analysis reveals the pattern of salvation; Christian theology reveals the Person who is that pattern. To “believe in Christ,” then, is to enter into the pattern of Christ’s life—voluntary death of the old self, resurrection into a new identity, ascension into divine likeness—precisely by being grafted into the Person who is that pattern. It is a call to embody the Logos through truthful speech, sacrificial action, and responsible engagement with reality, animated by the Spirit who indwells.

3.5. The Divine Individual as Theosis: Phenomenological Synthesis

We are now in a position to draw the threads together. The Divine Individual is not a single thinker’s coinage but the convergence of four distinct streams—biblical, phenomenological, patristic, and civilizational—each of which describes the same reality from its own angle.

From Walker and Moule we have the biblical archetype: the Son of Man as the divine–human bridge, the figure in whom heaven and earth meet, addressed and addressed by God in personal—though never atomistic—directness. From Davies and Burkill we have the gospel’s consistent insistence that this Son-of-Man pattern is offered to every person individually, that the kingdom comes one called name at a time even as it comes corporately. From Peterson we have the modern phenomenological grammar: the Divine Individual as the one who voluntarily confronts chaos, orders the world through logos, and embodies the sovereign value that grounds human rights—the same archetype that the Egyptian “democratization of Osiris” foreshadowed and that the Christian gospel universalised. From Athanasius and the patristic tradition, we have the ontological category: theosis, becoming by grace what Christ is by nature, the human person caught up into the divine life through union with the incarnate Son of Man.

These are not four competing accounts; they are four refractions of one structure. The Divine Individual is theosis described phenomenologically. Theosis is the Divine Individual described ontologically. The Son of Man is the Divine Individual revealed christologically. And the called-and-responding person of the Synoptic and Johannine narratives is the Divine Individual revealed pastorally. To miss any of these refractions is to flatten the doctrine; to hold them together is to see why salvation cannot be reduced either to forensic acquittal alone or to moral self-improvement alone. Salvation is the human person, by the grace of the indwelling Spirit, being conformed to the perfect Son of Man, and so becoming the truth-telling, responsibility-bearing, self-sacrificing, meaning-creating agent whose personal transformation radiates outward into the renewal of family, church, culture, and civilization. The “saved” person is not merely forgiven but reborn as a Divine Individual, an icon of Christ whose life contributes to the flourishing of the world.

3.6. Assessing Peterson: Grammar, Not Substance

The preceding sections have repeatedly insisted that Peterson supplies grammar, not substance. That claim must now be demonstrated rather than merely asserted, for it is the hinge on which the legitimacy of the whole proposal turns. The gain in deploying Peterson is neither doctrinal nor metaphysical but missional and apologetic. His phenomenological vocabulary—meaning, the hierarchy of values, the forum for action, voluntary confrontation with chaos, the heroic archetype—reopens classical theological categories (sin, salvation, the image of God, theosis) to a generation of late-modern hearers who have been catechised out of the older language and for whom forensic and metaphysical idioms have gone inert. Peterson functions, in other words, as a translator and as a corroborating witness from outside the household of faith: where a secular psychologist independently arrives at the structure of responsibility, sacrifice, and orientation toward the highest good, the Christian claim that this structure is inscribed in the human creature gains apologetic traction. This is the gain, and it is real. It is not, however, a warrant for importing Peterson’s anthropology wholesale.

At three points, Peterson’s framework diverges from Christian theology, and at each the divergence must be resolved in theology’s favour. The first concerns grace. Peterson’s account is, in the end, the account of a subject who lifts himself toward the good by an act of will. Christian soteriology centres not on the subject’s ascent but on God’s prior descent: the power to perceive truthfully, to order one’s loves, and to bear suffering redemptively is itself a gift, not a native capacity of fallen agency. Peterson can describe the shape of transformation with precision; he cannot, on his own resources, supply its source. Where his grammar implies self-rescue, the substance corrects it—the Divine Individual is not the self-made hero but the person whose agency has been healed and empowered by the indwelling Spirit.

The second divergence is metaphysical. Peterson works within a broadly Kantian and pragmatist frame: meaning, not being, is his primary datum, and he characteristically brackets the question of objective, mind-independent reality in favour of the phenomenology of the experienced world. Christian faith cannot rest there. It confesses the objective reality of creation, of the incarnation, and of the bodily resurrection of Christ—realities that obtain whether or not they are experienced as meaningful, and that ground meaning rather than being grounded by it. Salvation is therefore not only the intrapsychic reconstitution of meaning but participation in an extramental, objective divine act. Peterson’s perspectivism must accordingly be received critically and ordered beneath a theological realism that it does not itself supply; used otherwise, it would shrink salvation to an anthropocentric and merely psychological reality.

The third divergence has already been named: Peterson treats Christ as the supreme archetype, the pattern the human person may in principle instantiate, whereas Christian orthodoxy confesses Christ as the ontological source—the Logos made flesh, in whom and through whom the believer is conformed, not merely the exemplar imitated from a distance. Taken together, these three corrections show what “grammar, not substance” means in practice: Peterson’s vocabulary is admitted as a translation device and subordinated, at every load-bearing point, to the biblical and patristic substance; wherever his anthropology, his metaphysics, or his Christology diverges from that substance, the substance governs and the grammar is corrected. The proposal is therefore not a baptism of Peterson but a disciplined and critical appropriation of him—nearer to what an older theology called the spoliation of the Egyptians than to syncretism.

4. The Divine Individual as Civilizational Pillar

4.1. The Long Genealogy: Duchesne, Henrich, and the Christian Universalisation of the Person

The standard contemporary objection to any positive account of “Western” individualism is that it is a colonial-modern construct—a recent Enlightenment invention used to justify Euro-American domination. The objection has force when aimed at certain caricatures, but it cannot be sustained against the historical record. The Divine Individual has a deep genealogy, and it is neither uniquely modern nor narrowly Western-Protestant.

Ricardo Duchesne has documented the long aristocratic-heroic substrate of Western individualism, tracing it through the medieval to the classical Greek world.14 The Greek epic and tragic traditions, the polis-citizen, the philosophical pursuit of arete and self-knowledge—these constitute a millennium-long preparation in which the human person comes increasingly into focus as a bearer of irreducible worth and agency. What Christianity does is not invent the individual but universalise him: the dignity once reserved for the Homeric hero or the Athenian citizen is, by the doctrine of the imago Dei, predicated of every human being, slave and free, male and female, Jew and Greek (Gal 3.28). The structural analogy with the Egyptian “democratization of Osiris” that Peterson notices is not accidental; it is the same move at a different cultural altitude.

Joseph Henrich’s work then describes the institutional mechanism by which this theological universalisation became sociologically operative.15 Henrich shows that the medieval Western Church’s “Marriage and Family Programme”—its prohibitions against close-kin marriage, its requirement of individual consent in marriage, its dissolution of the binding power of extended kinship networks—produced over centuries a population whose psychology became measurably more individuated, more impersonally trusting, more capable of long-distance cooperation outside the clan. This “WEIRD” psychology (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) is the substrate, Henrich argues, on which representative governments, universities, free markets, social safety nets, and a culture of innovation eventually rest. Long before the Enlightenment, Christianised Europe’s focus on the individual conscience had produced institutional structures whose openness to pluralism and innovation had no parallel elsewhere.

Read together, Duchesne and Henrich give a layered picture: a deep Greco-Roman aristocratic-individual substrate, theologically universalised by the patristic and medieval Church through the doctrines of imago Dei and theosis, and then institutionally entrenched by the Western Church’s kinship reforms. The Divine Individual is therefore not the property of any single colonising power. It is a long civilizational inheritance, biblically grounded and historically documented, whose universal extension to every human person is precisely the move Christianity made and continues to make.

4.2. From Theology to Institution: Persons Build Civilizations

Once the genealogy is in view, the missiological consequence becomes visible. A community that honours the Divine Individual will produce institutions that protect personal responsibility, creativity, and moral agency—institutions that, in turn, become the vehicles of broader human flourishing. Representative government presupposes that every person’s judgement matters; rule of law presupposes that every person stands equally before justice; free inquiry presupposes that truth is accessible to the conscientious individual; voluntary association presupposes that persons can covenant beyond kinship. Each of these is, at root, a sociological consequence of a theological anthropology.

Empirically, the connection is overdetermined. Wherever the Christian doctrine of the person has gone deep into a culture, one finds a recognisable cluster of institutions: hospitals, universities, charitable orders, abolitionist movements, scientific academies, constitutional limits on power. None of these is automatic, and each can be corrupted; but the historical record is consistent enough that, as Peterson argues, the subordination of the collective to the ideal of the responsible, sovereign individual offers an answer to the twin pathologies of nihilism and totalitarianism. Where the Divine Individual is denied—whether in the name of collectivist utopia or in the name of atomistic market individualism—both freedom and flourishing erode together.

The reconstructed missiology that follows from this is not the cultivation of consumers, voters, or autonomous selves; it is the cultivation of Divine Individuals—persons formed in the pattern of the Son of Man, whose character animates and reforms the institutions they inhabit. Mission, on this account, is the formation of persons who, like Christ, bring order out of chaos, who build, heal, discover, and serve.

5. Answering the Critiques

A proposal of this kind invites four serious objections, each of which deserves direct engagement.

5.1. Is This Pelagianism?

The first objection is that an emphasis on agency, responsibility, and “becoming” the Divine Individual collapses into Pelagianism—salvation by self-effort. The objection misreads the proposal. Pelagianism makes grace decorative; theosis makes grace constitutive. The Divine Individual is not the self-made hero but the person whose agency has been healed and empowered by the indwelling Spirit to do what fallen agency cannot. The patristic distinction is decisive: only Christ is divine “by nature” (kata physin); humans become “gods” only “by grace” (kata charin), which is to say, only by participation in another’s nature.16 Theosis is therefore the structural opposite of Pelagian self-divinisation. Grace, in this account, is not merely a legal pardon but the divine power that restores human agency, heals the will, and makes the person capable of bearing the cross and fulfilling the imago Dei vocation. The slogan is Augustinian: “Command what you will, and give what you command.” Agency is the fruit of grace, never its prerequisite.

5.2. Is This Syncretism?

The second objection is that the proposal smuggles Peterson, Jung, or generic late-modern self-help into Christian theology. The reply, made in detail in Section 3.1, is that the central content of the proposal is biblical and patristic; Peterson supplies grammar, not substance. The Son of Man tradition (Walker, Moule, Davies, Burkill), the imago Dei, and theosis (Athanasius, Lossky, Yannaras) carry the theological weight. Peterson is read as a contemporary phenomenologist whose categories—meaning, hierarchy of values, voluntary confrontation with chaos, the heroic archetype—happen to translate well into the patristic vocabulary of likeness, ordered loves, ascesis, and conformation to Christ. Such translation is not syncretism; it is what Augustine called the spoliation of the Egyptians, and what Aquinas called the use of philosophy as the handmaid of theology. The test is whether Christ remains, in the final analysis, an ontological source rather than a mere archetype. He does.

5.3. Is This Atomistic Individualism?

The third objection, made most powerfully from the Eastern Orthodox tradition, is that any positive theology of the individual underwrites the Western “cult of the individual” that Christos Yannaras has so devastatingly criticised: the lonely consumer-self, the contract-bearer, the rights-claimant detached from communion.17 This critique must be heard. The Divine Individual proposed here is not the atomistic individual of late liberalism. He is the person-in-communion—constituted by direct address from God and from neighbour, fulfilled only in the relational matrix of the Body of Christ. Moule’s warning is decisive: Johannine individualism is not a substitute for the corporate but a refusal to let the corporate evacuate the personal. The Divine Individual is, in Peterson’s own description, the figure oriented toward the protection of the vulnerable and toward direct, honest communication as the means of solving the problems of human existence—hardly a portrait of the narcissist. Properly understood, the Divine Individual is the antidote to atomistic individualism, not another form of it: he is the person who has so fully received himself from God that he can give himself away without disappearing.

5.4. The Post-Colonial Critique

The fourth objection, raised forcefully by Lalsangkima Pachuau and others, is that any mission framed around “forming the Divine Individual” risks reproducing the colonial pattern: the Western missionary forming the non-Western convert in the image of Western personhood.18 The objection deserves direct engagement, not deflection.

Three replies are in order. First, the genealogy traced in Section 4 decisively undercuts the premise that the Divine Individual is a Western-colonial construct. The figure has roots in the Hebrew Son of Man, the Greek aristocratic-heroic ethos, the patristic doctrine of theosis, and the medieval kinship reforms—a long civilizational inheritance whose universalising thrust has always pressed beyond any one cultural carrier. Second, the proper response to the colonial corruption of mission is not the abandonment of formative mission but its deepening: mission as the formation of persons who, precisely because they are conformed to the Son of Man, are equipped to prophetically critique every institution—including the institutions of their own nation, of the global market, and of the historical missionary enterprise itself. The work of the Divine Individual is not simply to affirm representative democracy, free markets, or technology but to engage them with the same pattern of Christ’s cross—speaking truth to their corruptions and working to redeem them for the common good. This answers the post-colonial critique not by retreating from mission but by deepening its prophetic responsibility. Third, the test of any missiology is whether the persons it forms become, in turn, capable of forming others in their own cultural register. The historical record of the Global South—where, as Volf documents, evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity now lives most vibrantly—suggests that the formation of Divine Individuals has, in fact, transposed itself into idioms the original missionary movement neither owned nor controlled. That is not the failure of formative mission; that is its success.

6. Reconstructing Missiology: The Gospel of Human Flourishing

Having redefined salvation in terms of meaningful life and theosis, we now turn to missiology. If salvation is the formation of the Divine Individual, then the mission of the Church must shift—or rather, return—toward the formation of such persons in every culture and the consequent renewal of every sphere of life.

6.1. Mission as Formation

The first task of mission, on this account, is the formation of persons who, like Christ, bring order out of chaos. Such individuals become the builders, maintainers, and expanders of human institutions; they venture into the unknown and watch over the vulnerable, solving emergent problems in their spheres. This is a lofty description, but it reflects in theological terms the doctrine of vocation: each person’s calling before God contributes to the common good. Evangelical missiology, on this reconstruction, would emphasise that bringing someone to Christ means unleashing a conscience-driven, creative, responsible person into the world—the very sort of person who can renew culture and institutions. As history shows, when millions live out such personal transformation, the cumulative social impact is enormous.

6.2. Preaching the Gospel as a Call to Be Christlike

The proclamation that follows from this is not principally a transaction (“believe this and you will go to heaven”) but an invitation (“be conformed to this Person and you will become what you were made to be”). The two are not opposed; the first is a true thing said badly when isolated, and a true thing said well when embedded in the second. The biblical call to “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt 5.48), to “be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Rom 12.2), to “be imitators of God as beloved children” (Eph 5.1), to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil 2.12)—these are not optional addenda to the gospel; they are the gospel, properly preached.

6.3. Mission as Civilizational Renewal

And because persons build institutions, the formation of Divine Individuals has civilizational consequences. Mission is not just “sending missionaries”; it is primarily the formation of persons whose transformed lives reshape the cultures and institutions they inhabit. This is what evangelical mission has, at its best, always done—founded hospitals and schools, abolished slaveries, translated languages, defended the powerless, advanced sciences, built businesses and arts and constitutional orders. The reconstruction proposed here does not invent this trajectory; it names it and makes it theologically explicit.

6.4. A Healthy, Communal Individualism

It must be said again, because it cannot be said too often: the Divine Individual is profoundly other-directed. Selfish individualism trumpets rights without responsibility; the Divine Individual emphasises responsibilities over rights, a voluntary assumption of duty for the benefit of others. In Peterson’s framing, meaning is found in the assumption of responsibility rather than in the assertion of rights. This reframes freedom not as licence to indulge but as liberty to do what is right and needed. Tocqueville long ago warned of “individualism” as a withdrawal into selfish small circles, but he observed that American Christianity countered this by teaching believers to use their freedom for the common good—forming charities, churches, voluntary associations. In our time, the wreckage of selfish individualism—loneliness, consumerism, moral relativism—is everywhere visible. The Divine Individual is the antidote, not another variant of the disease. He stands in healthy tension with community: he respects the sanctity of personal conscience (against collectivist tyranny) and willingly serves neighbours in love (against libertine selfishness). The ultimate exemplar is Christ, who “did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” A Christ-formed person will, by the very logic of theosis, be self-giving.

7. Conclusions: A Reconstructed Faith for a World in Crisis

7.1. Summary of the Argument

We began with the Evangelical paradox: a movement numerically strong and culturally influential, yet increasingly perceived as irrelevant to the pressing here-and-now questions of life. The root problem identified was an imbalance—a fixation on saving souls for the hereafter at the expense of forming persons in the here-and-now. In response, we proposed a reconstruction of soteriology and missiology around the figure of the Divine Individual.

The reconstruction proceeded in four moves. First, we showed (with Walker, Moule, Davies, and Burkill) that the Divine Individual is biblically grounded in the Son of Man tradition—the divine–human bridge whose pattern is offered, by grace, to every human person. Second, we argued (with Peterson, Athanasius, and Lossky) that the proper theological category for this offering is theosis, with Peterson’s phenomenology supplying useful modern grammar but never replacing patristic substance. Third, we showed (with Duchesne and Henrich) that the Divine Individual is not a colonial-modern invention but the long civilizational inheritance of a Greco-Christian universalisation of the person, theologically grounded in imago Dei and institutionally entrenched by medieval kinship reform. Fourth, we answered the standard critiques—Pelagianism, syncretism, atomistic individualism, post-colonial domination—directly, showing that each rests on a misreading either of the proposal or of its sources.

The missiological consequence follows: mission is the formation of Christ-shaped persons whose transformation ripples outward into the renewal of family, church, culture, and civilization. This is not the abandonment of evangelical conviction; it is its deepening and re-rooting in the wider biblical, patristic, and historical tradition that evangelicalism’s best instincts have always reached toward.

7.2. A Vision for a Theology of Human Flourishing

What might Evangelicalism look like if it embraces this reconstructed vision? In broad strokes, it would become a faith known for holistic transformation. Preaching and teaching would regularly connect doctrine to personal growth, mental health, family, art, science, and community well-being—demonstrating that the Gospel speaks to every aspect of human existence. Churches would measure success not only by conversions or attendance, but by the fruit in believers’ lives and their neighbourhoods: are people growing in virtue? Caring for the poor? Creating beauty? Working with integrity? Experiencing joy and meaning even in suffering? These are the signs of the kingdom come on earth.

A theology of human flourishing also recalibrates the balance between present and future. The hope of heaven and Christ’s return is not discarded—these remain the ultimate consummation of God’s plan. But they cease to be excuses for apathy about the present. Future hope energises present action; believers become, in N. T. Wright’s phrase, “signposts” to the kingdom—lives that are previews of what God will do universally. Such a Christianity is winsome to outsiders because it is recognisably good news for now, not just later. It also directly counters the draw of extremist ideologies and nihilism: when faith addresses suffering and injustice in practical, formative ways, the radical political and pharmacological substitutes lose much of their allure.

7.3. The Final Charge

We conclude with a call to action—fittingly, since action is at the heart of our thesis. To pastors, theologians, and lay believers: embrace the balance. Preach heaven and earth. Teach grace and responsibility. Hold up Christ not only as the guarantor of your afterlife, but as the model and source of your present life—the Son of Man in whose footsteps we find our highest fulfilment. In doing so, we heed both Scripture and the cry of our times. We offer a generation lost in cynicism a reason to hope and a task to devote themselves to. We also offer a corrective to our own excesses, recalling that “faith without works is dead” and that orthodoxy without orthopraxy is empty. The world is watching to see if our gospel really is good news. A theology of human flourishing says: yes, it is good news—for now, not just later.

In practical terms, the final charge is this: take up your cross and build something. Every believer should ask, “How can I contribute to human flourishing in Christ’s name?” For one, it might be raising a strong family; for another, starting a business that serves the community; for another, preaching to thousands; for another, the patient work of justice in courts or schools or hospitals. All are valid and holy. The Church’s task is to support and commission persons in these endeavours, celebrating the manifold ways the kingdom can come “on earth as it is in heaven.” If we do this, we will have a faith both faithful and relevant—spiritually rich and existentially satisfying. We will have Christians who not only believe in Christ, but who, by the grace of the indwelling Spirit, embody Christ to the world. This is the Theology of Human Flourishing—a faith for abundant life (John 10.10) in a world still loved by God and worth redeeming, here and now.