83 For more than a century the consensus of eminent Protestant and Eastern Orthodox historians of dogma was that deifcation is a distinctively Eastern doctrine incompatible with the Western theological tradition. For the Reformation traditions, deifcation was said to be especially precluded by total depravity, predestination, and justifcation by faith alone. These claims habituated generations of scholars to presume soteriologies of deifcation are alien to the Protestant tradition. From the beginning, however, this commonplace was apologetic propaganda presented in the guise of critical scholarship. 1 It fails for the simple reason that examination of the primary sources of the Protestant tradition shows it to be false. Scholars have increas- ingly recognized this in recent years, but the claim is not new. Writing in the 1960s, already Jaroslav Pelikan observed, “Western theology and spirituality spoke in such language also; so, for that matter, did the Reformers and other Protestant divines.” 2 The thesis of this chapter is simple. The patristic doctrine of deifcation found in such writers as Irenaeus, Athanasius, Cyril of Alexandria, and Augustine is a biblical doctrine of the universal church affrmed by the Reformers and their immediate heirs. It is neither an exotic import nor inva- sive species in the garden of Reformed theology. Like Nicene Trinitarianism, creatio ex nihilo, and the canon of the New Testament, it is a constitutive part of the catholic inheritance which the Reformers sought to uphold and defend. Early Reformed theologians affrmed that it is appropriate to describe the goal or telos of salvation in terms of deifcation. Be that as it may, deifcation as a concise and appropriately evocative description of the gospel’s end and our highest good receded into the background. Christians in the Reformed Chapter 4 The Gospel’s End and Our Highest Good Deification in the Reformed Tradition Carl Mosser Copyright © 2021. Fortress Academic. All rights reserved. From: Jared Ortiz, ed., With All the Fullness of God: Deification in Christian Tradition (Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2021), 83-109.