Recent work in Protestant soteriology and eschatology has sought to recover and exposit the strands (or doctrines) of theosis present in figures such as Jonathan Edwards, John Calvin and John Wesley, among others. Yet, such ventures can risk unmooring doctrinal convictions from their embeddedness within a larger nexus of theological judgments and concerns. This essay provides a modest contribution to Protestant engagement with the doctrine of theosis, with the help of seventeenth-century Reformed theologian Petrus van Mastricht. In it, I argue that van Mastricht’s ‘upstream’ commitments to Christology and the incommunicability of divine perfections inform his rejection of deification. The essay concludes by highlighting the promise and perils of van Mastricht’s account of the real nature of the unio mystica.

Contrary to longstanding opinion, it was Luther, not Calvin, who first interpreted Christ’s descent into hell as an event of suffering and feeling forsaken by God. Though Lutheran tradition afterward emphasised a victorious interpretation taken from Luther’s famous ‘Torgau sermon’, a more ambivalent legacy exists in his own writings. Sufficient attention is therefore warranted to view Luther as a forerunner to Calvin’s use of the cry of dereliction to interpret the descensus. Understanding this nuance can smooth the edges of a myopic age-old debate between the two traditions, since the two Reformers have more in common than not on the doctrine.

An account of human subjectivity is built up from an analysis of the fundamental human desire for God. In conversation with Karl Rahner and Blaise Pascal, it is argued that this desire does not have any conceivable conditions of satisfiability. This leads to an account of human beings as fundamentally distractible, fragmented, opaque to themselves and non-self-identical; however, none of these are viewed as essentially problematic, arising instead out of the basic human–God relation rather than from a fallen condition. A range of implications for ethics and social criticism are briefly suggested.