One of the most common words to describe salvation until the Middle Ages was deification. Deification describes how someone can by grace become like God. The African Christian Athanasius famously summarized the doctrine by saying, "God became man, so that we could become God." Now, the language of "become God" ruffles our feathers today. But these Christians did not mean that we possess God's being or something like that. They basically meant the same thing that we mean by the word