Eustace, a troubled and unpleasant lad has held greed and revenge in his heart and he turns into a Dragon. The experience wakes him up to who he is, but he has no hope of reversing the magic - until Aslan comes, and tells him to undress and bathe. He tries to do so, by scraping a layer of dragon skin off, and then another, and another, but there seem to be unending layers of scales. Eventually Aslan says, "You will have to let Me undress you."

Eustace: "I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it. The first tear he made was so deep I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I've ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off. You know.....if you've ever picked a scab off a sore place...Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off...and there it was, lying on the grass, only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly looking than the others had been. And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch...I'd turned into a boy again.

- The Narnia Series

Theosis is the way the Eastern Church looks at atonement. The Process of us becoming more like God. An ancient Orthodox Bishop, Maximus the Confessor, suggested a simple way of thinking about it. He said there were 3 ways in which humanity needed to be transformed, and which therefore needed Christ's atoning work: in our BEING, in our WELLBEING, and in our ETERNAL BEING.

BEING: From the beginning humans have been corrupted images of God. There is something lodged deep inside us which seems to make it impossible for us not to hurt each other and God. Jesus address this through his incarnation. Iron is just cold impure metal until it is put in the flames, Jesus chose to face the fiery furnace of human life, to bring us the Holy Spirit so that transformation and eternal life were possible for us. His incarnation itself was an act of atonement.

WELLBEING: Put away the meaning the West has for that word. For the Orthodox Church of the East, wellbeing is strongly connected to peace, shalom. You are in a state of wellbeing when your relationship with God is right. The Eastern Church has practices like the Jesus Prayer - "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner". Repeated over and over again, sometimes with prayer beads, to help get rid sin, that which gets in the way of your relationship with God. As with Aslan (above) Jesus taught us to work with God to peel any layers of darkness or sin away and open the way to communion with God. With Jesus death he took all our sins on the cross and into death, effectively killing it. So Jesus life and death were one long act of atonement, to bring us closes to God.

ETERNAL BEING: Think back to Adam and Eve they were told that if they ate the forbidden fruit they would die. Where are they today? Yes dead! They lived to a ripe old age, God didn't say it would be instant death. But if they never ate it, they never would have died. Death entered the being of humanity and stayed there like a dark tumour that would spread inevitably within every life. Thankfully Jesus conquered Death.