"I don't think protestants think about the attainment of theosis at all. By and large they have no concept of salvation beyond being let off of eternal punishment on the basis of the substitutionary atonement."
I am most assuredly NOT familiar with Protestant theology, beyond reading Jonathan Edwards, Luther, some Calvin and being quite taken with the writings of +JC Ryle, an Anglican bishop of the 19th century who was almost sublimely patristic in an English sort of way. Of them all, only +Ryle seems to have a developed understanding of what "salvation" or theosis means beyond not being thrown into The Pit to burn forever in torment. Anyway, that's why I asked the question.
"The Wesleys, who died as priests of the Church of England, though the Methodists claim them as their founders, and the first few generations of Methodists, had an understanding of salvation more akin to the Orthodox than was found among other protestants, but that is now long forgotten it seems."
Comments, Padre?
Anglicans were a special case--there was always a tension in Anglicanism between being merely protestant and trying to be a kind of Western Orthodoxy. The latter tendency was typified by Bp. Thomas Ken, who, when martyred (?) by the Latins declared that he 'died in the faith of the Ancient Church, before ever division of East and West, the so-called Caroline Divines, the Non-Jurors, and the Oxford Movement (to the extent that it was not overly 'Romish'). Except possibly in the case of the Caroline Divines, at no time did this tendency represent a majority of Anglican thought. (I'm not familiar with Bp. Ryle, though.)
This on the one hand explains the easy transition Anglicans have when the Spirit leads them to embrace Holy Orthodoxy, and on the other the special attention the Evil One seems to have given to seducing Anglicanism in the US, Britain and 'white Commonwealth' into not merely heresy, but full-scale apostacy from the Apostolic Faith.
By and large the 'Anglo-Catholic' faction is gone now: most of us are now either Orthodox or Latin--though one of the 'Continuing Anglican' groups has dropped the filoque and explicitly follow Bp. Ken's view that they adhere to the faith of the undivided Church. (I've forgotten which of the group it is--it's not the ACC, the largest. Fr. Andrew of St. Michael Skete had once expressed the view (prior to the election of Benedict XVI, mind you) that that particular Continuing Anglican group was the only Western ecclesial body with which it was worthwhile for the Orthodox to have an ecumenical dialog.
I used the past-tense in my opening sentence because I think that tension is gone: the divisions in Anglicanism are no longer between protestant (of two species--'low church' evangelicals and 'broad church' latitudinarians--and 'high church' Anglo-Catholics, but between the remaining low churchmen and actual apostates (the intellectual heirs of latitudinarianism).