ALIVE IN IN AN UN-VITIATED GOSPEL
25/11/24 14:26
Theosis is participating in God. Our salvation is assured and our life in Christ is more fulsome than many have come to expect. We do not earn the company of Jesus in this life and we do not carry our level of improvement into heaven.
Christ has earned real life for for us. Reality is Christ. If we hope to see things as they are rather than be deluded by superficiality, spin and lies disguised as life, we need to live Christ our life. A state of being – rather than religion. There is no substitute for Jesus Eyes.
The foundation of Kingdom Life is a completed atonement and Christ come in our flesh. Our inheritance is a certainty and our spirit comes alive in this life because ‘Christ is our life,’ as Paul says. This does not mean that we will have an easy life, but it does mean that we will be alive in Spirit and life. The new covenant is called the New Covenant because Christ is that Covenant. Beware of gospels that are half-grace and unfinished atonement. They are spiritual junk food.
KINGDOM LIFE
The idol of church growth assumes that those already churched have a Christ-life worth speaking of. Not always. Kingdom life is more than church attendance and church maintenance. Be careful what you plant and insist that it not be tares. His real church grows sons and daughters of God.
Real Church Growth comes from planting people in Jesus – it is rooting them in oneness with Jesus. Plant a church and we will harvest a church. Plant Jesus in people and we will harvest daughters and sons of God who have agency and clout in heaven and on earth. We need the kind of church planting that is better than establishing a new set of empty boxes in another location. Our life in God is more than beliefs. It’s a state of being – of being one with God in Christ. What does this oneness look like? Jesus declared it as ‘I in them and you in me--so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me’ John 17.23 This oneness is the uncomplicated norm. Not some expression of ‘anything goes’ or the or the busyness of ideologues.
GLORY
The glory of you is to be yourself in Christ. Paradoxically we are revealed by being hidden in Christ. We are alive in our spirit when Christ is our life. We live His life when the eucharist is our living rather than a rite.
Jesus invites us to participate in His life in God. Christ has drawn us into God in a complete oneness that has been called ‘The vicarious humanity of Christ.’ This means that Christ represents us to God and Christ mediates God to us. Obedience means agreeing with Christ that this is so - so that we have His mind on the matter of our salvation. This is a salvation that is more than forgiveness for sin. It is union with God. Right thinking starts with your True Christ and authentic Gospel. Right thoughts matter. In the polity, dull and unperceptive leaders think selfish, crooked thoughts, say wacky things and put in place ineffectual people and policies. You walk in light and life in a real relationship with Jesus. Here you ‘never walk in darkness but have the light of life’.
IT’S A STATE OF BEING
Our part is to participate in the inheritance that is already ours. Vanhoozer cites Constantine Cambell who proposes that participation in Christ may be defined in terms of terms of union, participation, identification, incorporation. Charles Taylor depicts being in Christ as involving (1) a notion of the good (2) an understanding of the self (3) a narrative to live in and (4) a sense of community. We might add walking in the Gospel of Jesus and the apostles, rather than the aberrant gospel of a sect or cult.
BEING IN GOD’S COMMUNION
Clearly these concepts of being in Christ are ontological – a state of being in which we as Believers are incorporated into the reality of the Communion of the Trinity. If we are serious about belonging to the Body of Christ we must assert that we have been enveloped by God (the trinity) in Jesus and that we have been made one with real and Ultimate Persons by the enterprise of God.
Being in Christ results in being ourselves – thus Christ in you the hope of glory. Your glory as a son/daughter of God is to be the person that you were pre-destined to be in Christ. Oneness with God is not church, missionary work, praise and worship or Christian information. It’s incarnation. Incarnated the things just mentioned become filled with Christ’s spirit and life.
Real Presence in the terms explained by Leanne Payne is God incarnated in you. The flesh accomplishes noting because anything without the Presence is not alive with the life of Father, Son and Holy Spirit which is real life.
BEING ONE IS NOT A ‘LETTER ARTEFACT’
Therefore, being part of the Body of Christ is not a legalism or an assertion of the letter. It’s a state of being in which we are in God and God is in us. Our humanity has been woven into God in Christ and in Christ God has been woven into our being. This state of being is a fact, an ontological reality. So it is not an anointhg or a spiritual gift. But it is ministered by Holy Spirit with Jesus Christ and Our Father. In Father in this state of being we are truly sons/daughters of God.
NEW COVENANT STATED
Jesus Christ is more than enough. Kevin Vanhoozer writes “Karl Barth divided Paul’s long opening sentence into four sections, each beginning with “in Christ”
– in Christ, we have election (vv. 4–6)
– in Christ, we have liberation and forgiveness (vv. 7–10)
– in Christ, we have an inheritance and therefore hope (vv. 11–12)
– in Christ, we have the sealing of the Spirit, the pledge of our inheritance (vv. 13–14).
These blessings constitute one reality – all that we have “in Christ” – expressed in three tenses: past (election), present (forgiveness and the Spirit), and future (the hope of our inheritance). Stated differently: “in Christ” is shorthand for the whole doctrine of salvation, and thus the whole of redemptive history” (1)
In the Early Church the heresy was Arianism. In the present church it is ‘new perspectives on Paul’ – legalism justified and re-invented as a gospel that makes the Gospel of Jesus and the apostles impotent. Those shaped in legalism like this teaching because it confirms their error and comforts their confusion. See light in Christ’s Light to avoid humbug religion.
(1) Kevin J. Vanhoozer The Introduction to the Mystery of Christ, p16,
