OUR UNION WITH CHRIST

Rev. Dr. Douglas Olds

19 January 2022

“God is humanized in Christ, and, conversely, the human nature in Christ is deified” (Bavinck 2006, 309). As we become in union with Christ, the more we grow to fulfill the divine program for humanity in creation. Living with Jesus as Lord is to exist in union with him (we act in the Lord[’s name]): Rom. 14; 1 Cor. 6; Col. 3:17; Eph. 6:.1; Phil. 1:.21). And we die with Christ (Gal. 6:.14-15; Rom. 3) and share in his sufferings by our crucified life that we may share in his glory in the final days (Rom 8:17; 1 Pet. 4.13). Through union with Christ, we come to experience God as Christ experiences him—especially seeing God through our vision of the world as Christ sees it and us (Mt. 5: 8; 1 Jn. 3: 2). In our union with Christ, we experience active, heart, and intellectual communion with the Divine Trinity (John 14:23).[2]

Following the pattern of God dwelling among his people in the tabernacle (Exod. 25:8; 29:45; Leviticus; Numbers), Scripture prophecies the future dwelling of God among his people:

Ezekiel 43:7: “I will dwell in the midst of the people of Israel forever.”

Zechariah 2:10: “I come and I will dwell in your midst” (cf. Hag. 2:5).

John 1:14: “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

John 2:19, 22: “‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ … he was speaking about the temple of his body.”

The temple, the place where God dwells among human beings (Ps. 65:4), which the Old Testament structure prefigures, is the body of Jesus Christ. By Spiritual union to the body of Christ, we too enter and become the temple of God:

1 Corinthians 6:19: “your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you.”

John 14:23: “Jesus answered him, ‘If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.’”

Eph 2:19–22: So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, 20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, 21 in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. 22 In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.

Christ as sacrifice accomplishes far more in the NT. (See John 1:29, 35; 1 Cor. 5:7; Heb. 9:25-6; Rom. 3:25a). It is a cosmic atonement that includes expiation, purging, cleansing, and reparation/redemption functions. Christ is constituted as the living replacement of the temple, and where he lives, the Temple of God is also. In our union with him, we must act in our full life as dwelling continually in the temple of God as described in Exodus and Leviticus. We must pursue constant holiness and moral purity; we must avoid unclean thoughts; we must not corrupt our union with drunkenness (Lev. 8); we avoid profane speech and do not mix the pursuit of private wealth with worship of God. We must make our bodily members sacred implements for the dwelling of God (1 Cor. 12; Rom. 12; Eph. 4: 25; 2 Ti 2:14-24)—ever shining the lamp of truth and grace, making free will offerings of charity, praise, and thanksgiving. We must forgive our neighbors and make reparations for wrongdoing alongside offering to God a repentant heart. We must be constantly aware of the prods of our conscience as the central seat of the Spirit dwelling in us, which seals our confidence in redemption. Our free will offerings are voluntary acts of embodied conscience that respond directionally to the pull of Christ’s loving presence within and God’s presence in the push of love toward marginalized neighbors outside. Union with Christ is both inner-directed and outer-directed to those in need. In our union with Christ stitched by the Spirit, we are pulled toward perfection and pushed outward in love to neighbor and Christ toward virtue, justice, peace, truth, freedom, and charity.

Jesus’s humanity accompanied the Logos by learning obedience to it, so too in our sanctification we are joined and made obedient to the Logos. “He must become greater; I must become less” (John 3:30). Our ego becomes subordinated to the Logos in the way Jesus was subordinated in his human nature to God. Kenosis and condescension are salvific features of the human union with the divine Word, characteristic of the forgiven new humanity we put on in Christ.

Union with Christ is living fully inside the Word of God. Its contents become the foundation of our Spirit-guided conscience.

The Lamb of God is our way to God. He is Immanuel, God with and in union with us, who tore away the veil from the temple that kept God apart from us. In our union with Christ we have that forgiveness accomplished on the Cross and the receipt of Christ’s character and spirit/conscience in our own mortal selves, whereby we put on Christ and take off the old man (cf. Eph. 4.22-4; Col. 3:10). Our redemption was accomplished on the Cross by his pure blood (Eph. 1:7; Heb. 9:22; 1 Jn. 1:7), the righteousness of whom then flows to us—as a mystery of eternal love--in our Spirit-led conscience and consciousness of Him.

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[2] The breakdown of divisions--such as those of subject/object, ideational representation/thing in itself, sensation/mental  picture, divine/creature—is processively teleological and organicizing, the circulation of blood in the life of the flesh, and of the circulation of the Spirit in communion with God. Processive organicism in the union with Christ is thus deeply and necessarily ethical. Healing of agonism’s dysfunctions is founded on righteous ethics (Ps. 85, esp.10b). At the eschaton, the integration of these circulations of spirit and matter fulfills, and is fulfilled in, the Absolute Logos as God becomes all-in-all (Col. 3:11; 1 Cor. 15:28), a process that involves dying to self as the initiation of sacrificial deontological ethic--.“dying to the self” and its desires:

 Gal. 2:20  I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

Luke 9:23  And he said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.

Luke 14:33  So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.

1 Cor. 15:31

I protest, brothers, by my pride in you, which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die every day!

Rom. 6:3-11

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. ...

Php. 1:21  For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.

Luke 14:27  Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.

Rom. 12:1 (=Heb. 5: 1-10 + Rom. 8.29) I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

Col. 3:3

John 12:24-26

     The psychotherapist Irvin D. Yalom (1989, 21) warns against love that “fuses” two parties: “One of the great paradoxes of life is that self-awareness breeds anxiety. Fusion eradicates anxiety in a radical fashion— by eliminating self-awareness. The person who has fallen in love, and entered a blissful state of merger, is not self-reflective because the questioning lonely I (and the attendant anxiety of isolation) dissolve into the we. Thus one sheds anxiety but loses oneself. This is precisely why therapists do not like to treat a [care seeker] who has fallen in love. Therapy and a state of love-merger are incompatible because therapeutic work requires a questioning  self-awareness and an anxiety that will ultimately serve as guide to internal conflicts…Beware the powerful exclusive attachment to another; it is not, as people sometimes think, evidence of the purity of the love. Such encapsulated, exclusive love—feeding on itself, neither giving to nor caring about others—is destined to cave in on itself.”

Yalom, Irvin D.  Love's Executioner: & Other Tales of Psychotherapy. Basic Books, 1989.

     Yalom notes two cautions in human fusion or “union.” First, that it leads to the loss of self-awareness that would otherwise bring the guidance of normative anxiety. Second, that such fused attachments do not promote caring about others. In contrast, “union with Christ” evades both of these problems. The eternal gospel (Rev. 14:6-7) is founded in fear of the Lord, so that union with Christ does not vanquish anxiety, but instead redirects it toward its ontological source in creation. Second, union with Christ embodies love of God and other humans (Lev. 19:18; Mk. 12:30-31). Union with Christ is manifestly distinct from fusion inside human erotic relationships.