ALIVE IN THE PERSON OF CHRIST OUR LIFE
19/08/24 07:17
In the TV show ‘Bones’, Temperance Brennan is a brilliant forensic scientist while her companion in crime, prevention, Booth is a very effective FBI agent. Of the two, Booth has the better grip on his humanity, while Bones as intelligent as she is, just does not get it about the more human side of life. Case of not seeing the forest for the trees.
BE HUMAN NOT A CONSTRUCT
Similarly, it’s helpful to worship a personal Jesus, rather than be an adherent of an ideology or a representative of a belief system. The latter folk often find it difficult to come to grips with the reality of the Gospel – the essence of which is to become spirt and life by union with God. And not just be an apparatchik of a bunch of beliefs and behaviours.
THREE PERSONED GOD
Thomas Torrance believes that, “When thinking about God as the basis upon which all theology rests, [he] repeatedly insisted upon several crucial points: 1) that there is no God behind the back of Jesus Christ;
2) For that reason we cannot know God truly apart from our own personal union with Christ that takes place through the Spirit;
3) That what God is toward us in Christ and for us in his Spirit he is eternally in himself so that ‘if he were not Love in his innermost Being, his love toward us in Christ and the Holy Spirit would be ontologically groundless’.
4) That it is in the cross of Christ that God’s love is revealed ‘for in refusing to spare his own Son whom he delivered up for us all, God has revealed that he loves us more than he loves himself’; and
5) That soteriology is intimately connected with the doctrine of the Trinity. (1)
IT’S PERSONAL
The two stand-out points above are firstly that ‘God cannot be known and understood apart from a personal union with Christ through the Spirit. This implies what can be observed. That the barrier of the law muffles the light and life that can be had in Christ.
Secondly that by atonement, we have been made one with a person and not an abstraction.
Thirdly that God is love is demonstrated by the cross and most importantly God loves us more than God loves Himself. This is a striking contrast to the ethos of the political and economic system In which we live and so different to the meanness and divisiveness that is the hallmark of some political leaders- who ‘do not know what spirit they are of’.
Acceptance with God is not earned. Christ has earned our union with God. If we are to be truly human and truly alive we need to live in Christ who is our grace and not in some confected entitlement we think we have formulated.
(1) Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) . Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
