HOLINESS AND WHOLENESS

Wholeness and holiness is not about measuring up to Christ. It’s Christ becoming you.
 
The substance and application of our salvation was seen by The  Church Fathers to be the effect of the nature of the trinity mediated by Jesus Christ into our person and being. This achieved the end of Adamic alienation and the joys of our communion with God. We have been enfolded in a communion  that is similar to the communion the trinity have with each other. The degree of fellowship with God in this mode reveals the paucity of legalised attempt to gain what we already have in our enfolding in God
 
NOT PIOUS
 
In my youth, piety was seen by some of us as putting on a religious act. It still has this connotation for me. Godliness on the other hand is our being the expression of Christ who lives in us and manifests as Bob, Sue and Syd. Not as deities but as the real manifestation of sons/daughters of God.
 
We may have observed in politics at times an unfortunate disconnect between a publicly touted Christianity and any real degree of grace and kindness to the unfortunate. Piety may be like this but Godliness is Christ expressed as us.
 
HOLINESS ON THE GROUND
 
Christ our life, is not something effete or religious but God incarnate in our everyday lives, our normally living selves and our life together as families and societies. It has very little to do with virtue signalling or contrived kindnesses of those who are not kind at heart and not actually whole.
 
Godliness is neither religious or a separated piety from everyday living.  It is the flowering of the real self and the practical, powerful and living way of Christ being us.
 
Godliness in Jesus is us.
 
GNOSTIC TRUTH AND UNLIFE
 
Thomas Torrance writes, “This incipient credal formulation of belief was not a ‘hypothetical system’ of ideas excogitated out of the inner religious consciousness of the Church – such as the Gnostics kept dreaming up and putting forward as an alleged ‘body of truth’ – and then arbitrarily and distortingly imposed upon the interpretation of the Gospel. Rather was it a disclosure of the internal unity and harmony of the Gospel through a representation of the way in which different ‘members of the truth’ are conjoined within the organic structure of ‘the body of the truth”. (1)
 
NOT A CONCOCTION
 
The Real Gospel is not something made-up and not a body of additional doctrine that emanated from a prophet as a modification of the gospel handed down to the saints. It is the coalescing of the original Gospel of Christ, the apostles teaching and the expression of the church fathers in the creeds. It remains  normative for the Christian church and describes what it means to belong to the Body of Christ because it expresses what it means to belong to God.
 
The Gospel is co-extensive with the trinity and is the trinity in action in that this is the enterprise of Father, Son and Holy Spirit on our behalf. Paul’s Christ our life means us alive in the Being of the trinity. God in us and us in the company of God.
 
(1) Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) (p. 76). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.