NOT FOETID IN ‘ANOTHER GOSPEL’
02/10/24 12:01
The Gospel of the Kingdom is what God actually did and who we are as a result. It’s not ‘any gospel’ or ‘another gospel’ but it is Jesus’ Gospel and the Gospel that Paul called ‘My Gospel.’ So this is not a gospel that we can just make up or modify and still call it the gospel of Christ. It’s the gospel that decided the authentic nature of belonging in the Body of Christ.
REAL LIFE
‘The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you--they are full of the Spirit and life’ John 6.63 NIV.
“The canon of truth, as we learn from Irenaeus, gave an essentially trinitarian account of the Gospel and the whole mind of the apostles, and guided inquiry into ‘the mystery and economic activity of the living God’. (1)
PERICHORESIS
It is the nature of God as God that is the nature of God in us. This is the meaning of belonging to the Body of Christ, which is actually our inclusion in the Family of the trinity, not as Gods but as daughters and sons. We are not Gods. We are the sons/daughters of God – an elevated mode of Being that is much more than a religious construct or an expression of the law.
NOT SO MYTERIOUS
This mystery and ‘economic activity’ is God’s achievement of salvation for us – a salvation that is more than mere salvation as the achievement of our union (oneness) with God. This is a mystical union because it is not found in the law or externalities although they may be the evidence of them in which case they are the fruits of the Spirit. The fruit of oneness with God is life in all its forms. This is fruit of the kind that Jesus called spirit and life.
The spirit of sonship is not a name or a designation. It’s a state of being in the oneness with God that is our inheritance of Christ our life. It’s not religion or even ‘christianity.’ It’s a raw ‘Christ in you, Christ as you’ incarnation of the fullness of God in your person and in us ours.
(1) Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) (p. 75). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
