PARTICIPATING IN GOD AS SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF GOD
01/05/23 07:59
In Christ our life we participate in the divine nature as God in Christ incarnates Himself in our being. This is not law-keeping as the legalist might maintain. Indeed, participating in God via the law is an oxymoron as the law is the state of being separated from God in Adam and his seduction to the lie that man is able to achieve a superior state of godliness, by going it alone. Going independently in separation from father, who it is insinuated cannot be trusted.
THEOSIS MEANS..
Thomas Torrance writes, “The term theosis is indeed embarrassing, if we would think of it in ‘ontological categories’. Indeed, man simply cannot become ‘god’. But the Fathers were thinking in ‘personal’, terms, and the mystery of personal communion was involved at this point. Theosis means a personal encounter. It is the ultimate intercourse with God, in which the whole of human existence is, as it were, permeated by the Divine Presence.”
CHRIST COME IN US
Participation in God in Christ is the riches of our inheritance realised in authentic Christian Belief. This is life in the Spirit because it is Christ come in our flesh. It’s not wishy-washy because it has the holism of Christ expressed as you. Thus, we become a manifestation of Christ rather than an expression of selected tid-bits of the knowledge of good and evil that are icons of our denominational thinking.
Jesus established Himself as the Way to God in His Person. Myk Habets in his discussion of theosis in Thomas Torrance observes that, “Knowledge is the basis of this aspect of theosis: knowledge of God the Father as revealed through God the Son.
Jesus Christ is the Truth who has accommodated himself to humanity in an economic condescension. He is also a man who hears and obeys the Divine Word in his incarnate life. As such he provides for us in his own obedient Sonship, within our human nature, the way whereby we are carried up to knowledge of God the Father – the attainment of true life.” (1)
IT’S IN THE SPIRIT aka SPIRITUALITY
We do participate in the Divine Nature in the Spirit and never in the law – whose essence is separation from God. The attempt to do so leads to frustration or delusionary righteousness assumed through a formula that becomes a contract that we think we do to earn God. Legalism is the home of home of hypocrisy not because people mean it to be but because when Christ is not our life we are neither graced or capable of holistic living.
REALISE HIS LIFE AS YOURS
Paul spoke of Christ in you as the essence of a graced and Godly life. John spoke of Christ come in our flesh and declared Godliness an infusion of the Presence into our being in the words, ‘On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you’ John 14.20 NIV. Jesus talked of entering the realisation of this because it is our stepping through the Door of Jesus into real life, real Godliness and real self-hood. Unless we do this we are not borm again no matter how devout we may be.
THE EXCHANGE
“That the eternal Son took what was ours that we might have what is his was not merely a central theme in Patristic thought. It lay at the heart of John Calvin’s account of the mirifica commutatio (the wonderful exchange manifest in the incarnate Son) and it would become a central affirmation in the soteriologies of Karl Barth, Hans Urs von Balthazar, and T. F. Torrance as also the many contemporary theologians influenced by them.” (2)
PARTAKING IN THE DIVINE NATURE
Thomas Torrance puts participating in the divine nature in its Biblical context when he writes, “In the ascension of the Son of Man, New Man in Christ is given to partake of divine nature. There we reach the goal of the incarnation, in our great Prodomos or Forerunner at the right hand of God. We are with Jesus beside God, for we are gathered up in him and included in his own self-presentation before the Father.”
THE SUBTERFUGE
Legalism is a culture that dulls our perception of Christ, suffocates our being as a true and holy self and side-steps the reality of participating in the divine nature by actually separating us from Christ and genuine Godliness.
We can be slightly out in our Christian belief and advance into the fullness of Kingdom life when we have a passion for Jesus. Wrong belief can vary from a misguided variation on doctrine to cultish addiction to beliefs that have grown like weeds from fraud and presumptuous claims about speaking on behalf of God. The latter are productive of mediocrity to misery. They absorb people in trivial pursuit while denying them the real presence of God.
(1) Myk Habets. Theosis in the Theology of Thomas Torrance. P 126
(2) Introduction to McSwain, Jeff. Simul Sanctification: Barth’s Hidden Vision for Human Transformation (Princeton Theological Monograph Series Book 232) . Pickwick Publications, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.
THEOSIS MEANS..
Thomas Torrance writes, “The term theosis is indeed embarrassing, if we would think of it in ‘ontological categories’. Indeed, man simply cannot become ‘god’. But the Fathers were thinking in ‘personal’, terms, and the mystery of personal communion was involved at this point. Theosis means a personal encounter. It is the ultimate intercourse with God, in which the whole of human existence is, as it were, permeated by the Divine Presence.”
CHRIST COME IN US
Participation in God in Christ is the riches of our inheritance realised in authentic Christian Belief. This is life in the Spirit because it is Christ come in our flesh. It’s not wishy-washy because it has the holism of Christ expressed as you. Thus, we become a manifestation of Christ rather than an expression of selected tid-bits of the knowledge of good and evil that are icons of our denominational thinking.
Jesus established Himself as the Way to God in His Person. Myk Habets in his discussion of theosis in Thomas Torrance observes that, “Knowledge is the basis of this aspect of theosis: knowledge of God the Father as revealed through God the Son.
Jesus Christ is the Truth who has accommodated himself to humanity in an economic condescension. He is also a man who hears and obeys the Divine Word in his incarnate life. As such he provides for us in his own obedient Sonship, within our human nature, the way whereby we are carried up to knowledge of God the Father – the attainment of true life.” (1)
IT’S IN THE SPIRIT aka SPIRITUALITY
We do participate in the Divine Nature in the Spirit and never in the law – whose essence is separation from God. The attempt to do so leads to frustration or delusionary righteousness assumed through a formula that becomes a contract that we think we do to earn God. Legalism is the home of home of hypocrisy not because people mean it to be but because when Christ is not our life we are neither graced or capable of holistic living.
REALISE HIS LIFE AS YOURS
Paul spoke of Christ in you as the essence of a graced and Godly life. John spoke of Christ come in our flesh and declared Godliness an infusion of the Presence into our being in the words, ‘On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you’ John 14.20 NIV. Jesus talked of entering the realisation of this because it is our stepping through the Door of Jesus into real life, real Godliness and real self-hood. Unless we do this we are not borm again no matter how devout we may be.
THE EXCHANGE
“That the eternal Son took what was ours that we might have what is his was not merely a central theme in Patristic thought. It lay at the heart of John Calvin’s account of the mirifica commutatio (the wonderful exchange manifest in the incarnate Son) and it would become a central affirmation in the soteriologies of Karl Barth, Hans Urs von Balthazar, and T. F. Torrance as also the many contemporary theologians influenced by them.” (2)
PARTAKING IN THE DIVINE NATURE
Thomas Torrance puts participating in the divine nature in its Biblical context when he writes, “In the ascension of the Son of Man, New Man in Christ is given to partake of divine nature. There we reach the goal of the incarnation, in our great Prodomos or Forerunner at the right hand of God. We are with Jesus beside God, for we are gathered up in him and included in his own self-presentation before the Father.”
THE SUBTERFUGE
Legalism is a culture that dulls our perception of Christ, suffocates our being as a true and holy self and side-steps the reality of participating in the divine nature by actually separating us from Christ and genuine Godliness.
We can be slightly out in our Christian belief and advance into the fullness of Kingdom life when we have a passion for Jesus. Wrong belief can vary from a misguided variation on doctrine to cultish addiction to beliefs that have grown like weeds from fraud and presumptuous claims about speaking on behalf of God. The latter are productive of mediocrity to misery. They absorb people in trivial pursuit while denying them the real presence of God.
(1) Myk Habets. Theosis in the Theology of Thomas Torrance. P 126
(2) Introduction to McSwain, Jeff. Simul Sanctification: Barth’s Hidden Vision for Human Transformation (Princeton Theological Monograph Series Book 232) . Pickwick Publications, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.
