TRUTH IS LIFE AND LIFE IS CHRIST

This post is about accounts of truth and reality compared to accounts that are not. There is a one letter difference between lie and life and we will discern this when Christ is our life.
 
LIFE AND RIGHTEOUSNESS IS CHRIST
 
Righteousness is not an abstraction although we may think it is if we have been raised in a legalistic culture. Righteousness as John indicates is ‘Christ come in our flesh’ and as Paul declares is ‘Christ who is our life’. A whole person approach to Godliness couched in the law is a contradiction in terms, since there is nothing whole or coherent in an agenda formed from the knowledge of good and evil. At its best legalism is a gnostic philosophy. At its worst it everyone for himself in the quest to be godly. But such godliness is no godliness at all. The only real Godliness is God expressed as you.
 
HIS VERY SELF
 
Thomas Torrance “Uses the language of “imputation” [of righteousness] yet understands it in personal, filial, and ontological* terms. He argues that God does not give us abstract benefits; he gives us his very self: “Grace is to be understood as the impartation not just of something from God but of God Himself. In Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit God freely gives to us in such a way that the Gift and the Giver are one and the same in the wholeness and indivisibility of His grace.” Paul asserts that Christ is our righteousness (1 Cor 1:30). We receive righteousness not through an external imputation of the benefits of Christ but through a personal participation in Christ’s very self.” (1)
 
GRACE IS  NOT OUR DOING
 
Legalists may find this hard to accept because it involves repenting of self-made grace and requires more of themselves than they are prepared to give. Denominationalists may be scared off because if Christ is our life, then their accumulated perspectives, distinctives, identity and careers are a bogus sense of entitlement because they are not life.
 
MURKY LENS
 
Versions of the knowledge of good and evil, aka legalists or fundamentalist or those of a philosophical bent see through a glass darkly and like goldfish in a fish-bowl on a table in the middle of the lounge, think what they are living in is reality. Douglas Campbell is right when he observes that when comparing the legalist with the otologist for whom Christ is life, “They are not giving the same account of the truth or the same account of reality.”
*Ontological - Ontological is a philosophical term used to describe the study of being, the nature of existence, and the underlying structure of reality. It is concerned with fundamental questions such as “what is the nature of reality?”, “what is the nature of existence?”, and “what is the nature of the relationship between mind and matter?” In other words, ontology is the study of what is real, and explores the nature of reality.
(1)Radcliff, Alexandra S.. The Claim of Humanity in Christ: Salvation and Sanctification in the Theology of T. F. and J. B. Torrance (Princeton Theological Monograph Series Book 222) (pp. 68-69). Pickwick Publications, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.