LIVNG THE SUBSTANCE
03/10/24 12:37
Wholeness and holiness is not about measuring up to Christ. It’s Christ for you and Christ becoming you.
The Lord’s Table means that Christ is in us to be expressed as us.
The substance and application of our salvation and our life in the fellowship of God was seen by The Church Fathers to be the effect of the nature of the trinity and the replication of its oneness in us - a healed person and a healed community. This achieved the end of Adamic alienation and gave us the joys of our communion with God. In Christ the holiness of God is attributed to us and the wholeness of God is imparted to our persons.
NOT PIOUS
Such a communion, we need to say, is not something effete or religious but God incarnate in our everyday lives, in our normally living selves and our life together as families and societies. It has very little to do with the studied/externalised ‘virtue signalling’ of those who are judgmental, not kind and not whole.
NEW CREATION LIFE IS INCARNATION
This quality of life in us is the solution to the political/legalist posturing and the ‘Babylon/Egypt’ of chaos in which our polity demonstrates its futility. Political correctness in its religious and political forms is the octopus that makes us impotent and un-human. Godliness is neither religious or a separated piety from everyday living. It is the flowering of the real self, to make true society and the practical, powerful and living way of transforming ourselves and the creation. Thus Christ is our life - or we are not alive.
MORE THAN CHURCHISM
Beware of politics that touts Christianity yet ignores truth, integrity, grace and social justice. Godliness in Jesus is us. Never churchianity or a self-serving, self-made agenda of Christian works based entitlement.
GNOSTIC TAINT
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
It was not something made-up and not a body of additional doctrine that emanated from a prophet and solidified as a brand - as a modification of the gospel handed down to the saints. It was 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.
KINGDOM LIFE
The Gospel is co-extensive with the trinity and is the trinity in action in the Church. This is the enterprise of Father, Son and Holy Spirit on our behalf and in us as individuals and the Church Jesus builds.
(1) Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) (p. 76). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
