YOUR GOSPEL IS SIMPLE AND COMPREHENSIVE

You my have come across people who want to help – but they are the kind of folks who make any simple task more complicated than it is. It’s irritating and time wasting. Our Godliness in Christ is easier to understand and appropriate if it is seen as what it is: Christ’s life becoming our life in every way. Theologians call it the vicarious humanity of Christ. John called it Christ come in our flesh. Simple. It means living the incarnation everyday, aka living the eucharist.
 
The foundation of Godliness is incarnation as celebrated at the Lord’s Table.
 
GRACED WITH JESUS
 
This is to say we are graced with His justification which is Jesus Himself in place of us. We are graced with His spirit incarnated in our being so that ‘we are changed from the inside.’ This is much different to attempts to be changed from the outside as is the practise when we live from the law and from an adherence to externalities.
 
‘He saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit’ Titus 3.5 NIV.
 
Christ is for us and becomes us by the Spirit. This is Christ our life and the vicarious humanity of Christ appropriated by us because it is ours.
 
 
THEOSIS
 
Myk Habets observes that, “The introduction of theosis [participating in the Divine nature] to a Western soteriology such as [Thomas] Torrance’s removes the doctrine of the articulus justifications from a central position and affords this place instead to union with Christ, from which flow all the blessings of salvation, including justification and sanctification.
 
PART OF THE WHOLE
 
“Torrance grasps a central feature of Calvin’s theology, that the question of justification is essentially an aspect of the larger question of humanity’s relation to God in Christ, and these need not be discussed exclusively in terms of the category of justification.
 
INCLUSION IN CHRIST
 
“..,The result of including theosis in a Reformed soteriology like Torrance’s is that salvation is viewed in quite different terms. No longer is salvation thought of as exclusively salvation from sin, alienation, and hostility, although those themes are clearly part of any biblical soteriology. Instead, union, communion and participation are more meaningfully incorporated.”*  (1)
 
Thus, Jesus both saves the people from their sins and incorporates them into Himself and thus into fellowship with the triune God and in so doing makes them sons of God in spirit and in truth. As sons/daughters we express the nature of the Father by the Spirit.
 
UN-GODING AND DEHUMANISING
 
Participating in the divine nature has nothing to do with the law because law is an abstraction and Christ as God who is personal and shares with us His union with the trinity.
 
Therefore, our Christ life is not moralism and our Godliness is not us jumping through hoops. It’s simply Christ our life in every possible way. This is the basis of our life in the Spirit.
 
(1)Myk Habets. Theosis in the Theology of Thomas Torrance. P 126
 
* This is the import of the excellent book by Douglas Campbell.