BIG ON RELIGION BUT SMALL ON LIFE
11/11/24 14:59
A curiosity of fundamentalism and its attachment to ‘Bible Truth’ is that many fundamentalists don’t read the Bible much. The gospel they have extracted from it is often not Christ’s Gospel but a reductionist version of religion with the result that their utterances effect a false certainty while being oblivious to the original grand truths of our Christ-life and being.
TARE VISION
We can attach ourselves to views that we believe are bible based that are not so based at all. Some views are the result of s string of texts that have no genuine relationship to each other. Doctrine based on a string of un-related texts is ‘no gospel at all.’ This is how false christ’s and false gospels are birthed in good people.
START AT THE BEGINNING
We need to know that the law is not the foundational issue of life in God Why? Because Kingdom life is not a Christian version of the knowledge of good and evil. The foundation of your real self and true Godliness is your inclusion in the communion of God in Jesus Christ. Real Godliness is the self as a manifestation of Jesus Christ.
The most subversive non-gospels are those that frame the Christ and His Gospel in the law. The worst because they neutralise the cross, undo grace and reduce genuine Godliness to formulae and contract. Bent gospels make us the author of our own salvation.
NOT A FIXED WINESKIN
If we have been raised in legalism, we will not have a grip on what Jesus achieved for us. The Gospel of the Kingdom is Christ our life. It’s not a continuation of the law with Jesus Clothes added or a clever prescription of moralism supervised by Jesus. The new wine skin is more than justification. It’s the incarnation – Christ in the men and women who are becoming the expression of Christ. The mystery of Godliness is that Christ is expressing Himself as us so that we will be who we are in wholeness and holiness. This is Grace/real body life. Christ’s life as our life by designation and incarnation is foundational grace.
SLAVES AND SONS
As Paul indicates, ‘We get the identity of slave and worker in the law. With Christ our life we have the identity of the sons of God. Hidden in Christ we do not disappear. In union with God we are revealed as ourselves. This is authentic sonship. Myk Habets writes, “For Torrance the goal of theosis is not to become ‘God’ or even, technically speaking, to become ‘gods’. It is not the process of transcending the confines of human nature but the process and means by which the human can achieve true personhood. In Christ we become a true self and a real person.
THE TRUE PERSON CAN NOW STAND UP
“Theosis does not do away with our creatureliness; it fulfils it. In a similar vein Staniloae suggests that theosis cannot be taken literally. One cannot literally become God since that would be as absurd as if we were to state that God is a creature. The ‘transcendental determination’ inherent within each human person and realised by those united to Christ Jesus, means that men and women will be able to be and do what they were created to be and do – mirror God back to God, through Christ by the Holy Spirit.” (1) This is what it means to participate in the divine nature. Sons/daughters participate in Father.
INCLUSION
Not cardboard cut-outs. This is to say that we become sons of God in spirit and in truth as expressions of Christ in Christ’s Sonship. In Christ we are sons in our being and increasingly exhibit this sonship in our behaviour. But let’s be clear.
The fruit of sonship is wholeness and holiness. But the main issue – is inclusion in God. One with God, we are set free from the mode of the law of separation, sin and death. Good and evil is not now the main issue. Our union with God is the main issue, which is why Paul said, ‘Christ our life’ and not ‘Christ our law’ and why John spoke of Christ come in our flesh as the imprimatur of the spirit that comes from God and not the law come in our flesh.
Each person has an inheritance that is to be the expression of Christ in their uniqueness. Doing this as the church, we are the expression of Christ. His true Body.
(1) Myk Habets, Theosis in the Theology of Thomas Torrance, p 44.
