HOW TO MEDIATE CHRIST’S LIFE
12/11/24 10:06
Christ Himself is our life. Oneness with the Living Word enables us to ‘rightly divide the word of truth’ and be real persons rather than a religious construct. Myk Habets writes, “[Carl] Henry was a Biblicist who rigorously upheld the inerrancy and infallibility of Scripture… His theology amounts to a rejection of personal revelation in favour of an absolute propositional revelation. Henry disagrees with Torrance in Torrance’s contention that only through regeneration and repentance may one actually know God.” (1) Habets is correct. A merely propositional reading of scripture is the Bible read in the ‘letter that kills life’. A propositional perspective alone is an epistemological expression of legalism - a mode that brings with it the dryness of externality based religion that is not spirituality.
Words and themes of the Bible have a far greater reality than mere words on paper. They are vehicles of ultimate being. They have a reference beyond the text in the Being of God. In this post we compare knowing God as a result of assenting to propositions about God to knowing God as our being part of God’s being.
KNOW GOD
‘Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent’ John 17.3 NIV. Knowing in the Kingdom sense implies union.
ONENESS OF BEING
Knowing God in the context of Bible thought has the connotation of union, as with one’s spouse or with God. Thus other gods/other gospels imply adultery. Oneness with God is of the kind intimated by Moses and celebrated by David but lived by Jesus Christ as a human being; a human who was one with His Father. Nowadays, in Jesus Christ we have this oneness as a gift. It’s our possession on account of Jesus. We and Father are one in Jesus’ Person. Thus, true life is the eucharist lived.
FUNDAMENTALUST DEAD RIBS
Thomas Torrance exposes theologies of the letter when he writes, “The practical and the epistemological effect of a fundamentalism .. is to give an infallible Bible and a set of rigid evangelical beliefs primacy over God's self-revelation which is mediated to us through the Bible. This effect is only reinforced by the regular fundamentalist identification of biblical statements about the truth with the truth itself to which they refer. ...The living reality of God's self-revelation through Jesus Christ and in the Spirit is in point of fact made secondary to the Scriptures." (4) This has been called ‘Bible Deism.’
HAVING AN AFFAIR
Fundamentalist Christianity may not be adulterous. But a letter relationship with God is a depleted remnant of the fullness available to all in oneness with Christ. One can live in union with God as the Bride of Christ or in something like a casual and intermittent relationship one may have in a sexual affair.
Sex is no more a marriage than proof texts are a relationship with God.
‘The letter’ is a parody of being one with the Body of Christ. But incarnation is union with God I spirit and soul as the Bride of Christ. The law is a deficient lens of Biblical interpretation and can be relied on to produce a distorted exegesis.
CHRIST OUR LIFE
Jesus and our union with God as a lived reality is our theme in these posts: We declare Christ our life. We maintain that one may acknowledge the presence of God and be aware of God in nature and the stories of the Bible – but one does not know God through propositions and definitions. The knowing of God is analogous to the knowing of one’s wife in social, sexual and spiritual union – ‘knowing’ is a state of being one in a good marriage.
Knowing God is not a result of the pious effort of Bible study alone. It happens as we agree with Christ that He has included us in His life. One knows God by entering the union with God that is ours in the incarnation. Even then one knows some of God, courtesy of Jesus Christ. However, knowing God in His infinity is an unending adventure that cannot be fitted into a series of propositions or defined in Bible studies. Knowing God is a life.
JESUS MAKES US ONE
Habets continues, “Interpreting Torrance accurately, I think, Henry shows that according to Torrance, only Jesus, who is the Logos, can know the truth through human concepts and statements, because Christ is the God-man.” (2) Baxter Kruger affirms Torrance on this point, relying in the scripture that ‘No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.’ Matt 11.27 NIV. Jesus reveals Himself to those He knows. Not to those of whom He says, ‘I never knew you.’
BEING AND KNOWING
‘Knowing’ is clearly the essence of being and being a person where God is concerned. Father and son know each other. Jesus reveals to His followers Himself and the Father. Those who choose to know God get to know God from Christ the Son of God. God enfolds us in His being. For Torrance, knowing and being is our inclusion in the Being of the trinity and the ‘I AM’ of God. As sons and daughters, we know in a similar way. In Jesus God has enfolded humanity in Himself in order that we know God as God is.
JESUS IS WAY AND TRUTH
I was taken aback on a mission trip years ago, when I heard a Christian urge some young men that there is a higher authority than Jesus in knowing God – this is the Bible, he maintained.* The fact is however, that Jesus is known through Himself and the Bible is only truth when read in oneness and subordination to Jesus.
CLOUD WITHOUT RAIN
Knowing God and sound doctrine is not about proof texts, definitions and positional statements. Eternal life is to know God and Jesus Christ whom God has sent. It’s a state of being that is oneness with God because we believe it and live it – not because we have found a scripture that says we are ‘all of the one loaf’. There are mouldy loaves and fresh loaves. If our belief is merely propositional we can claim this union but be bereft of its substance.
SACRAMENTAL READING
“Torrance can thus say: “Theological knowledge and
theological statements participate sacramentally in the mystery of
Christ as the Truth.” As such revelation is, for Torrance, uniquely
personal and uniquely propositional to Christ, and mediated to
others to the extent that they participate in Christ. It is thus faith
(revelation) in Christ and not philosophy which forms the
conceptual bridge between God and humanity.” (3)
HOW TO SEE IN THE SPIRIT
Fundamentalism can deny the way, the truth and the life by attempting to make eternal life ‘words’. Jesus told Nicodemus that we cannot see and know the Kingdom if we are not born again. We are born again when we die to religion and rise with Jesus to life in His Person.
RELIGION TO ONENESS
The above is really an account of how we come to know God through the new birth and why we cannot see the Kingdom or know much of Him in religion, particularly fundamentalism. The letter makes us blind to the same extent that it makes us die.
Some theologies are actually a sophisticated Christian version of the knowledge of good and evil. The genuine Kingdom is not a religion. It’s a life of oneness with God. Unless our experience of God is the Fall Undone, we live our life as paupers rather than priests and kings.
* Bibliolatry – bible idolatry or Bible deism.
(1) Myk Habets, Theosis in the Theology of Thomas Torrance.
(2) Ibid.
(3) Ibid.
(4) Thomas F. Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology. Westminster Press. 1981. pgs 16,17,18).
Words and themes of the Bible have a far greater reality than mere words on paper. They are vehicles of ultimate being. They have a reference beyond the text in the Being of God. In this post we compare knowing God as a result of assenting to propositions about God to knowing God as our being part of God’s being.
KNOW GOD
‘Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent’ John 17.3 NIV. Knowing in the Kingdom sense implies union.
ONENESS OF BEING
Knowing God in the context of Bible thought has the connotation of union, as with one’s spouse or with God. Thus other gods/other gospels imply adultery. Oneness with God is of the kind intimated by Moses and celebrated by David but lived by Jesus Christ as a human being; a human who was one with His Father. Nowadays, in Jesus Christ we have this oneness as a gift. It’s our possession on account of Jesus. We and Father are one in Jesus’ Person. Thus, true life is the eucharist lived.
FUNDAMENTALUST DEAD RIBS
Thomas Torrance exposes theologies of the letter when he writes, “The practical and the epistemological effect of a fundamentalism .. is to give an infallible Bible and a set of rigid evangelical beliefs primacy over God's self-revelation which is mediated to us through the Bible. This effect is only reinforced by the regular fundamentalist identification of biblical statements about the truth with the truth itself to which they refer. ...The living reality of God's self-revelation through Jesus Christ and in the Spirit is in point of fact made secondary to the Scriptures." (4) This has been called ‘Bible Deism.’
HAVING AN AFFAIR
Fundamentalist Christianity may not be adulterous. But a letter relationship with God is a depleted remnant of the fullness available to all in oneness with Christ. One can live in union with God as the Bride of Christ or in something like a casual and intermittent relationship one may have in a sexual affair.
Sex is no more a marriage than proof texts are a relationship with God.
‘The letter’ is a parody of being one with the Body of Christ. But incarnation is union with God I spirit and soul as the Bride of Christ. The law is a deficient lens of Biblical interpretation and can be relied on to produce a distorted exegesis.
CHRIST OUR LIFE
Jesus and our union with God as a lived reality is our theme in these posts: We declare Christ our life. We maintain that one may acknowledge the presence of God and be aware of God in nature and the stories of the Bible – but one does not know God through propositions and definitions. The knowing of God is analogous to the knowing of one’s wife in social, sexual and spiritual union – ‘knowing’ is a state of being one in a good marriage.
Knowing God is not a result of the pious effort of Bible study alone. It happens as we agree with Christ that He has included us in His life. One knows God by entering the union with God that is ours in the incarnation. Even then one knows some of God, courtesy of Jesus Christ. However, knowing God in His infinity is an unending adventure that cannot be fitted into a series of propositions or defined in Bible studies. Knowing God is a life.
JESUS MAKES US ONE
Habets continues, “Interpreting Torrance accurately, I think, Henry shows that according to Torrance, only Jesus, who is the Logos, can know the truth through human concepts and statements, because Christ is the God-man.” (2) Baxter Kruger affirms Torrance on this point, relying in the scripture that ‘No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.’ Matt 11.27 NIV. Jesus reveals Himself to those He knows. Not to those of whom He says, ‘I never knew you.’
BEING AND KNOWING
‘Knowing’ is clearly the essence of being and being a person where God is concerned. Father and son know each other. Jesus reveals to His followers Himself and the Father. Those who choose to know God get to know God from Christ the Son of God. God enfolds us in His being. For Torrance, knowing and being is our inclusion in the Being of the trinity and the ‘I AM’ of God. As sons and daughters, we know in a similar way. In Jesus God has enfolded humanity in Himself in order that we know God as God is.
JESUS IS WAY AND TRUTH
I was taken aback on a mission trip years ago, when I heard a Christian urge some young men that there is a higher authority than Jesus in knowing God – this is the Bible, he maintained.* The fact is however, that Jesus is known through Himself and the Bible is only truth when read in oneness and subordination to Jesus.
CLOUD WITHOUT RAIN
Knowing God and sound doctrine is not about proof texts, definitions and positional statements. Eternal life is to know God and Jesus Christ whom God has sent. It’s a state of being that is oneness with God because we believe it and live it – not because we have found a scripture that says we are ‘all of the one loaf’. There are mouldy loaves and fresh loaves. If our belief is merely propositional we can claim this union but be bereft of its substance.
SACRAMENTAL READING
“Torrance can thus say: “Theological knowledge and
theological statements participate sacramentally in the mystery of
Christ as the Truth.” As such revelation is, for Torrance, uniquely
personal and uniquely propositional to Christ, and mediated to
others to the extent that they participate in Christ. It is thus faith
(revelation) in Christ and not philosophy which forms the
conceptual bridge between God and humanity.” (3)
HOW TO SEE IN THE SPIRIT
Fundamentalism can deny the way, the truth and the life by attempting to make eternal life ‘words’. Jesus told Nicodemus that we cannot see and know the Kingdom if we are not born again. We are born again when we die to religion and rise with Jesus to life in His Person.
RELIGION TO ONENESS
The above is really an account of how we come to know God through the new birth and why we cannot see the Kingdom or know much of Him in religion, particularly fundamentalism. The letter makes us blind to the same extent that it makes us die.
Some theologies are actually a sophisticated Christian version of the knowledge of good and evil. The genuine Kingdom is not a religion. It’s a life of oneness with God. Unless our experience of God is the Fall Undone, we live our life as paupers rather than priests and kings.
* Bibliolatry – bible idolatry or Bible deism.
(1) Myk Habets, Theosis in the Theology of Thomas Torrance.
(2) Ibid.
(3) Ibid.
(4) Thomas F. Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology. Westminster Press. 1981. pgs 16,17,18).
