TO BE OR NOT TO BE ALIVE - WHEN YOU ARE LIVING

‘The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you--they are full of the Spirit and life’ John 6.63 NIV.

It’s not only virtuous to live from the Gospel of Christ and the apostles. It’s life-giving. It’s spirit and life. Our new covenant oneness with God is the prize of the post cross age. God shares God’s being with His daughters and sons. It’s era of the tree of death brought to a halt by the cross and the beginning of the Kingdom of God resulting from Christ’s resurrection and our oneness with God – a oneness achieved entirely by the enterprise of God for us.

FOUNDATION OF LIFE
I  spent most of my life like many others not making much of the trinity and as a result not appreciating its foundational nature for an understanding of the being of God and the nature of our salvation – and more to the point of our oneness with God and what it means to be Godly.

UNION WITH GOD AND PERICHORESIS
Oneness with God has nothing to do with the law as some suppose. It has everything to do with the nature of God expressed as trinity.

“Prior to Karl Barth the doctrine of the Trinity had played a minor role in modern Protestant theology. The tone was set in the eighteenth century by Immanuel Kant, who stated that trinitarian doctrine offered “absolutely nothing worthwhile” for practical life.”  (1) He was wrong about that, given that it is the nature of the trinity and its implication for the being of humanity that engenders cohesiveness of one’s spirit and genuine community in place of rampant individualism and fragmentation. The trinity and its communion in the mode of perichoresis gives meaning to Christ’s words, ‘May they be one as we are one.’ This is to say that as a consequence our union with God in Christ is similar to the trinities communion with each other.

ONENESS
The meaning of Godliness is defined by the trinity because the trinity is the womb of our birth as humans. The perichoresis that defines God’s being is the perichoresis that was ours before the fall and which has become ours again in Christ. The simplicity of this is that we are not Godly according to doing and keeping laws. We are not Godly in terms of the knowledge of good and evil – how could we be in this separation – But we are Godly necause God is joined to us in Jesus us. We are talking atonement/incarnation and oneness with God.

AUTHENTIC CHRISTIANITY
Barth asserted that “The doctrine of the Trinity is what basically distinguishes the Christian doctrine of God as Christian, and therefore what already distinguishes the Christian concept of revelation as Christian, in contrast to all other possible doctrines of God or concepts of revelation.” (2)
It is also descriptive of our union with God as a result of the cross.
GLORY OF GOD IS ONENESS
This is to say that the genuine gospel as opposed to  law based distortions of Christ’s gospel are not about ‘doing’ but about being. At the fall our being was fractured into separation from God. By the cross and through the at-one-ment God has won back our union with God in the person of Christ. Jesus is your union with God.
The gospel of the Kingdom has nothing to do with the law. It’s about a new creation that is us in union with God. Of course it’s not divorced from righteousness. Not divorced because this new and living way is the righteousness of Christ expressed as us.
REAL BODY OF CHRIST
We may talk of the Body of Christ and claim belonging in it. Yet remain in a notional relationship rather than a substantive union whose archetype is the trinity. The communion of the trinity is the kind of union with God that is now yours in the person of Jesus. Legalism is an obfuscation and suffocation of this vital reality.
“The doctrine of the Trinity is what basically distinguishes the Christian doctrine of God as Christian, and therefore what already distinguishes the Christian concept of revelation as Christian, in contrast to all other possible doctrines of God or concepts of revelation.”
LAW PARODY
Legalism comes from the pit and is the spirit of antichrist. A law subverted gospel neutralises the ‘being’ that is ours in God, replacing this living union with a construct. This is why Paul calls this kind of ‘body’ the body of death. It’s not alive because it’s in Moses and Adam.
FUTILE THEOLOGY
Legalistic renditions of the gospel are futile because they have nothing to do with the undoing of Adam and the healing of the facture between God’s being and the being of His daughters and sons in Christ. This is seen in the scripture, ‘The two are made one’ in Christ.
KINGDOM LIFE – CHRIST COME IN OUR FLESH
‘On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you’ John 14.20. The day we realize this is the day that we are reborn into the second part of life – a lived union with God: The gift of infinite life. This is the difference between the actual body of Christ and the notional body of christ which is this body of death.
‘What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord!’ Rom 7.24,25. Do you know if you are alive in Christ or dead in Adam/Moses?
(1) Hunsinger, George. Evangelical, Catholic, and Reformed (p. 1). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.
(2)Ibid. (p. 2). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.