UNION WITH CHRIST | Conscious.

[This series of posts titled "UNION WITH CHRIST" comprise sections of a whole paper written on the relationship between the doctrines of union with Christ and justification. Because it is written for a class, its content reflects academic an tone, style, and structure. And although theologically heavy, my hope is that it would be both challenging and beneficial to understanding atonement, salvation, and the gospel more clearly. Feel free to give feedback and ask questions.]

//// CONSCIOUS

Here the past, present, and future collide. We are saved in the past and we are being saved in the present in light of the future promise of salvation. Past salvation is objective. Present salvation is subjective. Future salvation consummates the two. We will focus here on the relationship between our past (our salvation in Christ) and its bearing upon our present. We’ll discuss the relationship to the future in eschatological union.

Conscious union is the contact made between our consciousness and the objective reality of who we have been made to be in Christ. It is that aspect of union with Christ within which our consciousness, through the sole conduit of faith, comes to seize the saving person and work of Jesus. Prior to faith, our experience is in dissonance with the reality of our salvation in Christ. The objective reality is that Jesus has saved us in himself. But we are deluded and live in darkness, unaware we have been made sons of the Light.[1] Through faith we wake to reality, the good news: we have been united to Christ, and so are saved in him.[2] God is bent on saving us from our present delusion, healing our unbelief by giving us faith in Christ that we might gain the joy of participating in the resurrection work of Christ upon our lives.

An objection may rise: if we’ve already been objectively saved, doesn’t it follow that our present lives don’t actually matter and that we can go on living in sin and unbelief? Paul responds to precisely this objection in Romans 6:

By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.[3]

Here, Paul clearly explains how the past ought to bear upon our present. Our union with the resurrected One means we are able to, and must, live in his new life just as we died in his death. We are actual sharers in his death and burial by virtue of our union with him; therefore, we ought to participate in forming our lives to the shape of his death and resurrection. Christ’s present work in and through our lives by the Spirit is for the purpose of making our lives in every way more like his. This has enormous implications on how we understand faith.

Just as works are evidence of faith, faith is the evidence of our union. Our human faith is indicative, not effective. Our faith experience is not our human faith alone,[4] but the perfect faith of Jesus worked in us and through us.[5] Previously hidden from us, “God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.”[6] By grace we have already been saved in Jesus, and faith plays a role in “saving” us from our unbelief. Our salvation has been objectively accomplished; we are just waking up to the fact, and are commanded to live out of that reality.

There are three problems with believing it is merely by our faith, even given as a “gift from God,”[7] that we are actually saved: 1) explaining how faith teleports 2000 years of time in order to alter the historically fixed and finished event of the cross by tacking our sin onto it ex post facto, 2) explaining how faith—something we not only have, but do—cannot be classified as a work we must perform for salvation, and 3) explaining how, unlike anything else we have or do, faith remains invincible to our sinful corruption.

The first problem is hardly worth arguing against. Faith as the abstracted, disembodied, history-altering, sin-and-righteousness-time-machine teleportation vehicle we find (though not stated as blatantly) prevalent throughout Christian thought today is found nowhere in Scripture.

Second, if we are determined to cling to the idea that it is our human faith which is saving, even affirming it as given as a gift from God, we cannot dodge asking and explaining the very same questions Rob Bell raises in his book, Love Wins:

If the message of Jesus is that God is offering the free gift of eternal life through him—a gift we cannot earn by our own efforts, works or good deeds—and all we have to do is accept and confess and believe, aren’t those verbs? And aren’t verbs actions? Accepting, confessing, believing—those are things we do. Does that mean, then, that going to heaven is dependent on something I do? How is any of that grace? …Isn’t that what Christians have always claimed set their religion apart—that it wasn’t, in the end, a religion at all—that you don’t have to do anything, because God has already done it through Jesus?[8]

James argues that faith and works are symbiotic, distinct, and inseparable.[9] We always do that which we most truly believe. Christ’s reversal of our sin is not merely by what he did (righteousness), but also in Whom he believed and trusted (faith). Just as our own righteousness is insufficient to save us, our own faith is insufficient to save us. Even the righteousness of Jesus would be insufficient to save us were it not in seamless harmony with his faith in the Father. Indeed, his life and work is the outplay of his faith and trust in the One who sent him. If works are indeed an extension of our believing God to be who he is and we to be what we are, then daily, our works of sin expose our unstable, schizophrenic faith.[10] We are utterly incapable of generating the faith required of us.

Third, if it were somehow our faith and not Jesus’ through us, what exactly keeps our sin from corrupting our faith like it corrupts even our most righteous works?[11] Our faith must be as fallen, broken, fractured, and corrupted as we are.[12] It is insufficient in every way. A simple experiment would prove this: we may ask any Christian to describe the God in whom they believe and he will invariably be, in some way and measure, different than the God in whom we believe. And so to one degree or another, we all serve God falsely since our conception of him is inaccurate (I do not mean incomplete, though it is that, too). The faith which saves us is only Christ’s own, given to us in union with him.[13] Only those in Christ will experience his faith and believe: “Through him you believe in God, who raised him from the dead and glorified him, and so your faith and hope are in God.”[14] So what is the function of our faith if it is not “saving”?

Our present conscious faith functions as an indicator that we are united to the faithful One. Only the flawless faith of Christ[15] worked through us, in union with us, and manifested in our lives as our own, is acceptable to the Father. Union with Christ is not a result of our faith. As previously established, predestinational union and incarnational union predate our faith experience. Our faith is a result of a pre-existing union with the Faithful One, whose perfect faith is made manifest in us as an identifying indicator that we are in Christ who is faithful. Torrance writes about the relationship between Christ, his faith, and our faith in The Mediation of Christ:

He has believed for you, fulfilled your human response to God, even made your personal decision for you, so he acknowledges you before God as one who has already responded to God in him, who has already believed in God through him, and whose personal decision is already implicated in Christ’s self-offering to the Father, in all of which he has been fully and completely accepted by the Father, so that in Christ you are already accepted by him. Therefore, renounce yourself, take up your cross and follow Jesus your Lord and Savior.[16]

All that is Christ’s—his faith[17] and his righteousness, and therefore his justification (the result of his faith and righteousness before the Father)—is made incarnate in us through union with him by the Spirit, now 2000 years after his life.[18] Our union with Christ—or perhaps better stated, his union with us through the indwelling Spirit[19]—is the means by which we find the chasm between our doubting, unfaithful, unrighteous selves and the faithful, righteous Christ bridged seamlessly and securely. He makes us “one flesh” with him,[20] by which his faithfulness and righteousness might be counted as ours not as legal fiction but as true and actual reality, and through whichwe approach the One who abides in the light unapproachable. Before the Father, in Christ, we are justified by his faith and righteousness.

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[1] Gal. 4:4-7. We have wrongly assumed that the Spirit’s indwelling makes us sons. It is because we have been made sons in Christ that we gain the Spirit.

[2] Eph. 5:14

[3] Rom. 6:2-4

[4] McKnight, Atonement, 65: “Does ‘faith of Jesus Christ’ mean faith in Jesus Christ (Christians trust Christ) or the faith of Jesus Christ himself (Christ faithfully lives before God)? …To the degree that Jesus is the second Adam/Israel who identifies with us in his incarnation, it is his faithfulness to the covenant; to the degree that Jesus is our (alien) righteousness (1 Cor. 1:30-31), it is our faith in Jesus Christ.”

[5] Rom. 3:21-22; Php. 3:9. Translated “faith of Jesus Christ” as translated by the Authorized Version. For more on this discussion, refer to The Faith of Jesus Christ: Exegetical, Biblical, and Theological Studies, eds. Michael F. Bird and Preston M. Sprinkle (Colorado Springs: Paternoster, 2009).

[6] Eph. 2:6-7; 1 Pet. 1:20-21

[7] Eph. 2:8

[8] Rob Bell, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, (New York: HarperOne, 2011) 11.

[9] James 2:17-24, 26

[10] Rom. 7:15-25

[11] Is. 64:6

[12] Calvin, Institutes, 2.3.1: “In the contrast between the Spirit and the flesh, there is nothing of the Spirit except through regeneration. Everything, therefore, which we have from nature is flesh. Any possible doubt which might exist on the subject is removed by the words of Paul (Eph. 4:23)…Indeed, he had a little before drawn a picture of human nature, which shows that there is no part in which it is not perverted and corrupted…The human mind receives a humbling blow when all the thoughts which proceed from it are derided as foolish, frivolous, perverse, and insane.”

[13] Again, Rom. 3:21-22 and Php. 3:9 as translated by the AV.

[14] 1 Pet. 1:21

[15] Gal. 2:16 (KJV); Php. 3:9 (KJV)

[16] Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 94.

[17] Gal. 2:16 (KJV); Php. 3:9 (KJV)

[18] Justification (Rom 4:25; Gal. 2:16 [KJV]); Christ’s life of righteousness and faithfulness (2 Cor. 4:10-11; Rom. 4:25; Heb. 3:1-6; Php. 3:9 [KJV])

[19] Jn. 14:17-18; 1 Cor. 2:12; 12:13; 2 Cor. 4:13

[20] Eph. 5:29-32

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