Union With Christ

I had a good conversation with a friend after church last week. He noted that I had referred to a phrase for several weeks and he wanted to make sure he knew what it meant. We were, in fact, talking about our union with Christ and its derivatives, being “in Christ”, “in him” etc. In a way, it is an understandable question. In my own Presbyterian circles, it is not a particularly common expression though all of us that actually read our Bibles stumble across it. It was, after all, a favorite expression of the apostle Paul. I count Paul referring to believers being “in Christ” at least 90 times. Add to that about 30 instances of believers being “in him’. That seems like a lot to me, particularly when I recall how much attention Reformed Christians like Presbyterians pay to the Pauline Epistles. Add to this a handful of Paul’s words recorded in the Book of Acts and you can see the extent of the mystery. Why has our union with Christ seemed to receive less attention in the contemporary church that it deserves?

To start with, what do we mean by union? Constantine Campbell breaks it down into several concepts:

1. Union: gathers us up into Christ as the bride for the heavenly bridegroom.

2. Participation: makes Christ’s life and story ours.

3. Identification: we live in the realm or sphere of Christ.

4. Incorporation: we are members of Christ’s body.

Let’s go deeper. When did union with Christ disappear from view? What took its place? Here is my theory. Union gradually left center stage after the end of the Reformation when theologians focused their attention on debates with Roman Catholicism and between themselves on how exactly are people saved. Faith and works is part of this. So was God’s sovereign choice to save vs our free will. That led to Reformers and post-Reformers concentrating on isolating and understanding each discrete step in God’s redemption (ordo salutis). Reformed theologians saw these steps as: election/predestination in Christ, atonement, gospel call, inward call, regeneration, conversion (faith and repentance), justification, sanctification, and glorification. Each was studied in its own right. It made it easy to explore the differences between Roman Catholic, Arminian, and Reformed understanding of salvation, but I think it also came at a cost.

It moved us away from the Reformational way of understanding about how all of these steps were all linked together. That, in turn, made it harder to explain God’s salvation to others without losing them in the blur of theological vocabulary. Potentially worse, it severed the umbilical connection between God’s saving and sanctifying work in us. It unnecessarily substituted relational understanding with legal terminology, making it harder to see how God could be a Heavenly Father and a holy judge at the same time.

The Reformers themselves knew better. Peter Martyr Vermigli, the Italian Reformer, friend of Calvin and Thomas Cranmer, saw in the Lord’s Supper a symbol of Christ’s union with us. John Calvin saw in the ordo salutis a step-by-step-step breakdown of a greater theological truth, that believers are united to Christ by the Spirit through faith. We are incorporated into the life of Christ who presents us to the Father. Calvin’s approach to this and his theology of the Lord’s Supper (which is related) rooted us relationally in our relationship with God. Calvin wrote, “For this is the design of the gospel, that Christ may become ours, and that we may be in grafted into his body”. The living presence of Christ we relate to is the living mediator, the Holy Spirit. He, as Mark Garcia noted, is the bond of Christ. If I could put it this way: the issue for Calvin was not simply what Christ does for us, but who he is for us. Michael Reeves notes, “The greatest benefit of union with Christ is Christ”.

The Reformers like Calvin placed more emphasis on the connection between the preached Word and the celebration of the Supper as a depiction of who Christ is for us. Michael Reeves put Calvin’s perspective this way: “Like the bread and the wine we take into our bodies in Communion, he enters us by his Spirit and becomes one with us. In him, the divorce and division of sin is undone.

The Reformers like Calvin were simply re-emphasizing what they saw Jesus and Paul pointing out. Sinclair Ferguson, in a short article, “What does it mean to abide in Christ?”, fleshes out the implications of “abiding in Christ”. It means “allowing his Word to fill our minds, direct our wills, and transform our affections”. By the grace of God, we are grafted into Christ, and cleansed by him, making us “fit for union with himself”. Positionally, that means we cannot claim Christ and disobey him at every turn. Medieval mystics understood union primarily in terms of ecstatic experience. The Reformed perspective focuses more on how union transforms our thoughts, affections, and actions.

Michael Reeves leaves us with an imperative: “For our health, joy, and fellowship, then, we must take up arms against the insidious idea that we have any identity-background, ability, or status more basic than that of sharing the Son’s own life together before the Father”. To be in Christ means abiding in John 15’s “vine”. Through this ingrafting, we live new lives, have a new identity, new destination, new home, new family, and new hope.

So, to finish (for now), when we say that we are “in Christ”, we mean that our lives are inextricably and eternally bound up with his. We go where he goes, to include into the presence of our Heavenly Father, as he goes, looking to him as the captain of our faith. We are not autonomous beings that only engage Jesus when and how we wish. That is, as the Bible notes, impossible.

Basil Grafas

My thoughts came in dialog with several excellent works. Write me if you need exact footnote references:

Michael Reeves, Rejoicing in Christ pp. 83-100

J.Todd Billings, Union With Christ: Reframing Theology and Ministry for the Church pp. 1-31

Sinclair Ferguson, “What does it mean to abide in Christ”

Mark A. Garcia, Life in Christ: Union With Christ and Twofold Grace in Calvin’s Theology. pp. 255-274.