Living in Union with Christ

Grant Macaskill

Description

Leading New Testament theologian Grant Macaskill introduces Paul's understanding of the Christian life, which is grounded in the apostle's theology of union with Christ. The author shows that the exegetical foundations for a Christian moral theology emerge from the idea of union with Christ. Macaskill covers various aspects of Christian moral theology, exploring key implications for the Christian life of the New Testament idea of participatory union as they unfold in Paul's Letters.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• New Testament

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 15 octobre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781493419944
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
© 2019 by Grant Macaskill
Published by Baker Academic
a division of Baker Publishing Group
PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.bakeracademic.com
Ebook edition created 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4934-1994-4
Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. ESV Text Edition: 2016
Cover image : Fresco from Debre Berhan Selassie Church (Gondar, Ethiopia) depicting the divine protection of the three youths in the furnace (Dan. 3). In Eastern tradition, their faithfulness is celebrated in this kontakion: “You did not worship the hand-graven image, O thrice-blessed ones, but armed with the immaterial [lit., ungraven] essence of God, you were glorified in a trial by fire” (Kontakion 6, trans. Grant Macaskill).
Dedication
For Tom and Heather Greggs
Contents
Cover i
Title Page ii
Copyright Page iii
Dedication iv
Preface: Reconsidering Hope vii
Acknowledgments xiii
Abbreviations xv
Introduction: Union with Christ as the Basis for Christian Life 1
1. Scholarly Contexts for the Present Study: Attempts to Revise Our Understanding of Justification and Sanctification 15
2. Who Am I Really? Paul’s Moral Crisis 39
3. Baptism and Moral Identity: Clothing Ourselves in Christ 59
4. The Lord’s Supper and Someone Else’s Memory: Do This in Remembrance of Me 73
5. Crying “Abba” in the Ruins of War: The Spirit and the Presence of Christ 97
6. One Little Victory: Hope and the Moral Life 115
7. Concluding Synthesis: Living in Union with Christ 127
Bibliography 147
Author Index 154
Scripture Index 156
Subject Index 158
Cover Flaps 161
Back Cover 163
Preface
Reconsidering Hope
T his book is an exercise in the practical theological interpretation of Paul’s Epistles. It involves careful exegesis of a number of passages in critical dialogue with the work of other biblical scholars, but its purpose is not simply to gain a better understanding of Paul’s thought in its historical context, which is how biblical scholars often conceive of their task. Rather, it is ultimately oriented toward asking a practical theological question: As Christians who are committed to seeing Scripture as normative for our thought and practice, how then must we think and act today?
It is a book about hope—the hope of the gospel, and the hope that this gospel really does bring about freedom from the power of sin to control and destroy our lives. And it is about the personal character of this hope, by which I mean that it is constituted by a person who makes himself present with and in us to deliver us from sin. That person, Jesus Christ, is not just the one who brings us hope; he is our hope. The emphasis of this last statement can be shifted subtly in a way that further draws out its meaning: he is our hope. The possibilities of our lives are limited not by our own natural capacity for goodness and love but by the perfections and prospects constituted by this other person, Jesus Christ. Thanks be to God.
This personal hope should be at the center of the life and teaching of every church, displacing all other ways of thinking about God and what it means to walk with him. No element of Christian life or thought can be considered without reference to it and to the person in whom it is constituted. Behind my writing this book, though, lies a sense that the significance we attach to this personal hope has been reduced or truncated in ways that compromise the life of the church: it still shapes the way we think about forgiveness but does not adequately shape the way we think about Christian discipleship and growth.
To put this claim in the starkest of terms, the way we think about Christian morality—even within those parts of the church that self-identify as “evangelical”—is often functionally Christless. Too frequently, when we think about Christians as moral agents who act within the church and the world in an ethically good way, we conceive of their agency in terms that are not properly determined by who Jesus is and how he is present in them. We see their agency in simple terms as something that belongs to them and is performed by them. We may talk about Jesus as the one to whom their obedience is rendered or as the one who models obedience for them, but they are still the ones who act, whether well or badly. Christ is not personally involved in their obedience; they may be helped or strengthened by the Holy Spirit, but it is they who act. In consequence, when we seek to form them into good moral agents or into better disciples, we think in terms of helping them to make better decisions, for which we give them credit. Hence, the way we actually think about the moral activity or growth of the Christian (what we often label “discipleship”) is not really Christ-centered, even if we consider it to be directed toward him. It is, in reality, self -centered: we can talk about being “Christlike” or about “relying on the power of the Spirit” but still think about this as something we do. When, with the Holy Spirit’s help, we are obedient, we are simply better versions of ourselves.
And here lies the problem. Paul’s account of the Christian life involves a rejection of the idea that our natural selves can ever be improved or repaired in their own right. They are so compromised by sin that they will only ever turn the gifts of God to the purposes of idolatry and will be blind to the fact that they are doing so, as Paul himself was before his life-transforming encounter with the ascended Christ. People will act, think, teach, and lead in ways that serve this constitutional idolatry and will do so without any self-awareness. Their only prospect for salvation lies in their being inhabited by another self, a better self who can act in them to bring about real goodness. Hence, Paul’s personal hope is expressed in his statement “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). 1 This does not mean that his particular distinctive identity has been erased from existence: he still greets the churches to which he writes as “Paul” and still writes in a way that is shaped by his past. But something has changed, and it is not just what his life is directed toward, or how he seeks to live it, but it is his most basic sense of who he is, of the person that inhabits the space occupied by his body, of who gets the credit for what his limbs or lips do, of who he is becoming. He is not becoming a better version of Paul; he is becoming Paul-in-Christ. He is metamorphosing 2 into the likeness of Jesus. As difficult as it is for us to comprehend the meaning of such language, a proper understanding of Paul’s concept of the Christian moral life demands it.
If the way we think about the Christian life is not adequately shaped by these terms, then here is the danger that awaits: the selves we train to serve God better will be our natural selves, who will only ever embody idolatry, whose attempts to serve will always turn to idolatry, and who—like Paul, like the Pharisees, and like every other religiously diligent self—will labor under the delusion that they are doing splendidly, at least between the episodes of obvious failure that drive them (quite sincerely) to the cross. If a note of anger is detectable under the surface of my words, it is largely directed at myself, for such a way of thinking about the Christian life has undoubtedly marked me over the years and worked itself out in my conduct and values. I was idolatrous in the worst of ways because I thought I was being faithful—in between my moments of undeniable sin. I was an evangelical of evangelicals, of the tribe of Knox; as to zeal, a defender of all evangelical truth claims and an attender of all services; as to doctrine, faultless (in my own mind, at least). Yet over time, I have come to see that the most basic problem I had was the way that I thought about my self: I had not really come to terms with the implications of the gospel for who I identified myself to be, although this was a big part of my Reformed theological heritage. This affected all of my piety, all of my relationships, and all of my service.
The process of gradually coming to see this within myself has led me to ask whether the same deficiency might underlie a range of problems affecting the churches today, particularly among those that self-identify as “evangelical.” 3 Evangelical churches around the world continue to grow, and many are—in numerical and financial terms, at least—highly successful. It is important not to be cynical about this, but it is also important to be honest in our appraisal of some of the problems that have become visible in many of these churches and to trace carefully their possible causes. In addition to countless stories of controlling and manipulative behavior, especially within leadership, there have been multiple accounts of horrible personal moral failure. You may know the stories that are associated with well-known churches in your part of the world; you may have followed the blog posts about these online, because the congregations have often been seen as evangelical flagships and their pastors as evangelical leaders. I know of such stories that are less well publicized, because the churches in question are smaller and do not register on the national or international radar. It may be that you yourself have been involved in such a story and are still hurting from it. It may