One with Christ: 40 Biblical Meditations on Paul’s “in Christ” Idea

By Ben Pugh

Paul's most common phrase was "in Christ." It is a tiny phrase, used almost as frequently as punctuation, yet within it is abbreviated a whole universe of delight which many of us have barely tasted. For Paul being in Christ is so normal he never even explains what he means by it, or what he means by Christ dwelling in us for that matter. He is not exactly forthcoming about what exactly is involved in us having been crucified with, or having died with, been buried with, raised with, or seated with Christ either. He just expects us to keep up. What he does give us are a few little hints at what this union with Christ does. We get glimpses into the amazing things it does for us.

In forty days we visit just about every time Paul uses a phrase like "in Christ," "in him," "with Christ," and so on, meditating on each of the little hints that Paul provides. We do this in the hope of discovering just how deep this union goes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: May 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666750713

Ben Pugh

Ben Pugh first trained as an artist with the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham, UK, and still has a love for creative endeavors, especially in written form. After becoming a Christian at the age of nineteen, his love of writing combined with a newfound love for the Bible and a growing interest in Christian doctrine, especially the life-changing truth that we are justified in Christ. In time, this interest in theology led to an MA from Manchester University and a PhD from Bangor. His first full-time academic role was as Director of Postgraduate Studies at Mattersey Hall College which, at the time, could boast of having the largest graduate school of its kind in Europe. However, Ben longed for more time in the classroom engaging with students, and, of course, more time to write theology. Along came the offer of the position of Lecturer in Theology at Cliff College, Derbyshire, where he has been happily employed since 2012. Ben is blessed to work at a desk in what was once Victorian country house from which he can look out across the second most visited national park in the world--Peak District.

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Introduction

In Paul, union with Christ in his death and resurrection is one of the most comprehensive images for salvation itself, undergirding his nearly ubiquitous claim that believers can now find their life in Christ.

¹

Though I continue to lack his depth of insight, I share with Paul the conviction that the sum total of the Christian life is to be found in our union with Christ. I am not alone in this. In fact, it is the one idea that unites all denominations. The Orthodox call it theosis, a partaking of the divine nature (inspired by 2 Pet 1 : 4 ). Catholics and Protestants call it the mystical union with Christ, the deep, deep, joining together of life with life that all believers can enjoy, not only with Christ but with all those who make up his body the church. Faith unites us to Christ, so that one life reigns through the whole. ² Divine power is, all the time, coursing through our human frailty like sap flowing from vine to branches. We are not merely human anymore; we are drawing strength from a divine source of life, so that Paul could say, when I am weak, then I am strong (2 Cor 12:10). Paul even seemed to believe that this union with the Lord is the ultimate union of which sexual unions are but a pale reflection (1 Cor 6:17; Eph 5:23). In other words, the absence of this union with Christ is the reason for the insatiable appetite for sex that our culture has been beset with for so many decades now. It is the gaping hole left by the desertion of belief in God.

I have wanted to write a book about union with Christ since as far back as 1996. I was twenty-seven and an aspiring writer. I had finished my first book, The Silent Revolution, which had been about the power of the cross, and I felt that the next place to go was the union with Christ through which the benefits of the cross are applied to us. The trouble was, of the fifty-one publishers I approached about Silent Revolution, not one of them was interested in publishing. I found that if you try to move onto your second book when your first one has gotten literally nowhere, you quickly run out of steam. You can’t help thinking, Why am I doing this? By 2015 another book of mine on the atonement had been out for a year. It was called Atonement Theories: A Way Through the Maze. It was doing well, so I decided to tackle union with Christ again, this time as a forty-day devotional on my blog. I got to Day 19 before my summer came to an end and I was plunged into a busy new semester. But then, in 2020, a nationwide COVID lockdown happened. I felt a quiet nudge from God to finish this project. I wrote it mainly for myself. Throughout most of the four months from March to June I had a spare hour in the mornings that was not needed for driving to Cliff College. I devoted this time to deepening my own appreciation for my intimate union with Christ, in the hope of recovering a stronger sense of God’s presence in my life, which I felt had been somewhat lost over the years.

So, I wrote this for me. All the closing reflections contain suggestions which I have myself carried out. In writing it for me I have run the risk of not connecting well with you, the reader, of course. All I can say to that is that if you share with me the desire for the real deal—no hocus-pocus, no wearying rounds of meetings, committees, and rotas, no endless talking shop, no going through the motions, no frenzied but fruitless busyness—then perhaps I can connect with you after all. Perhaps we may pursue together a realization of our union with Christ that makes a critical difference not only to ourselves but to the way we reach out to a world of lost and lonely people.

Just a few things to say by way of the content that is to come. Firstly, I am assuming that Paul is the author of all thirteen letters traditionally attributed to him. I am aware that four are commonly disputed today: Ephesians, 1–2 Timothy, and Titus—and you are welcome to consult a good New Testament introduction to get yourself acquainted with the arguments.³ However, it seems to me that the concept I’m focusing on here is a truly Pauline concept. Even if it is one day proved beyond all doubt that some of his letters were written by an enthusiastic disciple of his and not Paul himself, I think the idea would still stand. Secondly, I have arranged each of the in Christ, with Christ, and Christ in you occurrences in what I think is a chronological order. This is why Galatians, Paul’s earliest letter, comes first, rather than Romans. The reason I did this was to see whether I could trace a development in Paul’s thought about the in-Christ life, and even perhaps some clues about the origins of his idea. However, I have done this in the full awareness of how tentative any chronology is. Scholars have continued to disagree about the dating of all the New Testament letters. And here again, your attention is drawn to the scholarly introductions if you would like to dig deeper into these debates. Lastly, you will notice that whenever a new vista opens such as a new part of Paul’s writings, the chapters are a little longer than normal. Specifically, these are chapters 1, 2, 15, 16, and 23. These will not eat into your time by anything more than a few minutes extra but, if the time you have for this kind of thing is really tight, this is just to warn you: those ones are a bit long!

Summer 2022

Nottingham

1

. Billings, Union with Christ,

35

.

2

. Taylor, China Inland Mission,

168

–

69.

3

. A trusty old favorite of mine is Guthrie, New Testament Introduction. You might also try Hawthorne et al., eds., Dictionary of Paul and His Letters.

1

In Christ—What Is it?

The preacher Loui Giglio tells the story of being invited to speak by a minister of a church who also owned a hotel. You’ll be thrilled! the man assured Giglio. I’ve given you the best room in the hotel. A church member came to pick Giglio up from the airport. You’re going to just love your room, the man oozed. It’s the best room in the hotel. As the hotel porter was showing Giglio to his room, he likewise said, You’ve got the best room in the hotel. Giglio looked around at his room. It was alright but not that great. He came to the church to speak. So how do you like your room? the hotel owner asked. Giglio tried to be polite: Yeah, it’s good, it’s fine. Not until the very last day of his stay did he notice a door that he had assumed was the door to the broom cupboard. He tried it. To his amazement, it opened out into a glorious suite the size of a large apartment, with a four-poster bed and panoramic views. The room he had been in was just a small adjoining room.

Are we living in a room that is fine when we could be in the lap of spiritual luxury? This is the kind of question I ask myself whenever I notice that incredibly common phrase, in Christ Jesus in Paul’s letters. It makes me think he is really onto something. And, as far as Paul is concerned, this truth is so utterly basic and completely definitive of the Christian life that it does not need explaining. And so he doesn’t explain it, ever. The closest Paul comes to explaining his in Christ phrase is in 1 Corinthians 6:17, where our union with Christ is juxtaposed with talk of sexual unions: But he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with him. Being in Christ is a real union, living and vital, like a sexual union. It can be experienced and felt.

One other possible way to describe the nature of this union with Christ is by using the kind of language that some of the great theologians would use to describe the union between the divine and human natures of Christ. He is, after all, the prototype divine-human union, as it were. In him is a union of divine and human natures that must not involve the obliteration of the one by the other; neither can it be the creation of a hybrid that is neither one nor the other, nor yet the total compartmentalization of the one from the other. The divine must stay divine and the human must stay human. Yet the divine nature must be so intimately joined to the human nature in Jesus that human nature itself is renewed. It is renewed first in the womb of Mary, then in all of us that are joined to him.