Full Contact Christianity

This is the fourth in a series of posts on Mystical Union with Christ.  For those of you who read the second and third posts, but missed the caveats in the introductory post of the series, you can find it here.

Well, opposition to my “Mystical Union” stance has certainly intensified.  To be honest, the manner of it has stung a bit.  On the other hand, it’s been helpful to me, because resistance highlights the specific “pressure points” that give me an idea of what needs more elaboration and clarification.

One of the big ones is just the fact that I, a scion of conservative, evangelical, free grace, and other theological adjectives, am daring to use the word “mystical” in a good light.  I touched on this in my first post, and in a well-received paper I presented at GES a year ago (audio here around the 27:00 mark), but further discussion seems to be in order.

So let’s have that discussion.

Galatians 2:20 means something.  Paul experienced another Person that was not himself living within him.  John 15 means something.  We too can experience living connection to Christ, our Vine from which we draw sustenance and by whose nature we bear fruit.  And when we walk with Him, we do have that experience.  In spite of our sins and follies and finitude and whatever errata may have crept into our doctrine — and be honest, we’ve all got some — if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.  That’s the promise, and God’s promises are true.

We are, in that way, united to God and one another — not off somewhere in the aether where it doesn’t matter, but right here, right now, practically.  Which is to say, mystically.

This idea sometimes makes conservatives freak out.  (There’s a major epistemological issue here that’s a subject for another post.)  They want something measurable, something they can photograph or copy in triplicate, something objective.  But there is a subjective element to the Christian faith, a reality that takes place within us.

Jesus promised this, and if it’s not real, then to hell with the whole of Christianity.

Of course, the reason they’re freaking out about me saying anything good about mysticism is that there’s a lot of false mysticism out there — but the existence of the counterfeit doesn’t invalidate the genuine article. I once had a counterfeit $20 in my hand, but I don’t, on that account, refuse all $20 bills.  The word actually does have a decent pedigree, stretching into far antiquity at one end and reaching up into historic Protestantism on the other.  For example, John Calvin once used it thus:

Therefore, to that union of the head and members, the residence of Christ in our hearts, in fine, the mystical union, we assign the highest rank, Christ when he becomes ours making us partners with him in the gifts with which he was endued. Hence we do not view him as at a distance and without us, but as we have put him on, and been ingrafted into his body, he deigns to make us one with himself, and, therefore, we glory in having a fellowship of righteousness with him.  (Institutes III.xi.10)

Historically, certain strands of the Christian church have used the term “mystical” to describe the realities that Galatians 2:20, John 15, and other passages are talking about.  Although our fathers have certainly gone some strange places with the word, at the core of it is an attempt to talk about the reality of a believer’s experience with God.

Given the various abuses that have cropped up around the term, I avoided it for a long time.  In the end, though, I’ve returned to it, and not entirely by choice.  As I began to see these truths clearly in Scripture, I tried a number of different words, seeking to convey what I was seeing.  Here’s what I found.

When I used the word “spiritual,” nobody understood that I was talking about a real thing happening right here and right now.  When I talked about Christ being present spiritually, people heard “as opposed to back in, say, AD 30, when He was really here.”  The connotation was some abstract transaction taking place in the heavens, far removed from us here and now.  Or worse, they heard “Christ is really in heaven at the Father’s right hand, but He’s here spiritually.” — which is to say, not really. Because I was shooting to convey a here-and-now reality, the word “spiritually” didn’t do the job for a lot of the people I was talking to.

I tried talking about relationship with Christ, and I really thought that would solve the problem.  How naive I was — “relationship with Christ” has been bandied about so much that it has lost all meaning altogether.  For most evangelicals, “relationship with Christ,” like “Christian life,” means “whatever I do that’s God-related.”  To use C. S. Lewis’ phrase, that term has been “sold, raped, flung to the dogs.” A few people — people who were already consciously living the truths I was trying to convey — understood what I was saying. But they were as baffled as I was when it came to finding the right vocabulary to convey it to people who didn’t already understand what we were talking about.

I tried talking about “experiential” knowledge of God.  That worked for some people, but there were problems there as well.  A lot of the very intellectual folks in my immediate circle nodded sagely and said they understood, but on investigation, it wasn’t true.  They were interpreting “experiential knowledge of God” as “gaining experience applying principles.”  Every Pharisee had that kind of experience — that wasn’t what I was talking about.

And so I found myself, at last, turning to “mystical” as a descriptor for the sort of thing I was talking about.  It conveyed the personal, immediate nature of the biblical truths I was trying to convey.  It was very clearly not just talking about applying principles, or about nebulous abstractions out in the aether somewhere.  In short, its use cut across the miscommunications I was struggling against.

Of course, it wasn’t perfect.  There are two problems with “mystical.”  The first is that it’s not a biblical word.  But we once settled on “Trinity” despite the fact that it’s not in the Bible, because we needed a word for that meaning.  I’m feeling similarly settled on “mystical” at this point, although I concede that could change.  As I said above, the term does actually have a decent pedigree.

Second, “mystical” has bad connotations in conservative circles. But I’m running out of terms to use, and this one lacks a number of significant flaws that the alternatives have.  Are there other possibilities?  I’m open to suggestions, as I’ve said before.  So far, I’m not getting any suggestions at all (let alone good ones) from the people who are upset that I’m espousing some form of mysticism.  How about it, guys?

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 6th, 2011 at 1:00 am and is filed under Meditations, Mystical Union. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.