Full Contact Christianity

Richard has a vaguely Christian background — Jesus died on a cross, like that.  He never really thought about it much, but he lost his job three months ago, and this week he’s not going to make his mortgage payment.  Not knowing what to do, he took a long walk to try to clear his head, and happened to pass by the church on a Sunday evening.  People were going in, and he thought, “What the heck?  Nothing else is working.”

So he sat through the service.  Didn’t know any of the songs, but it sounded sort of nice.  A little weird, to be honest — something about Jesus shining, and a fountain filled with blood.  But they seemed like nice folks.  Then, somewhere in the course of the sermon, the pastor said this:

We were dead, separated from God.  But Jesus came to give us life!  People talk about Jesus dying on the cross, and that’s important, but many miss what it was all for.  He died our death so that He could give us His life — and He gives it as a gift!  We couldn’t earn it, and we don’t have to.  When we believe on Him, He gives it to us.  The barrier between us and God is lifted, and we begin a new life with God that lasts forever.  Even after we die, we go to live with Him.

Richard never heard this before, but for some reason he couldn’t really explain, it felt like someone had hit a gong inside his chest.  It was true; he knew it was true.  Right there, sitting in the back, he believed.

***

What’s wrong with that scenario?

Absolutely nothing.  Not a thing.  God saved Richard by grace, through faith, apart from works, so that Richard would have nothing about which he could boast.  All the credit and glory belong to God.  That’s Ephesians 2:8-9.

***

Christ saved Richard so that Richard could be united to His Body, the Church, and join in its labors: doing the good works that God commissioned us to do from the beginning.

***

What’s wrong with that way of describing it?

Nothing.

It’s Ephesians 2:10.

***

Jesus has an agenda, and He is carrying it out.  When He saves you, He unites you to Himself, and He is moving His Body with purpose, a purpose that will be accomplished: revealing the manifold wisdom of God to heavenly principalities and powers and growing itself up to match the full stature of Christ, the Head.

It is this Jesus, and no other, that promises you everlasting life as a gift, unto His glory alone.  He can make that promise because His purposes for you will be accomplished, and in the accomplishing He will be glorified.  The promise can’t be separated from the Person, and when you try, you dishonor your high calling, shame the name of Christ, and become a walking contradiction.

Which is to say that it’s bad to try to chop Ephesians 2:10 off of Ephesians 2:8-9.  What God has joined together, let not man put asunder.  So let’s not — not even in theory.

As I’ve written about mystical union with Christ over the past two months or so, various points of resistance have appeared.  This week I’d like to address one of the big ones.  Some folks feel that this way of understanding relationship with God removes any real ground for assurance of salvation.

Let me be the first to say that if the accusation is in fact true, then it is absolutely damning.  Nobody should be ready to sign off on a theology that destroys all grounds for assurance.  I would be the first one to dump it.

In this case, however, it’s just not true.  People who meet God don’t generally question the reality of the experience.  They do sometimes later doubt it — but the doubt generally grows up after they have drifted far from God, in the same way that a man who has been estranged for years from his wife begins to doubt whether he ever really loved her (or she him) at all.  No, at the time that a person meets God, he is generally pretty clear on what is happening to him.  You can see this certainty in Saul of Tarsus, the man born blind in John 9, Moses at the burning bush, and so on.  You can see it dawning slowly in Nicodemus, or bursting all at once into the consciousness of the woman at the well, or Nathaniel, or John the Baptist.  They know.  There’s no ground for doubt.

So what’s going on here?  Why do people feel like being at a meeting where God shows up would leave someone in a morass of uncertainty?

I’m kinda puzzled too.  Some of these people, by their own testimony, had assurance long before they got their theology of assurance sorted out.  They know this; they give testimony to it.  And yet, they don’t seem to connect it to their theology.  When they talk theology, they talk as if assurance is impossible unless you get your theology of assurance straight.  This is just not true, and it was not true of many of them, for years. (Conversely, you can have your theology very nicely sorted out and still struggle with assurance. Lots of kids growing up in our circles struggle with this; if you don’t already know that, it’s not because it isn’t happening; it’s because they’ve decided you’re not a safe person to talk to.)

As far as I can see, here’s the problem: these people don’t really want assurance.  They won’t be satisfied with being certain, themselves, that they have been saved by Jesus, nor with you being certain, yourself, that Jesus has saved you.  That is, they won’t be satisfied with the fact of assurance; they want to see an accredited process that leads to assurance.  They want documentability, something they can check from the outside, any time they want.  Something “objective” rather than just something they know.

That means that people have to get their propositions exactly right.

I toured the Osceola County Jail once, many years ago.  A guard explained how they let the inmates out for exercise, and had to log the time, date and duration of the exercise period for each inmate.  “If you can’t document it,” he said, “then it didn’t happen.”  I wondered then whether it was the inmates or the guards who were really imprisoned.

I’m still wondering.

We’re having productive discussions about how relationship with God works, and I don’t want to disrupt that.  However, we do have a little unfinished business with the moribund corpse of Platonic anthropology, and I’d like to plant a stake in its heart.  I’ve already argued that having the intellect hermetically sealed off from emotion and will is bankrupt — and that intellect-emotion-will isn’t a sound ‘anatomy of the soul’ anyhow.  I’d like to extend that argument a bit further.

To that end, let’s consider another ‘anatomy of the soul’ that might compete with the intellect-emotion-will model.

Being a deep anatomist of the soul, St. Gregory [Palamas] teaches that man’s soul is divided into the nous, fantasy, opinion and intellect.  The nous is the center of the soul, the eye of the soul.  The sense is the non-rational power of the soul, which knows and feels the physical things.  Fantasy is the offspring of the sense; it originates from the sense.  Fantasy receives its images from the sense and keeps them even when the actual things are not present,  Opinion — the idea we have about various things, including people and objects — is begotten from fantasy.  Intellect is the rational power of the soul, which formulated the opinion we have about every issue.  It is evident, therefore, that the nous is the core of man’s spiritual world — the eye of the soul — whereas all the rest of the powers, that is, fantasy, opinion and intellect, depend on the sense.  Thus when one wishes to reach God and acquire the knowledge of God, he must do it only through his nous, and not through his fantasy, opinion and intellect.  They all originate from the sense, which is associated with the external bodily senses.*

My point here is not to advocate for this anthropology; in fact, I think it’s unbiblical in a couple of key respects.

But here’s the challenge: how would you refute it?

Go on, think it over for a second.  I’ll wait.

Got a few ideas?  Good.

How many of your arguments apply equally well to the intellect-emotion-will model?

____

*Hierotheos Vlachos, The Illness and Cure of the Soul in the Orthodox Tradition.  Translated by Effie Mavromichali. 119.

Once upon a time, Jesus met a guy who had lived his whole life in darkness–literally.  The man had been born blind.  The disciples speculated that it was some kind of curse on his sin, or maybe his parents sin, but no.  Not at all.  He was put there, Jesus said, so that the works of God could be revealed in him.  Jesus went on to say, “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”  Then Jesus did the craziest thing — He spat on the ground and made mud, and put it on the guy’s eyes.  He told the guy to go away–go wash in the pool of Siloam.

So the guy met Jesus, and Jesus didn’t tell him anything about eternal life or Messiah or dying for his sins or anything even remotely evangelistic, and then He just lets him walk away, just like that.

Jesus didn’t get His evangelism training the same places I did, that’s for sure….

But wait, it gets better.  The guy goes and washes, and suddenly he can see, for the first time in his whole life.  This was a miracle, and once the facts of the case were established for sure, everybody knew it.

They didn’t know how much of a miracle until recently.  Just within the last couple of decades, our doctors have developed the ability to heal certain maladies so that a person born blind might have a chance of recovering sight.  But they’ve run into a problem.  Seeing, it turns out, isn’t just about having functional eyes.  It’s also about your brain learning to perceive the input correctly.  The case I read about was an adult man who had functional eyes for the first time in his life.  Thing is, he couldn’t tell a dark stripe on the ground from the shadow of a curb — and that’s a big deal when you’re crossing the street.  All kinds of little details like that.  There wasn’t anything wrong with his eyes anymore, but apparently it takes the human brain years to learn to see well.

No such problems for this guy who met Jesus.  He washed the mud off his eyes, and it was suddenly like he’d been seeing all his life.  So naturally, they asked him who it was that healed him, and he told them.  Then they asked him to give God the glory and say what a sinner Jesus was, but he just wouldn’t play along.  “Since the world began,” he said to them, “it has been unheard of that anyone opened the eyes of one who was born blind.  If this Man were not from God, He could do nothing.”  They couldn’t discredit him, and they couldn’t shut him up, so of course, they cast him out.  What else could they do (other than repent)?

Later, Jesus goes and finds him.  Now, if ever a man was ripe for the gospel message….

All Jesus says to him is this: “Do you believe in the Son of God?”

“Who is He, Lord, that I may believe in Him?”

“You have both seen Him and it is He who is talking to you.”

Talk about seeing the Light….

***

Another man had the opposite experience.  He was able to see from birth.  But on his way to Damascus,  light shines from heaven and knocks him clean off the donkey he’s riding.

“Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?”

“Who are you, Lord?” he said.

“I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.  It is hard for you to kick against the goads.”

“Lord, what do you want me to do?”

“Get up and go into the city, and you’ll be told what to do.”

So he gets up, but meeting the Light of the World has made him blind, and they lead him by the hand into the city, where he waits three days.  Meanwhile, God calls Ananias to go and heal him, which he does.  When Ananias lays hands on him, scales fall from Saul’s eyes, and he receives the Holy Spirit.

On second thought, was he really blind for those three days?  Or was that the first time in his whole life that he could really see?

***

Consider these two men.  How did they come to be believers?  What happened?

If you’re on any side of the COSF debate: how much of your favored content is missing from these evangelistic encounters? Why do you think that is?

But also think about this: Is there any fuzziness here?  Any ground for a lack of assurance, in either man?

“Penny, my body and I have a relationship that works best when we maintain a cool, wary distance from each other.”

-Dr. Sheldon Cooper, Th.D.

When our fathers sought to reform the Roman church, they rejected the Roman formulation of merit theology.  Crudely put, the Roman idea taught that God saves people who had (in some fashion) racked up enough points to deserve saving.  Since all men are sinners, they need not only their own merits, but the merits of Christ infused into them – and those of Mary, the saints, and so on, and then after they die they will go to purgatory for additional cleansing before they will be able to enter heaven.  Alms, sacraments, indulgences, and various other things contributed merit, so that the sinner might appear before God in a patchwork quilt of merit accrued from all these various sources, in hopes of being thought worthy at least of purgatory.

The Reformers, being taught by Scripture that justification before God comes by faith alone in Christ alone, formulated their soteriology in a way that highlights God’s work—in fact, makes the entire affair God’s work from top to bottom.  Because of their belief that even faith is a gift of a loving God, and not in any way of human origin, they could maintain that saving faith is an act of the whole person, and still keep the focus on Christ.

Their descendants, however, were not so fortunate. The way the Reformers formulated the doctrine ultimately led to the Puritan disaster, in which each person was rigorously examined for the “marks” of true conversion.  The whole person was put under a microscope – but what this really meant was not the whole person, but a set of core samples suggested by their anthropology.  One had to have knowledge of the gospel, of course.  One had to assent to it, to agree with the facts of the gospel.  One had to trust.  This was attended – so taught the Puritans – by remorse for sin and various other symptoms, for which putative converts would be examined.  So thoroughly did the Puritan doctrine and practice depart from the biblical teaching of assurance that it proved unbearable, and there are, today, no Puritans in New England.

Seeking to avoid that problem, old-school Free Grace types (e.g., the Florida Bible College tradition in which I was raised) cut emotion out of the picture.  If God gave you lightning bolts from the sky at your conversion, or an overwhelming sense of remorse for sin, or joy, or peace, then wonderful – but you didn’t need to expect it, or question your salvation because you didn’t have a big emotional experience.  It was all about making a decision to believe in Christ, not about how you felt about it.  The Bible never promised such an experience; it does promise that those who believe will be saved.

Zane Hodges and GES took it a step further and cut the will out with the doctrine of passive faith (and I was in on that, and wrote a couple of articles in support of it).  When accused of preaching “mere intellectual assent,” we responded that there’s nothing mere about intellectual assent – that’s what belief is, and believing is all that’s required for salvation.

Assurance is vital; compromising it as the Reformed tradition so frequently does is spiritual disaster.  If one must choose between passive faith and the Reformers, or at least old-line FG theology and the Reformers, clearly one ought to take one of the former options.  But who says these are the only choices?  I say they are not, and to show you what I mean, I’d like to take a look at another, older stream of history, and how it converges with the one we’re already discussing.

The Greeks were acutely aware that the material world is a world of constant change.  Vexed at this constant shifting, they felt that knowledge of the material world was really impossible.  In search of something fixed to know for certain, Plato imagined a world of Forms, immaterial abstract invariant principles that exist independently of the material world.  True knowledge, Plato said, consisted in knowledge of the Forms.  The problem, of course, is that we human beings don’t live in that world; we live in the constantly shifting material world.  So how do we get contact with the world of forms?

There is a part of man, Plato said, that has contact with the Forms and is able to know them: the intellect.  The intellect, pure and free of bodily passions, could address itself to the Forms, and calculate propositions about them.

The medieval Christians eventually forsook this pagan fairy tale, realizing Plato’s contempt for the material world was a sin, and the certainty he was seeking through the Forms is actually found in Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, and who upholds the world by the word of His power.  Rebelling against Christianity, the Enlightenment rationalists brought Plato back.  Religion – by which they meant Christianity – stirs up men’s passions and brings violence and wickedness, but Reason delivers us from evil.  The intellect once again reigned supreme.

The Romantics sought to rebel against the rationalists, but they were far more like the rationalists than they realized.  They accepted the same basic anthropology, and the same opposition of reason on one hand, and emotion, spontaneity, etc. on the other.  The only thing the Romantics really changed was to reverse the moral polarity on the model.  Where the rationalists saw reason as the supreme good, and emotion and spontaneity as evil and dangerous, the romantics took emotion and spontaneity as good, and saw reason as cold, bloodless, and therefore ultimately wicked.

How does this story converge with Free Grace?  When we talk about belief as a matter of the intellect, we are speaking the language of Enlightenment rationalism and of Plato.  In doing so, we are assuming (on no biblical evidence at all) that there is such a thing as the intellect, a component part of man, separate from the passions and the body, that deals only in cool reason and propositions.  It is in this part that we find saving faith, and that being the case, saving faith could be nothing other than assent to the right proposition.

Identifying the right proposition, of course, then assumes paramount importance.  A disagreement there is a disagreement on the very substance of the gospel itself.  That’s the sort of thing that good Christians divide over—and here we are, divided and rebelling against the clear biblical teaching that calls us to be one in Christ.  Could it be we took a wrong turn somewhere?

We need to be careful at this point not to commit the error of the Romantics.  Seeing the evil effects of naked rationalism, the Romantics rebelled, but they didn’t actually seek out the source of the problem.  They wanted to keep the underlying anthropology, and still evade the evil effects of rationalism.  To an extent they succeeded, but because they didn’t address the root of the problem, they just brought about another, equally wicked, set of problems instead.

We have the same anthropology still dogging us today.  We have come hundreds of miles since we took that particular wrong turn, and going back one mile to try to find our way will not do; healing the wound lightly is not real healing.  So let’s go all the way back and see if we can correct the real mistake.

There are no Forms.  The world of matter is constantly changing; this is a glorious thing and the way God made the world to be.  Certainty is possible, and it is grounded in knowing the One who made the world and upholds it all.  If there are no Forms, there is no particular reason why we should need a proposition-calculator in the soul, neatly separated from passions and the body – no Forms, no intellect.

Anyway, “intellect” was never a biblical category to start with.  There’s nothing mandatory about it.  We did not derive it from diligent study of Scripture.  If we are going to have the category, we will need to defend it from the Bible.  I leave that job to someone who thinks it can be done; personally I don’t, and don’t intent to waste time trying.

Instead, I suggest we repair to Scripture and seek to understand the inner workings of man from the perspective of the Word of God.  Step one: belief takes place in the heart (Gk. kardia, see Lu. 24:25, Ac. 8:37, Rom. 10:10).  Sexual desire, and consequently adultery, can also happen there (Mat. 5:28), as can purity (Mat. 5:8), evil thoughts (Mat. 9:4, 24:48), humility (Mat. 11:29), dullness or understanding (Mat. 13:15, 19), being near or far from God (Mat. 15:8), forgiveness (Mat. 18:35) and love (Mat. 22:37).  Anything that comes out the mouth has its source in the heart (Mat. 12:34, 15:18): it can be the source for evil thoughts, murder, fornication, adultery, theft, false witness, and blasphemy (Mat. 15:19).  And that list is just from Matthew; wonder what we’ll find in the other 26 books of the NT, to say nothing of the OT?

If sexual desire, forgiveness, understanding (or the lack thereof), love, nearness to God (or the lack thereof) and saving faith all arise from the same place within man, what does that tell us?

That a crypto-Platonist on a seminary campus should be roped and hogtied on sight like a rodeo calf.  But beyond that, what are the long-term implications?  Frankly, I’m not sure, but at the very least this casts serious, biblically founded doubt on the notion that belief arises from a neoclassically sterile component of the soul separate from emotion, body, and relationship.  We need a better, more biblical anthropology.

I mentioned in an earlier post that mysticism, even true mysticism, poses major problems of epistemology to most conservatives.  This problem comes in two parts: conservatives have believed lies about the nature of knowledge, and simply fail to understand the nature of language and how it relates to relationships.

The first part of our problem is that we bought the Enlightenment lie about the nature of knowledge.  Real knowledge — so they told us — is about what can be weighed, counted, numbered.  Real knowledge can be calculated; it happens in a laboratory, or in an equation, and only there.

We brought this over into theology, too.  Real theological knowledge happens when all the proof texts line up, the syllogisms are clear and sharp and valid, and so on.  “If p, then q” and like that.  Propositional calculus reigns.

Well.  The results of a laboratory experiment, or a syllogism, can be real knowledge, true enough.  But we wouldn’t have arrived at the primacy of the laboratory from Scripture.

You can’t get four chapters into Genesis without noticing this.  “And Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain…”

He what?

So tell me, Mr. Gradgrind, to which facts did Adam’s intellect assent, that she might conceive Cain?  Did he seduce her with syllogisms, or maybe sing her that great Olivia Newton-John hit, “Let’s Get Cognitive”?

Of course not.  The marriage bed is a paradigm case of real knowledge, and though it can be described propositionally to an extent — parents everywhere struggle to try, when the kids start asking questions — the knowledge itself is far more than propositions.  (Otherwise, why would “virgins discussing sex” be a universally understood metaphor for not knowing what you’re talking about?)

For those of you sputtering “But ‘Adam knew Eve’ is just a euphemism!” — so what?  Do you really think Moses just picked a verb at random?  That “knew” is a lie, a mere place-holder because Moses was too genteel to say “f—ed”?  Of course not.  The word choice is appropriate, and made not just by Moses, but by the Holy Spirit who inspired him. God uses it because it’s an appropriate, a true, way of describing what happens.  If we don’t find it appropriate and true, then we need to repent.

Fast-forward to Deuteronomy and Proverbs, where we learn that real knowledge happens at the pilgrim feasts.  Come and feast before Me, God says, so that you may learn to fear Me.  The fear of the Lord, Proverbs tells us, is the beginning of knowledge.  One of the foundations of real knowledge in ancient Israel was drinking strong drink and eating roast sheep in the presence of Yahweh.  Not just the concept — the actual doing of it.  Put that in your propositional calculus and smoke it.

Back when I was part of a church singles ministry, we once invited the pastor, a couple of elders, and their wives to join us to play a version of the newlywed game.  All these couples had been married for decades, but that only made it more fun.  We separated the men and women, and asked them questions about each other, then got them together to hear the answers to the questions.

The pastor — married four decades at this point — didn’t know the color of his wife’s toothbrush.  But when we asked his wife what animal her husband reminded her of, she tried in vain to suppress a grin, blushed fiercely, and said “Stallion.”

Did he know his wife?  She seemed to think so.

**

The second part of our problem is that conservatives don’t grasp the Trinitarian nature of language.

The Trinity contains metaphor within its very nature.  If you’ve seen the Son, you’ve seen the Father.  The fundamental is/is not of metaphor is present there — If you’ve seen the Son, you’ve seen the Father; the Son is not the Father.  The Son is a metaphor for the Father.

Language is God’s gift, and it is metaphor.  “Lion” is not a lion; it’s a word.  But then, of course it’s a lion; it’s not “apple” or “skyscraper” or “purse;” it’s lion.  Is/is not.  Metaphor.

“The lion ate the zebra” is storytelling.  The language represents, but does not contain, the reality.  In the right relational context, though, propositions do more than communicate; they become a conveyance through which a relationship can be created, altered or destroyed.

“With this ring I thee wed,” uttered in the context of a stage play, does not actually unite the man and the woman on the stage in marriage.  A single person can stand in an empty room and say “With this ring I thee wed” all day long, and still not be married.

But in the proper context, said by the groom to his bride and vice versa, “With this ring I thee wed” both signifies, and accomplishes, the union.

What makes the difference?

The relationship.

Could the whole thing have been accomplished without words?  No, not really.  Were the couple deaf/mute, they’d have accomplished it without speaking, but not without language.  The proposition is important.  But it’s not a sufficient condition to accomplish the marriage.  The right people have to be present in the right relationship, or it doesn’t work.

What if they mess up the words?  What if they stumble over it?
“With this thee I ring…uh…with thee this ring I…oh, forget it, we’re married!” says the red-faced groom, sliding the ring on her finger.  The bride, thrown off by this, just blurts out “I thee wed” and puts the ring on his finger.

“But wait,” says the pinch-headed fundamentalist, as the guests are eating at the reception a little later.  “She didn’t mention the ring.  Are we sure they’re really married?”

Wedding guests should be clothed with rejoicing; this bean-counter has come to the feast without his wedding garment.  If he insists on making his point loudly and repeatedly, the friends of the bridegroom will quite properly cast him out.

**

What does this have to do with mystical union with Christ?  Propositions matter, but not in the way that rationalist bean-counters would like to think.  This is a reality we deal with every day; it is by no means too complicated for normal people.  However, it does not reduce well to test-tube categories, and if you have a certain turn of mind, that makes you angry.  “If it can’t be boiled down to essentials and tracked,” you say to yourself, “then how can I be sure?”

That’s exactly the right question, and to find the answer to it, answer this question first: If we can’t reduce Adam’s knowledge of Eve to propositions, how could she have conceived?  How could we be sure she had?

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?