“The Gospel is ‘the greatest drama ever staged … a terrifying drama of which God is the victim and the hero’ [Dorothy Sayers]. Drama is a composite of word and deed: at times the language of action drowns out the words, at other times the words carry the action along. Yet what God was doing in Jesus Christ ultimately makes sense only according to the biblical script that places the person and work of Jesus Christ in the Old Testament context of creation and covenant. There is a cosmic stage and a covenantal plot; there is conflict; there is a climax; there is resolution. Evangelical theology deals not with disparate bits of ideas and information but with divine doings—with all-embracing cosmic drama that displays the entrances and exoduses of God.”
Today on his blog, Justin Taylor posted two videos of Vanhoozer lecturing at SEBTS. These videos comprise a nice abbreviated summary of The Drama of Doctrine.
Letter dated Oct 20, 1955: “The enclosed should help you. I don’t want it back. I am the one on the left; the one on the right is the Muse. This is a copy of a self-portrait I painted three years ago. Nobody admires my painting much but me. Of course this is not exactly the way I look but it’s the way I feel. It’s better looked at from a distance.”
Letter dated Oct 30, 1955: “I first sent Harper’s Bazaar my self portrait and can you imagine, they said: this is not exactly what we want, a little stiff, couldn’t you send us a snapshot? I also sent it to Harpercourt Brace to use on the jacket of my book. They said: this is a little odd, we don’t think it would increase the sale of the stories.”
Letter dated June 19, 1963: “In the self portrait that is not a peacock. That’s a pheasant cock. I used to raise pheasants but they got too much for me as they require attention and have to be caged. The peacocks take care of themselves. But I like very much the look of the pheasant cock. He has horns and a face like the devil. The self-portrait was made ten years ago, after a very acute siege of lupus. I was taking cortisone which gives you what they call a moon-face and my hair had fallen out to a large extent from the high fever, so I looked pretty much like the portrait. When I painted it I didn’t look either at myself in the mirror or at the bird. I knew what we both looked like.”
“Just as the caterpillar becomes a butterfly, as carbon is converted into diamond, as the grain of wheat upon dying in the ground produces other grains of wheat, as all of nature revives in the spring and dresses up in celebrative clothing, as the believing community is formed out of Adam’s fallen race, as the resurrection body is raised from the body that is dead and buried in the earth, so too, by the re-creating power of Christ, the new heaven and the new earth will one day emerge from the fire-purged elements of this world, radiant in enduring glory and forever set free from the ‘bondage to decay.’”
As you may know I suffer from abibliophobia, the fear of running out of good reading material. And of course this means that I love getting new books. Thankfully I have a job, and some associations, that ensure that I get new books on a very regular basis. And in one of those new books—Wise Counsel: John Newton’s Letters to John Ryland Jr.—I came across a letter about receiving new books.
Here’s the background.
In 1779 John Newton published a 3-volume collection of hymns titled Olney Hymns. It contained 348 hymns, including Amazing Grace, and were mostly written by Newton himself (William Cowper pitched in 68). Upon hearing of the book’s release John Ryland Jr., a friend of Newton’s, wanted a set for himself. Ryland wrote Newton to express his anticipation. Newton mailed him a free set. But ahead of the books Newton sent the following letter:
The hymn books will be with you soon, how soon I know not. Your hungry curiosity will not be long in appeasing. When you have read the preface, twirled over the pages, run your eye down the tables of contents, and have the book by you, you will feel much as you do about any other book that has been lying by you seven years. At least I have often found it so (but perhaps your heart is not just like mine). I have longed for a book, counted the hours till it came, anticipated a thousand things about it, flew to it at first sight with eagerness as a hawk at its prey; and in a little time it has been as quiet, as if placed upon the upper shelf in a bookseller’s shop. [Wise Counsel, 127]
Gaffin then makes three categorical distinctions of this union:
• Predestinarian union with Christ (Eph 1:4).
• Redemptive-historical union with Christ (Rom 6:1–14). The union that is involved as we are seen as one with Christ when he actually accomplished our salvation. We are crucified, buried, raised up with Christ.
• Applicatory (or existential) union with Christ. Paul percieved himself as one chosen in Christ from eternity (1) and as one who was contemplated in Christ during his death/resurrection (2). But Paul also knew that he was at one time NOT united to Christ, but was rather a child of wrath (Rom 16:7). So what effects the transition from wrath to grace? That point came when Paul was united to Christ by faith.
These are not three distinct unions but three facets to the single union.
Under “applicatory union” Gaffin makes these further points:
• Mystical union. It is mystical union because it involves a great mystery, a mystery that has its closest analogy in the relationship between a husband and a wife (Eph 5). Marital union and intimacy does not blur the distinctions between the husband and wife. So our union with Christ does not blur the clear personal distinction between Christ and the Christian. Christ remains our representative. This point protects us from mysticism.
• Spiritual union. It is spiritual because of the activity and indwelling of the Holy Spirit. This union is not ontological (like the Trinity), not hypostatic (like the two natures of Christ), not psychosomatic (body-soul relationship), not one flesh (like marriage), nor is it merely intellectual and moral (as if Christ and the believe now merely share a common purpose). Spiritual union is rooted in the relationship between Christ and the Holy Spirit.
• Reciprocal union. Believers are in Christ and Christ is also in them. The hope of the church is that Christ “is in you” (Col 1:27).
• Vital union. Christ’s indwelling is the very life of the believer (Gal 2:20, Col 3:4).
• Permanent union. Rooted in election, our union will reach its final consummation in glorification. At the end of Rom 8 Paul says that nothing, not even death, can separate us from the love of Christ. Why? Because not even death can separate us from Christ. Westminster Confession: “The souls of believers are at their death made perfect in holiness, and do immediately pass into glory; and their bodies, being still united to Christ, do rest in their graves till the resurrection.”
• Corporate union. Union is obviously very personal. But it’s also corporate (1 Cor 1:9, 12:13). The call that comes to each believer is also a call into fellowship with His Body. There is no union that is not also fellowship with other believers. Never polarize the personal and corporate concerns.
• Union and justification. We do not have our justification apart from, or prior to, our being united to Christ. Justification is a manifestation of our union with Christ.
John Calvin, Institutes, 3.11.10: “that joining together of Head and members, that indwelling of Christ in our hearts—in short, that mystical union—are accorded by us the highest degree of importance, so that Christ, having been made ours, makes us sharers with him in the gifts with which he has been endowed. We do not, therefore, contemplate him outside ourselves from afar in order that his righteousness may be imputed to us but because we put on Christ and are engrafted into his body—in short, because he deigns to make us one with him.”
Conclusion. A focus on our union with Christ will keep our focus on Christ himself, on his person, rather than being preoccupied merely by the benefits we receive from Him. It keeps Christ central. It will not allow him to fade into the background as a mere facilitator of these benefits.
“Among all the realities of the invisible world, mediated to us by the disclosures and promises of God, and to which our faith responds, there is none that more strongly calls into action this faculty for grasping the unseen than the divine pronouncement through the Gospel, that, though sinners, we are righteous in the judgment of God. That is not only the invisible, it seems the impossible; it is the paradox of all paradoxes; it requires a unique energy of believing; it is the supreme victory of faith over the apparent reality of things; it credits God with calling the things that are not as though they were; it penetrates more deeply into the deity of God than any other act of faith.” (135)
“Those who see this form of forensic justification as merely a legal fiction do not share Luther’s understanding of the power of the Word of God. The reformer knew that from the beginning of the world, God determined reality by speaking. Therefore, he was certain that God’s word of forgiveness created a new reality in the life of the sinner. The reformer could not explain the mystery of evil and sin continuing in the lives of those God had claimed as his own in baptism. But he did not doubt that when God said, ‘Forgiven,’ the reality of human sinlessness in God’s sight was genuine and unassailable. God’s children must live with the mystery of the continuing sin and evil in their lives as they engage in the battle against their own sins. But they have no warrant to doubt that God has established the mightier reality of their innocence in his sight. And what he sees is real because he determines reality.” (154-155)
Tony Reinke 