A central but often neglected doctrine

In Union with Christ—a runner-up for WORLD’s 2016 Book of the Year in the Accessible Theology category—Los Angeles pastor Rankin Wilbourne doesn’t say Christ-bonding is easy, but he rightly insists that it’s essential and explains how tough times can produce great benefits. Imagine a storm blowing a sailboat so fast that all night long death seems moments away, but in the morning you’re hundreds of miles closer to your destination. We can rejoice amid suffering not because we’re masochists but because a deeper and sweeter joy will come in the morning. And, when we stop thinking so much about our own story that we enter into God’s story, we learn that’s the biggest and best of all. In the following excerpt, courtesy of publisher David C Cook, Wilbourne explains how our self-centeredness hinders our union with Christ. —Marvin Olasky

Chapter 6: Whatever Happened to Union with Christ?

Scientists tell us that something called dark energy makes up about 75 percent of the universe. But the fascinating thing is, as one of today’s leading scientists admits, “no one knows what it is.” So there’s something real, but invisible, and central to the world in which we live, something that permeates all we see and know, and not only do we rarely talk about it, but we’re not even sure where to start.

If you’re wondering, Why do I need to know about union with Christ? Is it really necessary? I’ve gotten along fine thus far without understanding it. Perhaps you feel that union with Christ is like dark energy—invisible, mysterious, impractical, because it’s true that you can get through your whole life having never once thought about dark energy. And most of us do.

But we have seen, in the last two chapters, that union with Christ is central to the gospel, biblically and historically. The first and greatest benefit of our salvation is that Christ unites us to himself. For this reason, John Murray says, “Nothing is more central or basic than union and communion with Christ,” for it “is the central truth of the whole doctrine of salvation.” As with dark energy, it’s entirely possible for something to be central, and for us to know that it’s central, but still not know what it is. Yet unlike dark energy, understanding union with Christ will change the way you live your life each day. It will give you hope and purpose, and it was never meant to be reserved for specialists.

A recent book claims, “Union with Christ may be the most important doctrine you’ve never heard of.” But why is that? Why haven’t we heard of it? If nothing is more central or basic to our salvation, then why is union with Christ neither central nor basic for so many of us?

If nothing is more central or basic to our salvation, then why is union with Christ neither central nor basic for so many of us?

Our neglect of this reality is not necessarily intentional, but neither is it just a blind spot. There are several factors at work in our culture at large that make union with Christ seem less important, less central, even less real.

Union with Christ Is Hard to Talk About: And We Like Clear Explanations

If, prior to reading this book, hearing “union with Christ” gave you a vague sense of “Yeah, I know what that means, I think,” that might be because it’s difficult to talk about and hard to understand without using pictures.

So pictures are exactly what the Bible gives us. Union with Christ—what is it? It’s like marriage (Eph. 5). It’s like the relationship of a human body to its head (1 Cor. 12) or stones to a building (1 Pet. 2). Even Jesus uses an extended metaphor of vine and branches to describe our union with him (John 15). The number of metaphors tells us how important this is; the variety tells us how far reaching. But the fact that metaphors must be used at all tells us there is no way to describe or explain union with Christ directly.

I hope to show you that nothing is more practical to living your faith than union with Christ. Yet because it relies on the language of poetry—similes and metaphors—and because it speaks of our participating in heavenly realities while we walk on the ground, it can come across as obscure, or too heavenly minded to be any earthly good. This brings us to a second reason we don’t talk about it today.

Union with Christ Is an Enchanted Reality: And We Live in a Disenchanted World

The writer B. F. Westcott said, “If once we realize what these words ‘we are in Christ’ mean, we shall know that beneath the surface of life lie depths which we cannot fathom, full alike of mystery and hope.” Lewis Smedes adds, “It is [a] whole new reality.” It’s not a reality we can contain in our heads but one that contains us and that underwrites a whole new way of living in an enchanted world. And by enchanted I mean what poet Gerard Manley Hopkins refers to when he writes, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”

This conviction, that the world is charged with God’s grandeur, fills the writings of G. K. Chesterton. The subtitle of his classic book Orthodoxy says it well: The Romance of Faith. For Chesterton, there is a romance to faith, a sacredness in the mix of things that moves against what he calls “the suicide of Modern thought.” Written over one hundred years ago, the book is a reaction to the modern notion that only what is empirical or observable can be real and true. In perhaps the most famous chapter of that book, “The Ethics of Elfland,” Chesterton writes:

The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, “charm,” “spell,” “enchantment.” … I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since … it has taken me a long time to find out that the modern world is wrong and my nurse was right … this world is a wild and startling place.

Our loss of enchantment did not happen overnight. In A Secular Age, philosopher Charles Taylor asks, “Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in say, 1500 in our Western Society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?”

Our loss of enchantment did not happen overnight.

Taylor’s book charts how and why Western culture has become increasingly disenchanted over the last five hundred years. He coins a number of terms to describe this growing disenchantment. It used to be that people assumed we lived in a world infused with the supernatural, charged with the presence of God and other invisible powers. But today, Taylor says, we live inside “an immanent frame,” in which we see the world as completely physical and purely natural, without any supernatural trace or element. Within this “immanent frame,” Taylor also speaks of the “buffered self,” a self that is insulated and autonomous, “not open and porous and vulnerable to a world of spirits and powers.” In our disenchanted world, the buffered self no longer needs to look beyond itself for meaning. It only needs to look within.

Also contributing to this sense of disenchantment, some (by no means all) of our leading scientists have tried to convince us that there is a necessary division between faith and science, that you have to choose between the natural world and supernatural realities. The late Stephen Jay Gould said that purely naturalistic answers to where we came from and why we are here are more than sufficient. “We may yearn for a higher answer,” Gould said, “but none exists. This explanation, though superficially troubling, if not terrifying, is ultimately liberating and exhilarating.”

But what Gould conceives of as liberating, Chesterton considers soul narrowing. “How much larger your life would be,” Chesterton says, “if your self could become smaller in it.”

As an odd sort of proof that no amount of scientific or technological advance can eradicate our sense of the supernatural, look at the number of movies and television shows today that contain supernatural or spiritual themes. No sooner does one area of our culture try to convince us nothing exists beyond the visible world than another stream rushes in to fill the void.

It seems that if we take mystery and enchantment out of our intellectual diet, we become starved for it. Could it be that our particular moment’s obsession with vampires and zombies is, in fact, an indicator of our hunger for enchantment? And that if we can’t find it where it’s meant to be found—at the center of reality—we will try and settle for our own created substitutes?

Union with Christ is an enchanted reality. It tells us that the most important things about our lives cannot be seen or touched with our senses. It tells us that there are extraordinary depths running just below the surface of our lives, which is an overarching reason it doesn’t enjoy a more robust reception today. So many voices in our secular age have conspired in chorus to convince us we live in a disenchanted world. But over the decrees of “This world is all there is,” Shakespeare’s retort still stands, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Union with Christ Displaces Us from the Center of Our Lives: And We Live in a Self-Centered World

To some extent, self-centeredness is innate to being human. Our experience of the world is always filtered through our own perspective, so it’s natural that our first frame of reference is “How will this affect me?” However, while in some times and places a culture will collectively urge people to subordinate their personal desires in favor of the family, the group, or the nation, it’s fair to say our particular culture feeds and nourishes our self-centeredness, encouraging us to enthrone ourselves as the sovereign of our own lives. Do your own thing.

What was once seen as the deadliest of sins—pride—is now embraced and cherished as essential to human flourishing: embrace yourself, express yourself, promote yourself.

What was once seen as the deadliest of sins—pride—is now embraced and cherished as essential to human flourishing: embrace yourself, express yourself, promote yourself.

Illustrations of our self-centeredness abound, but here’s one of my favorites. In 2006, thousands of American college students filled out a survey. They weren’t told what it was, but it was actually the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI), a psychological evaluation that asks for responses to statements such as “I am an extraordinary person,” “I am more capable than other people,” “Everybody likes to hear my stories,” and “If I ruled the world it would be a better place.”

The NPI has been given to college students for several decades. By looking at the change in responses over time, a recent study shows a 30 percent increase in narcissism over the last thirty years. Even more striking, in the 1950s, 12 percent of teens agreed with the statement “I am an important person.” In the 1980s, just thirty years later, 80 percent of teens agreed with that same statement. By our own reckoning, we live in an increasingly self-centered world.

Perhaps, then, another reason it’s difficult, if not impossible, for us to embrace union with Christ is because it displaces us from the center of our own lives, where we naturally love to be. It tells us that the most important part of our identity comes from outside ourselves and that, therefore, our posture needs to be one of dependence and vulnerability, of waiting and trust. To an age that embraces self-promotion as fervently as our own, union with Christ will come across not only as bizarre and strange but even distasteful and offensive.

Here’s an everyday example of just how difficult this displacement can be. When a married couple begins to consider the other’s needs alongside, if not before, their own, their sense of self is being displaced. Each must learn to replace “I” with “we” as their primary frame of reference in order to form a healthy partnership. But when you are used to doing things your own way, this displacement can be uncomfortable. It can be hard to embrace the fact that it’s no longer just you.

Similarly, when Christ unites himself to us, as a bridegroom to a bride, our sense of self must necessarily change. Nothing humbles us, nothing puts us in our place like union with Christ. And because humility is not something we naturally gravitate toward, especially today, it’s not surprising that union with Christ has been pushed to the periphery.

© 2016 Rankin Wilbourne. Union with Christ is published by David C Cook. All rights reserved.