The Body of Christ and New Creation

If justification is the doorway, union with the risen Christ is the house: the participatory heart of Paul’s gospel, in which the believer is incorporated into Christ, dies and rises with him in baptism, is indwelt by his Spirit, and is made part of his body the Church — “if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature” (2 Cor. 5:17). This file traces the Pauline language of being “in Christ,” the body of Christ, dying and rising with him, life in the Spirit, and the new creation, and shows how the Orthodox tradition reads this as the deifying trajectory of salvation toward theosis.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

“In Christ”

The most characteristic phrase in Paul is “in Christ” (en Christō) and its variants — “in him,” “in the Lord,” “with Christ” — occurring well over a hundred times across the letters. To be a Christian, for Paul, is to be in Christ: “there is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1); “if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature” (2 Cor. 5:17); “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Gal. 2:20). This is not metaphor loosely used but the structuring reality of Paul’s soteriology: salvation is participation in Christ — in his death, his resurrection, his life, his Spirit, and his body. The forensic language of justification (see Grace and Righteousness) is set within this larger participatory frame, and many interpreters across traditions now regard union with Christ, rather than justification considered in isolation, as the center of Pauline theology (Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 1977, on “participationist eschatology”; cf. the older study of Deissmann on the “in Christ” formula).

Dying and Rising with Christ in Baptism

The entry into this union is baptism, which Paul describes as a real participation in the death and resurrection of Christ: “Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6:3–4). The believer dies to sin and the old self and rises to a new life that is Christ’s own (Rom. 6:5–11; Col. 2:12; 3:1–4). This is the sacramental ground of the whole Christian life in Paul, and the Orthodox tradition reads it as the inauguration of the new existence that baptism effects and the Eucharist sustains (on the sacramental life, see Divine Liturgy). The Fathers, above all Chrysostom, dwell on Romans 6 as the charter of the baptized life — death to sin and the real implanting of the believer into Christ’s risen life (Chrysostom, Homilies on Romans 10–11, on Rom. 6; trans. NPNF I/11).

The Body of Christ

From union with Christ flows Paul’s ecclesiology: the Church is the body of Christ, and believers are its members. “For as the body is one, and hath many members… so also is Christ. For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body” (1 Cor. 12:12–13); “Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular” (1 Cor. 12:27); “so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another” (Rom. 12:5). The image is at once organic (the interdependence of the members, the dignity of the weakest, 1 Cor. 12:14–26), Christological (Christ the head, Eph. 1:22–23; Col. 1:18), and sacramental (the one bread making the many one body, 1 Cor. 10:16–17). This is the seed of the whole Orthodox doctrine of the Church as the living organism of Christ, animated by the Spirit, in which the faithful are not isolated individuals but members of one another (see Ecclesiology). It is rooted, strikingly, in the Damascus encounter itself, where the risen Christ identified himself with his persecuted members — “why persecutest thou me?” (Acts 9:4; see The Damascus Road).

Life in the Spirit

Union with Christ is realized in the believer by the indwelling Holy Spirit. Romans 8, the summit of the letter, sets out the life “after the Spirit”: the Spirit dwells in the believer (Rom. 8:9–11), bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God (Rom. 8:16), helps our weakness and intercedes within us (Rom. 8:26), and is the firstfruits and pledge of the redemption to come (Rom. 8:23). The Spirit produces fruit — “love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance” (Gal. 5:22–23) — and conforms the believer to Christ, who is being “changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Cor. 3:18). This last text — transformation “from glory to glory” — is read by the Orthodox tradition as a direct scriptural warrant for theosis, the progressive transfiguration of the believer into the divine likeness by the Spirit (see Theosis).

The New Creation

The horizon of all this is new creation. “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature [or: there is a new creation]: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2 Cor. 5:17); “for in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature” (Gal. 6:15). The resurrection of Christ has inaugurated a new creation into which the believer is incorporated, and which awaits its consummation when “the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21). Paul’s eschatology is thus cosmic as well as personal: the renewal begun in the believer is the firstfruits of the renewal of all things (1 Cor. 15:20–28, 51–57; Rom. 8:18–25).

The Deifying Trajectory: Toward Theosis

The Orthodox tradition reads this whole complex — union with Christ, the indwelling Spirit, transformation from glory to glory, the new creation — as the deifying trajectory of salvation. The goal is not merely pardon but participation in the divine life: that the faithful become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4), conformed to the image of the Son (Rom. 8:29), filled “with all the fulness of God” (Eph. 3:19). This is theosis, deification — humanity raised by grace into communion with God, sharing by the Spirit in the glorified humanity of the risen Christ. The Greek Fathers found in Paul the scriptural foundation of this teaching: that God became man so that man might be deified, and that the whole Pauline language of being “in Christ,” of bearing the image of the heavenly (1 Cor. 15:49), and of being changed into the same image (2 Cor. 3:18), describes precisely this ascent (Athanasius, On the Incarnation 54; Chrysostom, Hom. Rom. on Rom. 8; cf. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 1944; see Theosis and The Eastern Reading of Paul). In this reading the apostle of grace is also the apostle of deification: the same gospel that justifies the ungodly draws them, in Christ and by the Spirit, into the very life of God.

See Also

References

  • The Holy Bible, King James Version. The Epistles to the Romans, First and Second Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians; the Second Epistle of Peter; the Acts of the Apostles.
  • John Chrysostom. Homilies on the Epistle to the Romans. Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Vol. 11.
  • Athanasius of Alexandria. On the Incarnation. Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 4.
  • Sanders, E. P. Paul and Palestinian Judaism. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977.
  • Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. London: James Clarke, 1957 (orig. 1944).