Evidence for a Theology of Union
From outside sources...
"But there is a place at which God and the cosmic reality are reconciled, a place at which God and man have become one. That and that alone is what enables man to set his eyes upon God and upon the world at the same time. This place does not lie somewhere out beyond reality in the realm of ideas. It lies in the midst of history as a divine miracle. It lies in Jesus Christ, the Reconciler of the world." Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics"
"Do small things as if they were great, because of the majesty of Christ, who does them in us and lives our life, and great things as if they were small: easy, because of his almighty power." Blaise Pascal, Pensees #919
"At such moments [of revelation of the glory of God], offering up his heart at the hour when the nocturnal flowers offer up their perfumes, he could not have said himself, possibly, what was passing in his mind; but he felt something fly out of him and something descend into him. He dreamed of the grandeur and presence of God... He did not study God; he was dazzled by Him." Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
"For in knowing Christ man knows and acknowledges God’s choice which has fallen upon this man himself; he no longer stands as the chooser between good and evil, that is to say, in disunion; he is the chosen one, who can no longer choose, but has already made his choice in his being chosen in the freedom and unity of the deed and will of God. He thus has a new knowledge, in which the knowledge of good and evil is overcome. He has the knowledge of God, yet no longer as the man who has become like God, but as the man who bears the image of God. All he knows now is ‘Jesus Christ, and him crucified’ (I Cor. 2.2), and in Him he knows all." Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics
"The work done by Jesus in the heavenly sanctuary must have its counterpart in the heart that is to enter that sanctuary. And because it is one Jesus who is both Minister of the new sanctuary and Mediator of the new covenant, we may be confident that He will do His work in our heart as effectually as He does it in heaven. And, therefore, the deeper our insight into the perfection of His work in heaven above, the more confident our expectation may be of the perfection in our life within." Andrew Murray, The Holiest of All
"But what happens if someone appears with the claim that he not only has authority but is authority; not only has a word but is the Word? Here our being is invaded by a new being. Here the highest authority in the world so far, the prophet, is at an end. This is no longer a holy man, a reformer, a prophet, but the Son. The question is no longer, 'What or whence are you?' The question here concerns revelation itself." Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christ the Center
"lt is as the Son, the living One, that He is High Priest; it is in eternal life power, by a life working in us, that He brings us to God. And so, by His Spirit, He, in His self-sacrifice, lives in us, and makes it true in the experience of each true disciple—sin put away by the sacrifice of self. The law for the Head is the law for every member. And now the alternative is put before us: Which shall it be? Sin and myself or Christ and His Self." Andrew Murray, The Holiest of All
"Nothing can atone for the loss of secret and direct intercourse with God. Even work in the service of God and of love is exhausting: we cannot bless others without power going out from us; this must be renewed from above. The law of the manna, that what is heavenly cannot remain good long upon earth, but must day by day be renewed afresh from heaven, still holds good. Jesus Christ teaches it us: I need every day time to have communion with my Father in secret. My life is like His a life hid in heaven, in God; it needs time day by day to be fed from heaven. It is from heaven alone that the power to lead a heavenly life on earth can come." Andrew Murray, Like Christ
"To walk like Christ one must abide in Him; he that abides in Him has the power to walk like Him; not indeed in himself or his own efforts, but in Jesus, who perfects His strength in our weakness. It is just when I feel my utter impotence most deeply, and fully accept Jesus in His wondrous union to myself as my life, that His power works in me, and I am able to lead a life completely beyond what my power could obtain. I begin to see that abiding in Him is not a matter of moments or special seasons, but the deep life process in which, by His keeping grace, I continue without a moment’s intermission, and from which I act out all my Christian life. And I feel emboldened really to take Him in everything as my example, because I am sure that the hidden inner union and likeness must work itself out into a visible likeness in walk and conduct." Andrew Murray, Like Christ
"Only there is one thing I must not forget. It is not the remembrance of what Jesus has once done to me, but the living experience of what He is now to me, that will give me the power to act like Him. His love must be a present reality, the inflowing of a life and a power in which I can love like Him. It is only as by the Holy Spirit I realize WHAT Jesus is doing for me, and HOW He does it, and that it is HE who does it, that it is possible for me to do to others what He is doing to me." Andrew Murray, Like Christ
“The heart of the Christian faith is simple but quite revolutionary. It is that a man’s relations with God are no longer a matter of obedience to an 'external' God, but a willingness to be led by God’s own Spirit within him. Reconciliation with God is made possible by Christ, who is God as well as man, for, to use St. Paul’s words, 'God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself.' And it is by believing in a living Spirit within us that we can know the friendship of God and can experience his power and love actually operating within ourselves.” J.B. Phillips, Good News
"Know that you are one with Him--one in the unity of nature. By His birth He became man, and took your nature that He might be one with you. By your new birth you become one with Him, and are made partaker of His divine nature. The link that binds you to Him is as real and close as bound Him to the Father--the link of a divine life. Your claim on Him is as sure and always availing as was His on the Father. Your union with Him is as close." Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
Only cultivate large expectations of what the Lord will do for you. Let it be your sole desire to attain to an entire union with Him. It is impossible to say what the Lord Jesus would do for a soul who is truly willing to live as entirely through Him as He through the Father. Because just as He lived through the Father, and the Father made that life with all its work so glorious, so will you experience in all your work how entirely He has undertaken to work all in you." Andrew Murray, Like Christ
"Man at his origin knows only one thing: God. It is only in the unity of his knowledge of God that he knows of other men, of things, and of himself. He knows all things only in God, and God in all things. The knowledge of good and evil shows that he is no longer at one with this origin." Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics
"Sanctification, holiness, is nothing more than a life in union with Jesus. Nothing more, and nothing less. He that sanctifieth, and they who are sanctified, are all of One. To live in that oneness, to have Jesus living in us, is the way to be holy." Andrew Murray, The Holiest of All
"Knowledge of Jesus Christ implies ignorance of a man’s own good and evil; knowledge of Jesus Christ refers the man entirely to Jesus Christ; and from this it follows that there must every day arise a new authentic proving which will consist precisely in the exclusion of all other sources of the knowledge of the will of God. This proving springs from the knowledge that a man is preserved, sustained and guided by the will of God, the knowledge that he has already been endowed with the merciful union with the will of God; and it seeks to confirm this knowledge every day afresh in his actual concrete life." Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics
"As our communion with Him becomes more intimate and intense, and we let the Holy Spirit reveal Him to us in His heavenly glory, the more we realize how the life in us is the life of One who sits upon the throne of heaven. We feel the power of an endless life working in us. We taste the eternal life. We have the foretaste of the eternal glory." Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
"The inconceivable mystery of the gift of the Holy Spirit—Who is He? The Spirit of God, in Whom, just as a man has his life in the spirit that animates his body, the whole life and glory of Deity is comprehended. The Spirit is the bond of union between the Father and the Son. He is the Spirit of the Father and of the Son too. And this very same Spirit is to be the Spirit of our life, dwelling in us as the hidden God, doing His work to reveal the Son and the Father within us,—the Spirit of God dwelling in us. The thought is so overwhelming that it constrains us to worship and adore. And of this blessed Spirit God has said that He will be the life of our life. He is given with the express purpose of working out in us all that God wants us to be and to do. He is given with the understanding that we never need, in our own strength, to do what God commands: the Spirit will work it in us. He comes as the whole God to take possession of the whole man; He will be responsible for our whole being, if we will yield ourselves to Him in faith. He will glorify Christ in us, and as we look up to Christ, and through Him to the Father, the blessed Spirit will work in the depth of our hearts the likeness of God and His Christ." Andrew Murray, The State of the Church
“[The early church] realized with a kind of dazed happiness that now that they believed in the focused God, they were reconciled with the purpose and will of God, and the spiritual resources of heaven flowed into their ordinary lives.” J.B. Phillips, Good News
"There is no other way of our becoming holy, but by becoming partakers of the holiness of Christ. And there is no other way of this taking place than by our personal spiritual union with Him, so that through His Holy Spirit His holy life flows into us." Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
"When we have said all that we can, the secret mysteries of a new nature and divine life can never be sufficiently expressed; language and words cannot reach them; nor can they be truly understood but by those souls that are enkindled within, and awakened unto the sense and relish of spiritual things..." Henry Scougal, The Life of God in the Soul of Man
"The Holy Spirit was given for this one purpose--that the glorious redemption and life in Christ might with divine power be conveyed and communicated to us. We have the Holy Spirit to make the living Christ, in all His saving power, and in the completeness of His victory over sin, ever present within us. It is this that constitutes Him the Comforter: with Him we need never mourn an absent Christ." Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
"But there is a place at which God and the cosmic reality are reconciled, a place at which God and man have become one. That and that alone is what enables man to set his eyes upon God and upon the world at the same time. This place does not lie somewhere out beyond reality in the realm of ideas. It lies in the midst of history as a divine miracle. It lies in Jesus Christ, the Reconciler of the world." Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics"
"Do small things as if they were great, because of the majesty of Christ, who does them in us and lives our life, and great things as if they were small: easy, because of his almighty power." Blaise Pascal, Pensees #919
"At such moments [of revelation of the glory of God], offering up his heart at the hour when the nocturnal flowers offer up their perfumes, he could not have said himself, possibly, what was passing in his mind; but he felt something fly out of him and something descend into him. He dreamed of the grandeur and presence of God... He did not study God; he was dazzled by Him." Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
"For in knowing Christ man knows and acknowledges God’s choice which has fallen upon this man himself; he no longer stands as the chooser between good and evil, that is to say, in disunion; he is the chosen one, who can no longer choose, but has already made his choice in his being chosen in the freedom and unity of the deed and will of God. He thus has a new knowledge, in which the knowledge of good and evil is overcome. He has the knowledge of God, yet no longer as the man who has become like God, but as the man who bears the image of God. All he knows now is ‘Jesus Christ, and him crucified’ (I Cor. 2.2), and in Him he knows all." Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics
"The work done by Jesus in the heavenly sanctuary must have its counterpart in the heart that is to enter that sanctuary. And because it is one Jesus who is both Minister of the new sanctuary and Mediator of the new covenant, we may be confident that He will do His work in our heart as effectually as He does it in heaven. And, therefore, the deeper our insight into the perfection of His work in heaven above, the more confident our expectation may be of the perfection in our life within." Andrew Murray, The Holiest of All
"But what happens if someone appears with the claim that he not only has authority but is authority; not only has a word but is the Word? Here our being is invaded by a new being. Here the highest authority in the world so far, the prophet, is at an end. This is no longer a holy man, a reformer, a prophet, but the Son. The question is no longer, 'What or whence are you?' The question here concerns revelation itself." Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christ the Center
"lt is as the Son, the living One, that He is High Priest; it is in eternal life power, by a life working in us, that He brings us to God. And so, by His Spirit, He, in His self-sacrifice, lives in us, and makes it true in the experience of each true disciple—sin put away by the sacrifice of self. The law for the Head is the law for every member. And now the alternative is put before us: Which shall it be? Sin and myself or Christ and His Self." Andrew Murray, The Holiest of All
"Nothing can atone for the loss of secret and direct intercourse with God. Even work in the service of God and of love is exhausting: we cannot bless others without power going out from us; this must be renewed from above. The law of the manna, that what is heavenly cannot remain good long upon earth, but must day by day be renewed afresh from heaven, still holds good. Jesus Christ teaches it us: I need every day time to have communion with my Father in secret. My life is like His a life hid in heaven, in God; it needs time day by day to be fed from heaven. It is from heaven alone that the power to lead a heavenly life on earth can come." Andrew Murray, Like Christ
"To walk like Christ one must abide in Him; he that abides in Him has the power to walk like Him; not indeed in himself or his own efforts, but in Jesus, who perfects His strength in our weakness. It is just when I feel my utter impotence most deeply, and fully accept Jesus in His wondrous union to myself as my life, that His power works in me, and I am able to lead a life completely beyond what my power could obtain. I begin to see that abiding in Him is not a matter of moments or special seasons, but the deep life process in which, by His keeping grace, I continue without a moment’s intermission, and from which I act out all my Christian life. And I feel emboldened really to take Him in everything as my example, because I am sure that the hidden inner union and likeness must work itself out into a visible likeness in walk and conduct." Andrew Murray, Like Christ
"Only there is one thing I must not forget. It is not the remembrance of what Jesus has once done to me, but the living experience of what He is now to me, that will give me the power to act like Him. His love must be a present reality, the inflowing of a life and a power in which I can love like Him. It is only as by the Holy Spirit I realize WHAT Jesus is doing for me, and HOW He does it, and that it is HE who does it, that it is possible for me to do to others what He is doing to me." Andrew Murray, Like Christ
“The heart of the Christian faith is simple but quite revolutionary. It is that a man’s relations with God are no longer a matter of obedience to an 'external' God, but a willingness to be led by God’s own Spirit within him. Reconciliation with God is made possible by Christ, who is God as well as man, for, to use St. Paul’s words, 'God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself.' And it is by believing in a living Spirit within us that we can know the friendship of God and can experience his power and love actually operating within ourselves.” J.B. Phillips, Good News
"Know that you are one with Him--one in the unity of nature. By His birth He became man, and took your nature that He might be one with you. By your new birth you become one with Him, and are made partaker of His divine nature. The link that binds you to Him is as real and close as bound Him to the Father--the link of a divine life. Your claim on Him is as sure and always availing as was His on the Father. Your union with Him is as close." Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
Only cultivate large expectations of what the Lord will do for you. Let it be your sole desire to attain to an entire union with Him. It is impossible to say what the Lord Jesus would do for a soul who is truly willing to live as entirely through Him as He through the Father. Because just as He lived through the Father, and the Father made that life with all its work so glorious, so will you experience in all your work how entirely He has undertaken to work all in you." Andrew Murray, Like Christ
"Man at his origin knows only one thing: God. It is only in the unity of his knowledge of God that he knows of other men, of things, and of himself. He knows all things only in God, and God in all things. The knowledge of good and evil shows that he is no longer at one with this origin." Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics
"Sanctification, holiness, is nothing more than a life in union with Jesus. Nothing more, and nothing less. He that sanctifieth, and they who are sanctified, are all of One. To live in that oneness, to have Jesus living in us, is the way to be holy." Andrew Murray, The Holiest of All
"Knowledge of Jesus Christ implies ignorance of a man’s own good and evil; knowledge of Jesus Christ refers the man entirely to Jesus Christ; and from this it follows that there must every day arise a new authentic proving which will consist precisely in the exclusion of all other sources of the knowledge of the will of God. This proving springs from the knowledge that a man is preserved, sustained and guided by the will of God, the knowledge that he has already been endowed with the merciful union with the will of God; and it seeks to confirm this knowledge every day afresh in his actual concrete life." Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics
"As our communion with Him becomes more intimate and intense, and we let the Holy Spirit reveal Him to us in His heavenly glory, the more we realize how the life in us is the life of One who sits upon the throne of heaven. We feel the power of an endless life working in us. We taste the eternal life. We have the foretaste of the eternal glory." Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
"The inconceivable mystery of the gift of the Holy Spirit—Who is He? The Spirit of God, in Whom, just as a man has his life in the spirit that animates his body, the whole life and glory of Deity is comprehended. The Spirit is the bond of union between the Father and the Son. He is the Spirit of the Father and of the Son too. And this very same Spirit is to be the Spirit of our life, dwelling in us as the hidden God, doing His work to reveal the Son and the Father within us,—the Spirit of God dwelling in us. The thought is so overwhelming that it constrains us to worship and adore. And of this blessed Spirit God has said that He will be the life of our life. He is given with the express purpose of working out in us all that God wants us to be and to do. He is given with the understanding that we never need, in our own strength, to do what God commands: the Spirit will work it in us. He comes as the whole God to take possession of the whole man; He will be responsible for our whole being, if we will yield ourselves to Him in faith. He will glorify Christ in us, and as we look up to Christ, and through Him to the Father, the blessed Spirit will work in the depth of our hearts the likeness of God and His Christ." Andrew Murray, The State of the Church
“[The early church] realized with a kind of dazed happiness that now that they believed in the focused God, they were reconciled with the purpose and will of God, and the spiritual resources of heaven flowed into their ordinary lives.” J.B. Phillips, Good News
"There is no other way of our becoming holy, but by becoming partakers of the holiness of Christ. And there is no other way of this taking place than by our personal spiritual union with Him, so that through His Holy Spirit His holy life flows into us." Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
"When we have said all that we can, the secret mysteries of a new nature and divine life can never be sufficiently expressed; language and words cannot reach them; nor can they be truly understood but by those souls that are enkindled within, and awakened unto the sense and relish of spiritual things..." Henry Scougal, The Life of God in the Soul of Man
"The Holy Spirit was given for this one purpose--that the glorious redemption and life in Christ might with divine power be conveyed and communicated to us. We have the Holy Spirit to make the living Christ, in all His saving power, and in the completeness of His victory over sin, ever present within us. It is this that constitutes Him the Comforter: with Him we need never mourn an absent Christ." Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
