The Inner Life

to whom God willed to make known what the wealth of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles is, the mystery that is Christ in you, the hope of glory. Colossians 1:27 NASB

Christ in you – “Jesus lives in me,” she said, thinking that “Christ in you” meant a spiritual/physical union with the Messiah.  What she didn’t understand is that idea parallels the Dionysus cult of ancient Greece, a pagan god taking over the body of an intoxicated follower.  I’m pretty sure Paul didn’t have this in mind, yet some Christian theologians speak of this verse, and this particular Pauline Greek combination (“Christ in you”) as if it were a mystical union.  For example:

The inward experience of a new creation, the actual formation of Christ, as the resident life within, “worked mightily” in Paul, and he called everybody to a similar experience. . . the actual incorporation of Christ—the Divine Life—into the life of the man, in such a way that he who is joined to the Lord is one Spirit. Christ is resident within, and thereby produces a new spirit—a principle of power, a source of illumination, an earnest of unimagined glory.[1]

Perhaps you’ve heard similar assertions.  Of course, if “Jesus” isn’t God, all of this becomes much more unbelievable, so you might say that the mystical union idea depends on two underlying doctrines: 1) the Trinity, and 2) the cult of Dionysus.  Graeme Goldworthy explains the danger:

“The pivotal point of turning in evangelical thinking which demands close attention is the change that has taken place from the Protestant emphasis upon the objective facts of the gospel in history, to the mediaeval emphasis on the inner life.  The evangelical who sees the inward transformation work of the Spirit as the key element of Christianity will soon lose contact with the historic faith and the historic gospel.  At the same time he will come to neglect the historical acts of God in the Old Testament.  The Christ enthroned in the human heart loses his own incarnate humanity, and the humanity of the Old Testament history will be soon discarded so that the ‘inner spiritual’ meanings may be applied to the ‘inner spiritual’ life of the Christian.

“The crisis of the Old Testament today is only another form of the crisis of the Protestant faith.  Inner-directed Christianity, which reduces the gospel to the level of every other religion of the inner man, might well use a text from the Apocrypha to serve as its own epitaph for the Reformers:

There are others who are unremembered; They are dead, and it is as though they had never existed.”[2]

Paul isn’t a mystic.  He’s a Jewish rabbinically-trained Messianic believer.  His God doesn’t infect believers.  His religion is about historical events, occurrences when God manifested Himself to Israel.  His apocalyptic vision is about the historical return of the Jewish Messiah.  “Christ in you” is not a divine/human symbiosis.  It’s an ethical expression.  It’s a technical term for the idea that the teaching and training of the Messiah is now the dominant rule of your life.  You express what it means to act as the Messiah would have acted.  “Christ in you, the hope of glory” is the assertion that restoration of God’s world comes from living as the Messiah lived, waiting for the fulfillment of Kingdom.

Topical Index:  inner life, spirituality, mystical union, Dionysus, history, Colossians 1:27

[1] R. M. Jones, Studies in Mystical Religion, 14, from https://biblehub.com/commentaries/hastings/colossians/1-27.htm

[2] Graeme Goldworthy, Gospel and Kingdom: A Christian Interpretation of the Old Testament, p. 113.