For the Reformed (mostly): on Union with Christ

[hedrick]

No, I'm not assuming that faith = baptism if by that you mean water baptism. For Paul, being baptized into Christ is the work of the Holy Spirit who works faith in the believer.

There is a parallel between Gal 3:27 ("For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ", i.e., have been united to Christ) and Gal 3:28b ("For you are all one in Christ Jesus", again this speaks of union with Christ). The explanatory for clause in Gal 3:27 in turn explains Gal 3:26 ("For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus"). So Paul is connecting faith with union by the linkage between vv. 26, 27 and 28b.

Hedrick, are you making an attempt to exegete the text?

Sure. My real conclusion is that this kind of ordo probably doesn't represent Paul all that well. As I see it, he's actually treating being in Christ through faith as the same thing as being united with Christ in baptism. To construct an ordo we have to break this apart in a way that I'm not sure represents his thought.

That would lead to

faith = union -> sanctification and justification in parallel

The problem is that Paul tends to use faith in a specific way. Justification is always said to be by faith. And the basis of our new life (sanctification) is that in Christ we have died to sin and risen to new life. After thinking about it more, I suspect these are different aspects or emphases on what is basically the same thing. If that's the case, a diagram like this just isn't well suited to showing it.

An obvious alternative would be

faith -> union -> sanctification and justification in parallel

But I have problems with it that come from considering what faith actually is. Even knowing that we're talking about logical dependence and not necessarily sequence in time, I think calling union something separate from faith is potentially misleading. It could imply that it's some kind of mystical experience. I think for Paul the sense in which we are in Christ is that we have trust and obey him, which I believe is what he means by faith. So I think the union actually is faith, not a conceptually separate result of faith.

 

[hedrick]

Incidentally, you may wonder why I say that faith is trust and obedience. Note by the way that I'm talking about an attitude of obedience, not a set of accomplishments. Those fall under sanctification. Otherwise we contradict Luther's basic insight.

I have two reasons:
1) pistis in Greek covers both faith and faithfulness
2) if we want to understand Jesus and Paul as saying the same thing, the only sensible parallel in Jesus' teaching to faith in Paul's is being a follower.