Union with Christ Is at the Heart of Reformation Theology
Union with Christ
When the Puritan allegorist John Bunyan (1628–1688) finally discovered spiritual peace, he described the awakening as a dramatic release from bondage: “Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed; I was loosened from my afflictions and irons. . . . [N]ow went I also home rejoicing, for the grace and love of God.” But even more significant than his striking imagery was the theological breakthrough that produced it:
I saw, with the eyes of my soul, Jesus Christ at God’s right hand; there, I say, was my righteousness. . . . I also saw, moreover, that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor yet my bad frame that made my righteousness worse; for my righteousness was Jesus Christ himself, “the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever,” Heb. xiii 8. . . . Now Christ was all; all my righteousness, all my sanctification, and all my redemption. Further, the Lord did also lead me into the mystery of union with the Son of God; that I was joined to him, that I was flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bone. . . . If he and I were one, then his righteousness was mine, his merits mine, his victory also mine.1
In this passage, Bunyan’s joy in God flows directly from recognizing that justification and sanctification are united but distinct salvific realities. His justification is secure because it is based on a righteousness that comes from outside himself, from Christ, and his “not guilty” verdict before God thus depends not on whether he has “a good frame of heart” or “a bad frame” from moment to moment. But rather than eliminating the need for inward moral renewal, such an insight carves out space for it: he goes “home rejoicing” in God and glorifying him from the secure position of freedom in Christ. This is the Reformation alignment of justification and sanctification. But notice also how, for Bunyan, these two aspects of salvation are held together by a common center point: union with Christ. The entire passage celebrates how union with Christ by his Spirit is the source of all spiritual good: “Christ was all; all my righteousness, all my sanctification, and all my redemption.” For Bunyan, union with Christ was the key to understanding salvation in all its facets, the sum and substance of our spiritual life—justification and sanctification each originating together from the one same union.
A Heart Aflame for God
Matthew C. Bingham
A Heart Aflame for God explores spiritual formation practices that are consistent with the 5 solas, presenting the riches of the Reformed tradition for 21st-century evangelicals.
And Bunyan was not alone in this thinking. Whether we examine pioneering sixteenth-century Reformed theologians such as John Calvin and Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499–1562), post-Reformation thinkers such as Jerome Zanchi (1516–1590) and Theodore Beza (1519–1605), or English divines such as William Perkins (1558–1602) and William Ames, the conclusion is the same: union with Christ is the controlling idea from which flows the entirety of our redemption.2 Union played a central role in the theology of the English Puritans, for whom it has been described by one historian as “the existential nerve” of their piety.3 Likewise, among twentieth-century and contemporary Reformed theologians, union with Christ continues to function as the key to rightly aligning justification, sanctification, and the very idea of an authentically Christian spiritual life: “Union with Christ is really the central truth of the whole doctrine of salvation not only in its application but also in its once-for-all accomplishment in the finished work of Christ.”4
Why has this doctrine been so important for Reformed theologians? Surely in large part it emerged organically, for as the Reformers pursued a theology driven by the principle of sola Scriptura, they couldn’t have helped but notice the centrality of union in the biblical texts themselves: “Once you have had your eyes opened to this concept of union with Christ, you will find it almost everywhere in the New Testament.”5
And of course, the Reformation more generally was a solus Christus (Christ alone) movement, an effort to reclaim and recenter the person and work of Christ from a medieval Catholic religious culture that often allowed him to be functionally obscured. As historian Elsie McKee has noted, medieval theology often, at least in practice, “seemed to make the church with its sacraments, saints, and good works the source of salvation, rather than God,” and the lavish attention paid to various saints and the Virgin Mary “seemed to make Christ one among many intercessors.”6 Indeed, early on in his road to reform, Huldrych Zwingli was deeply moved by a poem titled “The Complaint of Jesus.” A satirical piece written by the Renaissance humanist Desiderius Erasmus (ca. 1466–1536), the poem imagined Jesus in heaven lamenting that he no longer receives many prayers since they all go toward the company of saints and his mother Mary. Upon reading it, Zwingli “arrived at the opinion and the firm belief that we need no mediator other than Christ.”7 Surely these dissatisfactions with medieval piety and a return to the New Testament emphasis on Christ alone would have left the Reformers primed and ready for a renewed emphasis on the doctrine of union with Christ.
Justification and sanctification exist as distinct but inseparable realities, both flowing from union with Christ.
But perhaps above all, union takes a central place in Reformed theology because of the way it effectively solves the puzzle of precisely how justification and sanctification relate to each other. Both blessings are necessarily present in the life of every believer because both blessings flow from the same source: Christ himself and our Spirit-wrought union with him. In a classic passage from his Institutes, John Calvin explains this as the believer’s “double grace” (duplex gratia):
Christ was given to us by God’s generosity, to be grasped and possessed by us in faith. By partaking of him, we principally receive a double grace: namely, that being reconciled to God through Christ’s blamelessness, we may have in heaven instead of a Judge a gracious Father; and secondly, that sanctified by Christ’s spirit we may cultivate blamelessness and purity of life.8
This description emphasizes the simultaneous and inseparable nature of justification and sanctification, both of which you receive when you receive Christ. Indeed, what it means to be joined to Christ is to have both:
As Christ cannot be torn into parts, so these two which we perceive in him together and conjointly are inseparable—namely, righteousness [i.e., justification] and sanctification. Whomever, therefore, God receives into grace, on them he at the same time bestows the spirit of adoption [Rom. 8:15], by whose power he remakes them to his own image.9
Notice that the reason why justification and sanctification cohere is because Christ himself coheres, and to suggest that a justified person might not also be sanctified (the Catholic charge against Protestants) is to suggest that Christ could be “torn into parts.”
When we think about spiritual formation in Reformation perspective, it is vital to grasp that any real growth we achieve flows out of this Spirit-wrought union. This is what distinguishes a biblical keeping the heart from a moralistic self-striving. Anyone can engage in spiritual disciplines—indeed, one finds dedicated practitioners of rigorous spiritual techniques across all major religions—but real heart change is the work of God’s Spirit alone. Yes, the Spirit uses means, but by following the Reformers in recognizing that justification and sanctification exist as distinct but inseparable realities, both flowing from union with Christ, we can rest in the knowledge that our justification is secure and finished while vigorously pursuing Spirit-empowered sanctification. Knowing that our justification is final, finished, and perfect, we can joyfully give ourselves to the work of spiritual formation.10
Notes:
- John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (Glasgow: Porteous and Hislop, 1863), 90–92.
- Richard A. Muller, Calvin and the Reformed Tradition: On the Work of Christ and the Order of Salvation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012), 202–43.
- R. Tudur Jones, “Union with Christ: The Existential Nerve of Puritan Piety,” Tyndale Bulletin 41, no. 2 (1990): 186–208, https://doi.org/10.53751/001c.30522
- John Murray, Redemption Accomplished and Applied (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1955), 161. See also Michael S. Horton, Covenant and Salvation: Union with Christ (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2007); Richard Gaffin, “The Work of Christ Applied,” in Christian Dogmatics: Reformed Theology for the Church Catholic, ed. Michael Allen and Scott R. Swain (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2016).
- Anthony A. Hoekema, Saved by Grace (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), 64.
- Elsie Anne McKee, “Reformed Worship in the Sixteenth Century,” in Christian Worship in Reformed Churches Past and Present, ed. Lukas Vischer (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 7.
- Ulrich Zwingli, Selected Works, ed. Samuel Macauley Jackson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), 2:217. For the historical background, see Carlos M. N. Eire, Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450–1650 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 224.
- John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 1:725 (3.11.1).
- Calvin, Institutes, 1:732 (3.11.6).
- Although there have been many wonderful expositions of how justification and sanctification relate to each other, if I had to recommend just one, it would probably be John Murray’s treatment in Redemption Accomplished and Applied, 117–50.
This article is adapted from A Heart Aflame for God: A Reformed Approach to Spiritual Formation by Matthew C. Bingham.
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