Podcast: Why Union with Christ Is More Amazing Than You Think (Marcus Johnson)

June 21, 2021 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

A Misunderstood Doctrine

In today’s episode, Marcus Johnson, assistant professor of theology at Moody Bible Institute and the author of One with Christ: An Evangelical Theology of Salvation, discusses the doctrine of our union with Christ, drawing special attention to this beautiful doctrine that is well-attested in church history but often misunderstood today.

One with Christ

One with Christ

Marcus Peter Johnson

Foundational to believers’ salvation is their union with Christ. In this accessible introduction, Johnson argues that this neglected doctrine is the lens through which all other facets of salvation should be understood.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

02:15 - What Union with Christ Is Not

Matt Tully
Marcus, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Marcus Johnson
Glad to be here. Thanks for the invite.

Matt Tully
Union with Christ is one of those doctrines that is probably less often taught, less understood, and maybe even less accepted among certain evangelical circles than other doctrines related to our salvation. I want to spend some time getting into that—the why behind that and what you’ve observed as a college professor teaching theology to students—but maybe to start us off, I wonder if you could just finish the following sentence in as many ways as you can: Union with Christ is not . . . .

Marcus Johnson
Good question. It is not foreign to orthodox, Protestant evangelicalism. It is not merely the province of Eastern Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism. It is not a new doctrine. It is not—you have me putting it negatively—it is not absent from Scripture. It is not merely a speculation about Scripture; it’s grounded deeply in Scripture. Those are some of the things that came to mind when you first asked that.

Matt Tully
So then behind some of those is this assumption that many Christians today—Protestant evangelical Christians perhaps—would perhaps be a little bit suspicious of this doctrine and would wonder about whether or not it is really something that is part of our tradition. You’re a college professor, like we’ve said; you teach students theology. Have you observed that suspicion? Is that something that is alive and well, so to speak, in your experience working with students?

Marcus Johnson
It is, at least initially, for a majority of them that come from evangelical, non-denomination, Baptist backgrounds, but also even more mainline Protestant traditions who come to Moody Bible Institute. They’re surprised when I tell them about union with Christ. They’re a little surprised they haven’t heard much of that growing up, either in their churches or in their Christian schools. But the suspicion, normally speaking, doesn’t last that long because I make a point of demonstrating, firstly and most importantly, how this doctrine pervades Scripture. It’s ubiquitous in Scripture. It’s all over the place if your eyes are open to it.

Matt Tully
Is there a dynamic there with “it’s so ubiquitous” that maybe it makes it a little bit easier to miss? Almost like how a fish swimming in water doesn’t know it’s wet?

Marcus Johnson
Yes, especially when you recognize—if you don’t mind, I’ll use the statistics. Bruce Demarest, in his book The Cross and Salvation (published by Crossway), went through and counted how many times the apostle Paul—just in Paul’s letters—refers, in one way or another, to our being joined to Jesus Christ. Phrases like us being in him or him being in us. The number he came up with was two hundred and sixteen separate occurrences of Paul, alone, speaking about being united to Christ. Two hundred and sixteen in only thirteen or fourteen letters. Do the math on that. It means that it’s ubiquitous. It’s actually very difficult to read any of the apostle Paul’s letters without, let’s say, going maybe more than one paragraph without him referring to us being in Jesus or him being in us. That’s incredible! So it must be true if people say, and this was in my own experience, that I’ve never really heard of being united to Christ that that couldn’t be true, because it’s really all over the place in Scripture. So maybe there’s some other dynamic at work where we don’t think to think, or we’re not taught to think, in terms of being joined to Jesus. We can pass right by all those references, not realizing that they’re really loaded. So think of even a passage like 1 Corinthians 1:9: “God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.” That could easily be read in a merely sentimental way: God’s made peace between you and his Son. Or, God feels warmly about you because of Jesus Christ. But if you take that phrase “into fellowship with Jesus Christ” and compare it to and put it alongside all the other ways that Paul talks about being in Jesus, or being united to him, Paul means much more than just a sentimental affection. Although certainly that, he means a whole lot more.

07:15 - What Union with Christ Is Not

Matt Tully
That’s what I was going to ask about. It seems like if we do talk about union with Christ, even as a doctrine or think about these passages that you’re referencing where you would say this doctrine shows forth, I think we often think in terms of relationship. That’s a category that is very common for evangelicals: we have a relationship with Jesus. We would say it’s deep, intimate, and personal. Is that what union with Christ is all about? Is it a relational dynamic that we have with Jesus?

Marcus Johnson
It’s that, but we have to ask the question, What’s the nature of that relationship? We all know that we have different kinds of relationships in our lives. I have a relationship with my dad, with my wife, with my son, and with my colleagues. They’re all relationships, but to say the least, they all don’t have the same kind of intimacy. They can all be intimate, but in very different ways. So the question isn’t, Do we have a relationship with Jesus? Of course, we do; that’s precious. The question is, What kind of relationship is this? I think a really important part of the question of What does it mean to be united to Jesus? is just that: What kind of union are we talking about here? Is it a union of sentiment or will or shared affection? Or is it contractual? Is it merely legal? All these questions are important because you’re right; a lot of people read a warm, true, pious relationship with Jesus into this language, and there’s nothing wrong with that per se. But, speaking of the apostle Paul (just to name one), they’re also thinking of a much, much deeper intimacy than merely change of affections or dispositions. They’re actually thinking of a union that includes both our soul and our body.

Matt Tully
Unpack that for us. What does Scripture—or Paul in particular—mean when he talks about us being united to Jesus? In what sense? We’re starting to get into some territory where maybe people start to have questions about the language that we would use here. So how would you describe (positively first) the nature of our union?

Marcus Johnson
We can, and I think should, do it in several ways. Maybe the place to start, even if it feels a little provocative, is to recognize how intimate, how profoundly real, a union this is that is being described in Scripture. I think one of the ways to get at that is one of the ways that happened to me, and it’s the way that I often teach it. It’s to start with, in order to overcome the merely sentimental read of being united to Jesus, is to recognize that the teaching of Scripture is that we’re bodily united to Jesus. It’s not just our spirits, souls, or feelings that we share with or are joined to Jesus, but the teaching of Paul in particular is, Don’t you know your bodies are limbs and organs of Jesus Christ himself? That’s in 1 Corinthians 6, and he’s insisting to the Corinthians that it’s not just their souls or spirits that are one with Jesus; their bodies, actually, are included in Jesus himself.

Matt Tully
That’s in the context of Paul condemning them for seeing prostitutes. Is that right?

Marcus Johnson
Precisely. That’s why we know that his insistence about being joined to Jesus there runs contrast to the fact that they united their bodies to prostitutes. So his counter argument is you’re already in a bodily union with Jesus. So it sort of proves what Paul is saying. In fact, his argument would turn to mush if he wasn’t insisting, Your bodies are already joined to Jesus. That’s why it’s a problem that you unite your bodies to prostitutes.

Matt Tully
Is there a sense then, if we are united to Jesus and we are truly connected to him in a real way, is there an ontological connection there that we should be reading into this? Are we in some way being enfolded into his person?

Marcus Johnson
The answer is yes. In fact, there needs to be that ontological reality. With that question, you do get at the heart of the suspicion among some people. We’ve been taught to so honor—rightly so in so many ways—honor the Creator-creature distinction, the impassable gulf between us and God, which is important to maintain in so many ways. But the incarnation does tell us something striking and even staggering about the way that God wishes to be one with us. The incarnation is the grandest of all those truths—that God, without ever ceasing to be fully who he is as God becomes who we are because he wants to bring us into his very own life.

12:29 - The Incarnation and Union with Christ

Matt Tully
Is the incarnation crucial to this? Would it have been possible to be one with God—one with the Son, we’ll say—apart from the incarnation?

Marcus Johnson
The short answer is no. I’m sure a lot of listeners will want to know about the Old Testament background there, which we don’t have time for, but the short answer is no. All of the promises of the nearness and closeness of God are realized and made manifest in Jesus. God does the unthinkable thing in Jesus, which is to really stoop so low—“condescend” is the word Calvin liked—so condescends to us that he not only deeply sympathizes at a distance (which is one thing and a wonderful thing) but he actually becomes who he wishes and desires eternally to love so as to bring us into his own life. That means that Jesus is utterly unique because he’s the mediator between God and man, and he’s the mediator in his human flesh and blood. We have no access to God in any human way because he’s God and we’re human. The way for us to have any contact with and availability to share in his life has to be Jesus in his human flesh and blood. That is the connection we have with God is his full humanity. You can see that in 1 Timothy 2:5: “For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” We have no mediator between God and humankind besides Jesus, which makes him utterly unique in all of universal human history.

Matt Tully
And utterly crucial for the idea of being reconciled to God.

Marcus Johnson
You bet. If there’s no mediator, then we have no access to God. But to do that, we have to have one who is fully who God is and fully who we are. Only Jesus is that.

14:31 - The Trinity and Union with Christ

Matt Tully
Another question that maybe the theologically astute listener might be thinking right now is, Alright, if we are united to Jesus—God the Son—in a real, ontological sense, then God the Son is also a member of the Trinity and is united to the Father and the Spirit at a fundamental level. Does that mean, in some sense, that we also are participating in that relationship? What’s the language we would use to describe the way that we are united to the Trinity as a whole?

Marcus Johnson
The answer is yes, and that’s the consistent teaching of the Newer Testament is that we come to share—

Matt Tully
You said the Newer Testament?

Marcus Johnson
Yes.

Matt Tully
Why do you say that?

Marcus Johnson
Because it’s older and newer. I guess it’s a way of trying to avoid saying “Old Testament”, as if it’s antiquated. A professor of mine while I was at University of Toronto would speak that way, and I sort of liked that he said older rather than old because old only means something bad in our society. They’re both testaments to Jesus Christ; there’s older and newer.

Matt Tully
I want to come back to where we see union with Christ in the Old Testament, but keep going.

Marcus Johnson
It’s another element of the question, What kind of union are we talking about? One of the staggering things we read in Scripture is that by being joined to Jesus, we come to share in his oneness with his Father. This occurs over and over in John 14–17 (it occurs in many other places too). He talks about how Jesus says, Through the Holy Spirit I will dwell in you and you will dwell in me, as I am in my Father. Twice in John 17 he says, You’ll be in me and I’ll be in you, even as I am in my Father. That is really striking language. He’s making the comparison. We want to put on all the brakes there, understandably. We have all sorts of brakes we want to put on it and say, Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a minute. Are you saying that we can share in the life of God? Well, Jesus says we share in the life of God, so the question is what should we say and what should we not say. He does, in fact, say it as strongly as I suppose one could. But what we see from the rest of the Scripture is Jesus is not saying, You will become God.

Matt Tully
Or, You will become uncreated.

Marcus Johnson
Yes, another great point. That’s different than saying we don’t share in the life of the Trinity. Those might be two different things. One of the difficulties, or stumbling blocks, there for us is that we also resist—rightly, in so many ways—doctrines of deification, which we see sometimes in Eastern Orthodoxy.

Matt Tully
Define that. What does that mean?

Marcus Johnson
Literally, deification means to be made God.

Matt Tully
Right. How is that even potentially considered a Christian type of thought?

Marcus Johnson
In that proper instinct we have to avoid or reject that notion, it’s possible to throw the baby out with the bath water there and not recognize that’s different than saying we don’t share in the life of God. That’s different than becoming God. One of the ways that I was helped there in how to see that faithfully was that when we share in the life of God, it doesn’t make us something other than human; it makes us authentically human. We were created to commune and have fellowship with God; not to be God, but to have intimate fellowship with God in both body and soul—to have communion with him. As Calvin puts it, he says the highest end—the highest goal—of humankind is communion with God. That’s something not many Calvinists or Protestants think to say anymore. So if we think about it that way—that God created us to have communion with him—then to share in his own life is not to become something other than human, it’s to become authentically and perfectly human.

Matt Tully
So you’re not minimizing the Creator-creation distinction?

Marcus Johnson
Nope. It’s crucial that it stays, but as long as we have that there, then we have a little bit of the kind of context we need to read so many different places in Scripture that talk about us really and truly united to God in Christ.

19:11 - Salvation and Union with Christ

Matt Tully
One of the ways that you describe and explain the doctrine of union with Christ in your book is that we cannot be saved by the work of Christ without first being united to the person of Christ. That gets to the broader conversation about salvation and the order of salvation. One thing you note is that our evangelical culture and theology often falls prey to this objectification of salvation. What are you getting at with that phrase?

Marcus Johnson
When we divide Christ’s work from his person, it won’t be too surprising if we’re more interested in his work than his person, because we are going to be saved by his work. So often what happens is the living person of Christ begins to recede from view, not because anyone wants him to, but we’re taught to think we need his accomplished work on the cross to be thought of as belonging to me. So his living, human, incarnate person is still important theoretically to us, but we really need that accomplished work.

Matt Tully
He’s important because he did that work.

Marcus Johnson
Right, not just for himself. Even if it’s unconsciously or subconsciously, we yank his person away from his work as if there could be some work of Christ that is available to us apart from his person, which is not true. That isn’t possible because what Jesus does to save us takes place within him not outside of him. If we hold person and work together, then we’ll find that what we need is to be in Jesus. If we yank them apart, then we can start to develop soteriologies or understandings of the gospel where we don’t need to be united to Jesus, because we can somehow just benefit from his work.

Matt Tully
Can you give an example of how this division can happen in subtle ways? Maybe no one’s intending it, but is there an example of the way we would often think, or even talk, about salvation that illustrates that?

Marcus Johnson
I can, and I do it humbly because I know these things are sensitive to people and even precious to people. There are ways that we can talk about the cross that end up replacing Jesus. So if we “run to the cross” for salvation and we “pray at the foot of the cross,” or we say “the cross saves us”—understood rightly and defined by any given person, could be completely a faithful thing to do. But there’s also a danger that we’re actually thinking of a cross when we say that. I don’t know if this is a sophomoric sort of a comment, but the cross can’t save us in any real specific way. It’s shorthand for the crucified Christ. He’s the one, and he alone can be the one we mean when we say that. Now, “cross” could simply be shorthand for that. You can see that a little bit in the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians again. But what’s safe in someone’s hands may not be so safe in somebody else’s hands.

Matt Tully
Sometimes if we are so beholden to the shorthand we can sometimes perhaps lose—subtly, slowly, gradually—lose sight of the actual thing that it was meant to refer to.

Marcus Johnson
That’s right. And in this case, the person it was meant to refer to. In any case, when that divorce of person and work happens, it wouldn’t be a surprise then, as we began this discussion, to see people be suspicious about union with Christ, or they’re not really familiar with it. Well, of course not, because if you divide person from work, why would we say it’s necessary to be joined to Jesus to be saved when I can benefit from his work and be saved? So it’s part of the matrix and the various contexts in which a doctrine like union with Christ—that was so precious to people like Luther and Calvin—for their twenty-first century heirs seems strange.

23:33 - Calvin and Luther on Union with Christ

Matt Tully
You mentioned Calvin earlier as perhaps the gateway for you to begin to understand this doctrine. Are there any other historical figures who saw union with Christ as central to what it means to be a Christian and be in fellowship with God?

Marcus Johnson
Calvin had read a great deal of Martin Luther. I know we’re not going too far outside of the Reformation here and we’re kind of staying there, but that was one of the insights that was really important for me. I saw that they had shared this deep understanding—I had first read in my undergraduate program where I took some history of Christian doctrine. I just thought it was fabulous. I read Calvin and Luther on the points you might expect: maybe on predestination or the sovereignty of God or the doctrine of justification. I loved them. I still do. I love all those doctrines. And then I wanted to go study my own history a bit more as a Protestant evangelical: Where do we come from? I love the way these reformers talk about Jesus and these lovely doctrines. I want to go read more of them. As I went to go read more of them—as I read Luther and Calvin a lot, lot, lot more—it was almost nagging to me (originally in a suspicious way): How come they keep talking about being joined to Jesus? How come they keep talking about believers being engrafted into his body and becoming one with God in Jesus? So I was a little suspicious, and I kept reading and reading and reading. Of course, they don’t talk or write for very long without either quoting Scripture or saying the truths of Scripture, so they kept forcing me back to Scripture to say, Why are they talking like this? Is it just an outmoded vestige of late Medieval Roman Catholicism that they haven’t gotten over?

Matt Tully
Right. They’re still cleansing that stuff out of their system.

Marcus Johnson
Right. Maybe they’re clinging to it or something. Then I realized, Oh no, not only do they not stop talking like that, they’re actually just quoting Scripture most of the time. So it was a really great historical and scriptural education for me that I had to reckon again with, Oh, they write about this? By the way, I didn’t know our own tradition talked about salvation in these ways—Calvin and Luther, to name two, in very, very strong ways. So I came to understand that doctrines of justification were actually couched in a larger context of being joined to Jesus. That’s something I didn’t know.

26:12 - Justification and Union with Christ

Matt Tully
I was going to ask about that. As Protestants we would typically hold up justification as one of those banner doctrines that is foundational to a Protestant identity and a Protestant theological system. How does this doctrine of union with Christ relate to justification?

Marcus Johnson
It was Calvin and Luther who taught me, for an artful segue, that we’re justified exactly because we’re joined to Jesus, and not in some other way. It’s only when we’re joined to Jesus that we can be justified. I think my prior understanding was that we have to be justified first for anything else to happen, like being joined to Jesus or what have you. So I was a little surprised to see that order reversed, especially as I read Calvin, but it also began to make more and more sense to me scripturally. If you think of something like Romans 8:1: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” That “in Christ Jesus” I probably would have read through before and just excused it as maybe, again, like a sentiment. A nice, Christian sentiment, or something along those lines. Calvin doesn’t read it that way. It’s because we are joined to Jesus that we are not condemned because we share in his justification. So it’s back to that point that we were talking about with separating person from work. The reason we can’t be justified before we’re united to Jesus is because justification is not a benefit or work of Jesus Christ that can be separated from who he is. So the only way to share in justification is to be united to Christ.

Matt Tully
That’s helpful because I think sometimes the way justification and the idea of forgiveness of sins, Jesus atoning for our sins, and taking on the punishment for our sins has struck me, and I know others, how can that work though? How can that actually happen? I think the idea of being united to Jesus can help to explain a little bit more how it is that justification can actually work. Do you resonate with that?

Marcus Johnson
Strongly. It helped me a ton. It also helped me to see that one way or another people need to find a way to get what Christ has accomplished over to them. It helped me to see that models are developed—for lack of a better term, because it all sounds so cold—but models of the gospel are developed to help see how that’s possible. As you probably know, the doctrine of imputation played a big role in there in later Protestant evangelical history. I’m not sure how much more we can say about that, but I became convinced that Calvin was right about that. The reason God regards us as righteous and our sins are forgiven—we are counted righteous—is because he’s joined us to his Son, who has suffered our condemnation and has been raised for our justification as the Righteous One. What took place in Jesus now belongs to us because we’re joined to him.

Matt Tully
So it’s not as if Jesus’s righteousness was sort of floating over him—this is the way I’ve actually heard it described—it floats over (in the diagram) and then sits on us, and now we have Jesus’s righteousness almost like it’s a cloak or something that we put on. Jesus takes it off and it moves over and we put it on. But the diagram is a little different. How would you picture this if you were going to make a drawing out of it?

Marcus Johnson
Less like a courtroom and more like a marriage. I’ve heard it once said that easily the most prominent analogy in Scripture between God and his people is marriage. I think the imagery you were just using came from a critique that N. T. Wright had about forensic imputation, which was interesting because he thought he was criticizing a Protestant evangelical forensic imputational notion, if I remember correctly, and he and John Piper (and others) had a spat. Well the strange thing about it was he was critiquing (in my opinion) a caricature. If you read Calvin, there’s not something called “righteousness” that can be moved from Jesus to you or to me, or even regarded as ours apart from him. What he stresses is that we’re regarded as righteous, like I said, because we are one with the Righteous One. So there’s no gas, there’s no mere attribution, there’s no ray gun that shoots righteousness from one place to another. We don’t have access to any work of Jesus Christ apart from being united to him, because it doesn’t exist. I don’t know if this will be helpful for any listeners—I don’t even know if it’s helpful for my students when I say it—but still, I feel like saying it. I think there’s been developed a sort of Santa Clausifying—

Matt Tully
That’s a good word.

Marcus Johnson
—of salvation. The reason I say that is this: popular storytelling about Santa Claus is that he comes and he drops off gifts at your house, and then he leaves. For Santa Claus, the gift isn’t Santa Claus. He has gifts/objects to give you, and then he leaves. I fear that maybe too many of us are thinking of Jesus—or God in Jesus—like Santa Claus. The difference between Jesus and Santa Claus here is quite stark. The gift that he’s giving you is actually himself—you in him. So that’s what I mean by the objectification. You’re supposed to objectify Santa Clause; that’s the point. We’re not supposed to objectify Jesus because with Santa Claus, gift and gift-giver are not identical. In Jesus, they are identical.

Matt Tully
Any of the gifts that we do receive from and in Jesus, you’re not downplaying the reality of those because Scripture speaks of justification, adoption, sanctification, glorification—those are the isms (or the ations) of salvation that we are often focused on. So you’re not downplaying those.

Marcus Johnson
Not at all. In fact, I think what I learned from seeing the centrality of union with Christ made these doctrines all the more precious to me because I saw where they came from and where they exist and how they exist. At least for me, I saw them grounded in the reality of Jesus. They became all the more real to me. I was already in love with the doctrine of justification. I’m not less so, I’m more so. Sanctification became alive to me because I saw that it wasn’t a threat to my being justified. It was a beautiful gift that we have where Christ dwells in us and makes us like himself. It’s a gift. Glorification, adoption—it almost went from 2D to 3D for me. I write about that in my book, that union with Christ helped me to see why these doctrines are so precious to Protestant evangelicals.

34:30 - How Understanding Union with Christ Changed My Life

Matt Tully
Do you think about union with Christ often? You wrote this book nearly ten years ago and I know it was, in some ways, based on your dissertation. At least, it was a distillation of your dissertation on Calvin and union with Christ. How does this doctrine impact you today?

Marcus Johnson
Strongly. I can hardly think of an area of my life where it didn’t. I don’t know if the listeners would understand this, but I have three children now, in large part (I have to say), because of the depth of this life-giving union and what it meant to be related to Jesus Christ and what it meant to be united to another person—that life-giving nature of it. How God was infusing the beauty of his own interpersonal Trinitarial relations into the life of the world. Marriage was a beautiful sign of the church’s union with Christ in which he enters into his church and gives her life and gives us new birth. These and many other realizations that came to me made me think differently about the marriage that I was in. Sadly, I was committed to a willfully childless marriage for some time. I’m kind of embarrassed to say that now, but I was. I don’t think I understood what marriage was in that way. So even something like I have a deeper sense about the whole purpose of and destiny of what marriage is supposed to be. It changed my life forever in that way. I also began to think of the sacraments differently. Luther and Calvin also convinced me of that. What is baptism if it isn’t principally a magnificent picture of being united to Jesus in his death and in his resurrection? Clearly, the Lord’s Supper is the truth that Christ lives in us and we in him. So there are a couple of examples where my life changed dramatically because Christ became bigger in my life.

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