Untangling Cliché: "Through Christ"

From The Mailbag:
I often hear people refer to how Christians cannot do things in their own strength, but only 'through Christ'. 

Can someone explain this to me? What does this look like applied to our everyday lives? How do we stop trying to do things in 'our own strength' and do them 'through Christs' ?

I think this is one of those questions that troubles a lot more people than care to admit to it. It's like those words that we vaguely think we know the meanings of but really couldn't define if we had to: "glory," "praise," "worship," "through Christ," "in Christ," "in my heart..."

The most modern approach to the question would be to say something like, "By focusing my mental eye on Christ and his life, I will be able to do whatever I need to do." Some would argue that "Things will just come around right" for people of faith, which is sort of a baptism of the power-of-positive-thinking.

But I think that this has instead something to do with a state of being that most of us are uncomfortable talking about: mystical union with Christ through love and faith.

This is a little outside the modernist vocabulary of most of our theology... we follow our culture in liking our theology cut and dried ("accept Jesus Christ as your Personal Lord and Savior"), or else indefinable ("receive the Holy Spirit").

But you're pressing us into the realm where we have to talk about what we mean here.

It has to do with what we think the person is. For us, having grown up in a post-Freudian culture, the "person" is a discrete, self-contained unit. We are bounded by our bodies, and our spirits are our own, and we have a sense that this is an impregnable fact. We may be hopelessly confused about who or what we are, we may be complex to the point of madness, but we're "one person."

Not so, say the Greeks, the Hebrews, the Chinese, the ancients of all stripes: far otherwise. You "become" a person, and the person you become is rooted in the person(s) that you attach yourself to. When Genesis says that in sex "the two shall become one flesh," it's not blowing smoke. They believe in a kind of intersection of the identity in sex, where two bodies and spirits become tangled in one another. And not only in sex but also in the thing called "faith." 

The Greek word pistis means something like, "belief in, adherence to, faithfulness to, keeping your word to." It does a lot of duty in Greek, unlike in modern English... but it resonates well in Elizabethan English, where Shakespeare can talk about "faith" as a state that exists between two people, binding them together in a strong bond: thus Duke Orsinio from Twelfth Night:

Since you to non-regardance cast my faith
And that I partly know the instrument
That screws me from my true place in your favour,
Live you the marble-breasted tyrant still.

Orsinio offers a parallelism here, where "non-regardance" of "faith" is equivalent to being "screwed" (yeah, yeah) "from my true place in your favor." Faith here means "allegiance, fidelity," even "good service." And this is the nature of the Greek word, not merely "belief."

This kind of faith in the ancient Near East created a sort of mental picture: the one to whom you were faithful "spread a cover over" the faithful person. The one to whom God is faithful therefore benefits in this "cover." (Just a note: the word we translate as "Atonement" from the Hebrew scriptures means something like "to cover.") 

It is therefore a mystical identification with God as God comes to the believer in Christ that is meant here, I think.

The benefits that accrue to these faithful people in the New Testament? 

Freaky shit.  Miracles. Healings. "Coincidences" that are really discernible as the hand of God. Miraculous insight. Truth-telling on an epic scale. Honesty and love.

To do something "through Christ" is to do it in this experience, under the cover of God.

Comments

[Touchstone]

This motif really is a good start. Very classy and mellow, emphasizes the text.

[Otter]

Thank you: credit to SquareSpace and their amazing pre-fabs.