Holiness
Glimpses of sanctification in the New Testament
Introduction
It goes without saying: fundamental to all Christian thought and speech must be the person and event of Christ. It is a simple enough affirmation, to be sure, usually falling under the heading of something like “Christo-centrism,” yet I am undertaking a treatment of sanctification with a much more radical claim, something quite different than Christo-centrism, choosing rather to use the language of “Christo-logic” coined by Jordan Wood (a scholar who specializes in the works of Maximus the Confessor).
The gospel of John’s prologue (1:1-18) helps orient us to this way of thinking, making an outrageous confession about the structure of reality, about the very logic of all creation, and he does this in a very Jewish way – by calling to mind the ancient creation story in Israel’s scriptures. The opening lines of John 1: “In the beginning was the Word” is a clear echo to the opening text of Genesis 1, “In the beginning, God.” Immediately John is tying together in a concise yet dynamic way a vision of original existence and ultimate future, of the cosmos from first conception to now undergoing God’s renewal new project where he will remake all things from top to bottom, and this has begun with the coming of this “Word” or logos.
Against the backdrop of the Greek philosophical tradition, this idea was well understood. The logos was the transcendent principle that first drew order out of chaos, the metaphysical reason or guiding logic of how the world worked, the operative ground for all reality. John’s opening line is shocking enough – God is the logos; he is the transcendent. But then John takes this a step further in claiming this logos is not simply a transcendent divine principle, but rather a concrete human being named Jesus: “the logos was made flesh.” With just a handful of words John is restructuring how we think about the world. Jesus, both the person and the event, is the ground of all reality. One common refrain is to talk about God using the transcendentals: He is the true, the good, the beautiful. Another well-worn phrase is that Jesus is what it means to be God – God is like Jesus.
However, Christ is also what it means to be truly human. He is at once the visible image of God and of Adam, of mankind. Any conception we have about the world, about humanness, about divinity, or about reality as such that is not grounded in the person of the Christ, is simply a false reality. Jesus is not merely the central figure in Christian thought; he is the very logic which undergirds the structure of the world.
