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Chapter Five:
St. Paul---2. Christ in
Us, We in Christ
We must now examine in greater detail the
nature of the mystery which Paul is proclaiming. The
first thing he says of it, is that it consists in a
certain presence of Christ within us, and of ourselves
in Christ. The expression appears in the opening line of
his first Epistle:
Paul and Silvanus and Timothy,
To the Church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and
the Lord
Jesus Christ:
Grace to you and peace. (1)
Even
thus early, the phrase presents its full meaning, as may
be seen from a comparison with the headings of the other
Epistles. There is question of a certain mystical
inclusion of the Church in Christ. The expression
remains a favorite with Paul to the last, and at the
time of the Christological Epistles, it becomes dearer
still. In these, he declares that it sums up his
thought, and that the mystery which is his whole Gospel,
is simply Christ in us.
Paul speaks of this interior treasure in
every possible way. First, he himself is convinced of
Christ’s presence in his soul. What matter if his
strength declines and his forces are spent? Christ is
within him, and strengthens him in Himself. Christ is in
his preaching, to give it His truth; He is in his words,
to give them His authority; in his decisions, to give
them efficacy; in his soul, to continue there His
Passion; in his heart, to love the faithful. Paul loves
his neophytes, as God will testify, in the heart of
Jesus Christ. So, when they receive Paul, it is Christ
that they receive; and to imitate Paul is to imitate the
Lord.
Paul, as it were, has given place to Christ
within him. Since God has manifested Christ in his soul,
Paul himself has passed to the background. He still
lives, it is true; but no! It is no longer he that
lives, but Christ that lives in Him. Christ is in him,
like a new soul, and, whether Paul preaches or prays or
suffers, it is not so much he who does these things, as
Christ who does them in Paul.
Like Paul, the faithful too possess Christ
within them. Paul sees them as temples in which Christ
dwells. Since that day, when he saw Christ in the Church
which he was persecuting, it seems that he can no longer
look into the eyes of a Christian without meeting there
the gaze of Christ.
This he repeats to his converts. By faith,
they possess the Lord who abides in their hearts. Christ
works in them, acts in them, and lives in them and
whosever sins against them sins against Christ. If Paul
spends himself day and night for their souls, it is that
he may see Christ grow in them. They have within them
the spirit of Christ, the wisdom of Christ, the peace of
Christ, and they must needs be total strangers to
themselves, not to know that they have Christ in their
hearts:
Make trial of your own
selves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own
selves Or is it that ye know not yourselves---even that
Jesus Christ is in you? Unless indeed ye be reprobate!
(2)
Outwardly perhaps, Christians may have no
distinguishing mark, yet they bear within their souls a
mystery of greatness.
Christ is in His own, and this indwelling,
like love, is mutual. They too are in Christ. While the
phrase “Christ in us” is frequent in St. Paul, the
expression “in Christ”, that corresponds to it, is more
frequent still.
En
Christo:
“in Christ”. St. Paul repeats the formula over and over
again, one hundred sixty-four times in the few of his
writings that have come down to us. In certain passages,
he reiterates it unceasingly. The expression must have
been upon his lips at every moment, as was the precept
of love on the lips of John. Hearing him speak thus,
Paul’s disciples must have learned the habit from him,
as a passage from the Epistle to the Romans seems to
indicate.
The letter ends, like many others, with a
series of salutations. Paul and the disciples who are
with him greet the brethren they know at Rome. We can
readily picture the scene. The Apostle has just finished
dictating; about him Timothy, and Lucius, and Sosipater,
and the others with him at Corinth, claim their place at
the end of the letter, to send their fraternal greeting.
Tertius, the secretary, writes from dictation:
Greet ye Prisca and
Aquila, my fellow-workers in Christ Jesus....Greet ye
Ampliatus, my beloved in the Lord….Greet ye Tryphaena
and Tryphosa, who labor in the Lord….
Timothy my fellow-worker
greeteth you, and Lucius and Jason and Sosipater, my
kinsmen. (3)
The disciples have given their message. And,
while the Apostle is endeavoring to recall whether there
is anyone else to name, Tertius quickly slips in his own
greeting:
I,
Tertius, who have written this epistle, greet you in the
Lord. (4)
It is not a long salutation, and the
dictation is immediately resumed. But the few words of
this Christian of the first generation have a special
significance. He has spoken like the Apostle: “I greet
you”, he says, “in Christ”.
Not only is the phrase “in Christ” of
frequent occurrence under Paul’s pen, but it is employed
in a great variety of contexts. The whole Church, he
declares, is in Christ, and the individual churches are
also in Christ. Like the Church, the faithful, too, are
in Christ. They live in Him; they are holy in Him; in
Him they have their virtues, their qualities, their
functions, their sorrows, their joys, their glory. Their
ways are in Christ, in the strength and grace that are
given in Him; in the fact, hope, and charity that are in
Him, they advance to the salvation, redemption, and
vivification that are in Him. For them, all is in Him,
and whether they are being born, or whether they live,
or whether they labor, or whether they die, they may say
with St. Augustine, “ab
uno eodemque Christo non recedimus:
we remain always in Christ.” (5)
II
The faithful, therefore, are in Christ. But
what does Paul mean by this expression? The Apostle does
not always employ the term in the same sense. In some
passages it seems to signify no more than “Christian”,
or, “in a Christian way”. Thus, at the end of his
letters, when Paul speaks of his fellow-workers in the
Lord, of Apelles, “approved in Christ”, and of Rufus,
“elect in Christ”, we should render his thought
accurately if we are to consider the expression, “in
Christ”, as equivalent to the adjective “Christian”,
which is missing from his vocabulary.
In a number of other places, the phrase has
not a definite, fixed meaning. It is used to convey the
idea that Christ is the cause, the mediator, the
intercessor, the exemplar of a grace; it signifies that
the thing spoken of is in Christ as in its cause, its
source, its prototype or intermediary, but does not
explain how this thing is in Him. In these cases, the
expression would be made more precise by some such
paraphrase as: “like Christ”, “with Christ”, “through
Christ”, “for Christ”, “because of Christ”. Some
commentators have even adopted this method of
explanation as a habit or principle. In their
commentaries, they always replace the rather vague
words, “in Christ”, by one or other of the clearer
formulas we have just indicated. In this we see a
laudable, but somewhat indiscreet eagerness to add
clearness to the text.
The danger is that in always substituting
some other phrase for “in Christ”, one is apt to lose
sight of the primitive and natural sense of the
expression. For, in this formula, it is scarcely
probable that “in” should never, or almost never mean
“within”.
In order to determine the exact sense, it
seems best to consult first the passage in which the
phrase most often occurs. Here, the Apostle seems
particularly pleased with it, and besides, the
multiplication of examples makes it easy to determine
his meaning. Here we have the best chance of finding, in
all their clearness and purity, the lessons that God
gives us through His inspired author.
Our
search need not be long; the expression is repeated at
frequent intervals throughout the first chapter of the
letter to the Ephesians, and its general meaning is very
clear. As we have already remarked, the passage is a
hymn in honor of the “mystery”, that is, in praise of
God who unites us all in Christ.
Blessed be the God and
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us…in
Christ. Yea, in Him He singled us out before the
foundation of the world…{by the} grace wherewith He hath
made us gracious in the Well-beloved. In Him we have
redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our
transgressions….It was the purpose of His good
pleasure…to bring all things to a head in Christ….In Him
we also have come to have our portion, having been
predestined…as having been the first to hope in Christ.
In Him are ye too, who have heard the word of truth, the
glad tidings of your salvation. For ye have believed
therein, and have been sealed with the Holy Spirit of
the promise. (6)
In these lines the expression “in Christ”,
or its equivalents, occur several times, and the meaning
is obvious. There is question of a supernatural
inclusion in the Saviour; all mankind, and even the
whole universe, is summed up and included, as it were,
in Him. Only in Him does God see and bless it. But God
sees things as they are. Hence Paul means that by the
operation of grace we are truly plunged, truly
incorporated into Christ. This real and mystical
inwardness is the full sense, the technical sense, so to
speak, of the formula “in
Christo”.
(7)
On the other hand, it does not always
present this full meaning. Quite often, as we have said,
it means merely “Christian”, or “in a Christian way”.
But, as we should expect, the words retain something of
their natural signification even here, and the sequence
of ideas will always appear more clearly, if in
translating we remember that to be a Christian is to be,
in a mysterious way, in Christ.
We may seek further light on this same
expression in what Paul says of baptism. Let us take,
for instance, a passage of the Epistle to the Romans:
Know ye not, that as
many of us as were baptized unto Christ Jesus {i.e.,
baptized in order to be immersed in Christ}, we were
baptized unto His death {i.e., baptized in order to be
immersed in His death}? We were buried therefore with
Him through this baptism unto death, that as Christ was
raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so
we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have
become with Him (lit., if we have been grafted upon Him}
in likeness of His death, why, then, we shall also be in
likeness of His resurrection. (8)
The Apostle, or rather the Holy Spirit, who
speaks to us through the Apostle, wishes clearness at
any cost: four times and more in these few lines he
repeats that we are included in Christ. We are baptized
in Christ; we are baptized in the death of Christ; we
are buried in His death; we are grafted upon Him by our
likeness to His death. In another passage Paul declares
that at baptism Christ covers us like a garment.
All
of you who were baptized into Christ, have put on
Christ. (9)
“You have put on Christ.” One could not hope
for greater clearness. Christ, then, becomes our
environment and our atmosphere; He becomes, so to speak,
“the element in which we live, the form that envelops
us.” (10)
This supernatural clothing, as Paul points
out in other passages, demands of us a new manner of
life. Our actions, our views, our sentiments must
reproduce those of Christ. However, this resemblance and
this imitation are simply a necessary, but of themselves
very superficial result of a change that is more
profound. “To put on Christ” means not only to be
inspired by Him after the fashion of an actor who “plays
a character well”, but, as its very clearly shown in the
above passage of the Epistle to the Romans, it means to
enter into a new life, and a new manner of existence.
From this point of view, a comparison with
another similar expression is instructive. Paul
frequently speaks of being and acting “in the Spirit”.
He uses the term in the same context, and apparently in
the same sense in which he employs the formula “in
Christ”.
The role of the Holy Spirit in the Mystical
Body will be considered in a later chapter. All that
need be noted at present is that for Paul the Spirit is
an internal principle of life and sanctification, a
principle of the interior spiritual life. To be in the
Spirit means to be in the “act” of the supernatural
life; consequently, to be in Christ means the same: to
be supernaturally “in act”.
This does not mean, of course, that Paul’s
Christ is a fugitive or nebulous reality, for we know
how truly living He is, but rather that His life is so
intense as to overflow into us.
Thus, He is our “spirit”. (11) Indeed, the
use of the word
spirit
is not restricted to the Third Person of the Blessed
Trinity and to the immaterial part of our being. For
Paul, it expresses what is more subtle and more
mysterious than the realities of everyday experience; it
denotes a mystical reality, we should say.
It should be added that the new life we
receive in Christ is an active thing, and one that makes
us active. And it must also be noted that neither the
phrase “to possess Christ”, nor the expression “to be in
Christ”, implies sleep or repose. There is no question
of being absorbed into an atmosphere that is inert, but
of being lifted up and carried into an ardent life.
Christ is action, Christ is the force that raises the
world to higher things: to be in Him means to share in
an activity that is immense; to possess Him is to
possess in one’s soul a constant incentive to action.
To conclude, then, the two expressions, “to
possess Christ”, and “to be in Christ”, are synonymous,
though they evoke images that are at first sight
incompatible. But let us now leave images aside.
The Apostle employs both expressions to
render the same thoughts. He passes from one to the
other in the same context, and does so as if there were
no change in meaning. Thus, in the Epistle to the
Romans, he declares that we are in Christ, and a little
further on in the same chapter, that Christ is in us.
After assuring the Corinthians that he is speaking in
Christ, he goes on, a few verses later, to say that
Christ is speaking in him. He had already expressed
himself in the same way in the Second Epistle to the
Thessalonians: may God make you worthy of your vocation,
he writes,
that the name of our
Lord Jesus maybe glorified in you, and you in Him,
through the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.
(12)
So, for Paul, the thought to be expressed
remains fundamentally the same, and the two phrases are
equivalent in meaning. The thought is that of a mystical
life, of a single organism, which constitutes the
atmosphere in which the faithful are united and given
life, but which is at the same time a source of energy
and activity within each individual.
1)
1
Thess. 1: 1.
2)
2
Cor. 13: 5.
3)
Rom.
16: 3, 8, 12, 21.
4)
Rom.
16: 22.
5)
St.
Augustine, De
Trinitate,
13: 24, P.L.,
Vol. 42, 1034.
6)
Eph.
1: 3-14.
7)
“According to the theory of the Mystical Body, we become
an integral part of Christ, we put on Christ, we are
plunged into Christ; Christ is in us, and we are in Him.
Such is the usual, and as it were, the technical sense
of the formula in
Christo
as used by St. Paul, especially when there is question
of the supernatural life of the Christian, or of the
union of the faithful among themselves.” Prat,
La Théologie de Saint
Paul,
Vol. 2, 6th edition (Paris, 1923), p. 478.
8)
Rom. 6: 3-5.
9)
Gal. 3: 27.
10)
Prat, op. cit.,
Vol. 2, p. 361.
11)
2 Cor. 3: 17.
12)
2 Thess. 1: 12.
• Up • The Whole Christ (Introduction) • The Whole Christ: Chapter One • The Whole Christ: Chapter Two • The Whole Christ: Chapter Three • The Whole Christ: Chapter Four • The Whole Christ: Chapter Five • The Whole Christ: Chapter Six • The Whole Christ: Chapter Seven •
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