Gorman: "Life in Christ"

Some books are best chugged like cold water on a hot summer day; others are best when they’re sipped like a high-shelf bourbon. Michael Gorman’s Cruciformity falls into the latter category, and the sipping has been fantastic. As I slowly work my way through this book, I’ll share some of his thoughts and insights on Christian spirituality. The book’s focus, insofar as I can tell, is on the Christian life being a narrative reenactment of Christ’s death and resurrection; Christian spirituality is rooted in death to self and life to God.

* * *

Paul sees identification with and participation in the death of Jesus as the believers’ fundamental experience of Christ. To be “in Christ” is to be under the influence of Christ’s power, most poignantly the power to be conformed to him and his cross by participating in the life of a community acknowledging his Lordship. Gorman defines cruciformity (his own made-up word) as an ongoing pattern of living in Christ and dying with him that produces a Christ-like (cruciform) person. Cruciform existence is what being Christ’s servant, indwelling him and being indwelt by him, living with and for and “according to” him, is all about, for both individuals and communities. (48)

This “cruciformity,” Gorman makes clear, goes beyond mere imitation. Much of modern Christian living revolves around the question, WWJD? The Christian life becomes a matter of imitating Christ, or at least doing our best to decipher how he would live and act if he were in our shoes. There’s certainly value in imitation—as Paul testifies that he imitates Christ, and encourages believers to imitate him—but cruciformity takes it a step further: it’s what happens when Christians, as individuals and communities, live with/in Christ. There are more than ninety references to being “in Christ” (or variations upon that phrase). Gorman doesn’t see this as “mystical” language but spatial language: it’s about living in a “sphere” of influence, that “sphere” specifically being Christ. Although Gorman takes the language as spatial, he doesn’t for a second decry intimacy in the relationship: we dwell in Christ and he dwells in us, so much so that Paul can say that the operator in his life isn’t him but “Christ who lives in me.” The with language that we find so often in Paul—dying with Christ, rising with Christ, etc.—is technical language with an undertow of personality. Living “with/in” Christ is a spatial and intimate experience.

The biggest question is, “How are we in Christ? And how is Christ in us?” Gorman uses a lot of big words, but the take-home is this: just as we breathe in air and it fills our lungs, so we also live in this air. In the same way, the Christ in whom we live also lives in us, individually and corporately. Gorman highlights Romans 7: for those outside Christ, sin both dwells in them (7.17, 20) and is the sphere in which, and under the power of which, they dwell (7.14; 3.9). Those outside Christ are “in the flesh,” the “sphere of influence” governed by sin. The power of Christ replaces sin as the power that lives in us and the power in which we live, so that there’s a transfer of “spheres” and, likewise, a metaphysical change in our identity. Thus, people are either “in the flesh/in sin” or “in Christ/in the Spirit.”

It’s poignant that Paul can use “in Christ” and “in the Spirit” almost interchangeably. Life “in Christ,” which is about cruciformity rather than imitation, is likewise “life in the Spirit.” The Spirit is a key piece to the puzzle of the Christian experience. Perhaps the distinction between “imitating Christ” and “cruciformity” is a matter of operations: unlike imitation, cruciformity can’t be attributed to human effort. There’s a power at work within Christians and our communities that produces Christ-like qualities. This power enables the exalted, crucified Lord to take shape in and among those who belong to him and live in him. This power, Gorman says, is the Spirit of God, who is also the spirit of Christ. The Spirit is often associated with power: the power of creation, the power of moral and spiritual transformation, the power of new creation. This new power and its outworking lies at the heart of the purpose of the Spirit. The Spirit isn’t just there to give us guidance, to comfort us in times of need, to pray for us when we don’t know how or what to pray for, to give us gifts and tongues and the fruit of Spirit. All of these workings of the Spirit dovetail on the Spirit’s primary purpose: CRUCIFORMITY.