Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 65:2 (Fall 2003)
Article: Luther and the Finnish School Mystical Union With Christ: An Alternative To Blood Transfusions And Legal Fictions
Author: Paul Louis Metzger

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WTJ 65:2 (Fall 2003) p. 201

Luther and the Finnish School
Mystical Union With Christ:
An Alternative To Blood Transfusions And Legal Fictions

Paul Louis Metzger

[Paul Metzger is Assistant Professor of Christian Theology and Theology of Culture, Multnomah Biblical Seminary, Portland, Ore., and director of its Institute for the Theology of Culture: New Wine, New Wineskins.]

I. Mired in the Mundane, Longing for Something More

Increasingly, Westerners are looking eastward in search of a satisfying spirituality. Many of them, more at home in the Christian tradition, are turning to Eastern Orthodoxy. Others are looking farther afield to the religions of the East. One of the causes of this migration is what Loren Wilkinson calls “a subtle deism. .. latent in much Western theology.”1 Wilkinson, an Evangelical, finds Eastern Orthodox thought forms appealing, noting parallels between Eastern Orthodoxy and Celtic Christianity, which he also appreciates.2 Another Westerner, Marcus Borg, a liberal Protestant and leading voice for the Jesus Seminar, also finds deistic tendencies latent in traditional Western theology. Borg, to whom we will return at the close of this essay, draws from a host of sources, including Eastern religions, in propounding a panentheistic model of the God-world relation in the attempt to overcome the distance.3

Such distance between God and the world, including the believer, can also be found in Western debates on union with Christ. On the one hand, the Roman Catholic doctrine of infused righteousness, the spiritual equivalent of a blood transfusion, gives rise to the charge of autonomy from God.4 Here the believer possesses God’s grace as a property or quality, that is, as created grace. The

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implication is that the person exists somewhat independently from God. On the other hand, the Protestant conception of imputation, which its critics call a “legal fiction,” when left in isolation or given primacy in discussions of justification, gives rise to the charge of autonomy from the grace of God.5 Here the believer depends wholly on the will of God. But is God’s grace truly present to me? Are there no sources in the Western tradition to which one could turn to overcome the deistic divide and erase the dreary-eyed look of those mired in the mundane, who are longing for something more?

In the 1998 Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, J. I. Packer hailed the ...

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