Braaten & Jenson (1998, Eerdmans Pub)’s Union with Christ, The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther, continues to yield innumerable riches of insights into the gospel of God and of Christ for me.

I’m reading and studying the book…again! In pages 14 to 15, this astounding truth brought me much delight. “Faith means justification precisely on the basis of Christ’s person being present in it as favor and gift”.

After highlighting numerous passages in this book, and adding copious footnotes and margin notes on it, I realize that these Finnish theologians have done a masterful job of placing the whole of Christ, that is, His Person and work of salvation, at the center of their thesis on union with Christ and the believer.

Their take which is at heart, an interpretation of Martin Luther’s thoughts and works on the concept of theosis or participation of the believer with God through Christ, is that God gives Himself in the Person of Christ, in faith. They interpret with Luther, quite competently and persuasively, from Luther’s original works, that faith can carry this eternal weight of glory precisely because, “”in ipsa fide, Christus adest“: in faith itself Christ is present, and so the whole of salvation”.

We can understand this glorious gospel truth better through Eph 2:8 – 10. A simple reading of the context of this passage, beginning from verse 1 of chapter 1 of the letter to the Ephesian church, bears this out. Salvation is ALL of grace. A fallen sinful human being requires saving OUT of his human machinations or human ingenuity. Even the thought, or the awakening of a desire to be “saved”, and the various movements towards the grace of God are energized by the grace of an ever-seeking Good Shepherd of the sheep. Oh how this realization humbles the pride and arrogance of the wayward heart of man!

The glory does not end here. The Reformed tradition tends to focus on the cross to the exception of the resurrection. Decidedly an under-realized eschatological disposition towards salvation. The innumerable hymns sung to the glory of the cross in the hymnals of the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries bear testimony to this observation.

Even this New Finnish Interpretation of Luther shows this disposition. The WHOLE of salvation comes to us in Christ. This perspective of the whole of salvation, from Lutheran and Reformed perspectives, strangely leaves out a Christ who even though Scripture exhorts is a “Resurrected, Ascended” (Beale, 2023), and therefore a “Living” Person, is a Christ devoid, and de-fanged of His miraculous nature. Except of course for the miracle of regeneration, or of being “born-again” (John 3:3-7).

Justification for Paul would have been meaningless and impossible without the Person, Presence and Power of the Holy Spirit, Who is the very Gift and Promise Peter spoke of in his day of Pentecost sermon in Acts chapter 2. Yet, today, it is the norm, except for Pentecostal and Charismatic congregations, for a miraculous-less gospel! A gospel that really calls out the deception of the yet unsanctified heart, to “control” Christ, and keep Him in manageable circumstances. A controlled Christ according to the sad remnants of a failed Enlightenment experiment that washed out the glory of the gospel. Luther himself being one of the culprits through his stand on the cessation of the gifts of the Spirit in his Galatian commentary.

The call today is a call to reclaim the whole gospel and to rescue it from the monopoly of those who would insist that it be confined to the cognitions paramountly.

A miracle-less gospel is a gospel in caricature.