Christian perfection consists in the twofold way of charity: service of neighbor and our direct quest for God's love. Many of us discover ways to love our neighbor, but few achieve intimacy with God. Why? Because we don't know how to prepare ourselves properly to reach this exalted goal. In these pages, Father Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalen lays out for us a time-tested path toward achieving complete intimacy with God, the path first mapped out centuries ago by the Church's acclaimed master of the contemplative life, St. John of the Cross (1542-1591). St. John showed that God hungers for union with each of us but also requires arduous efforts on our part, the many details of which Father Gabriel explains in these enlightening pages. Do you perceive holiness as an unattainable goal for you? Or is fear of the fatigue of such an effort holding you back? Absorb this book, and allow gentle St. John to take you by the hand and lead you — as he has led so many others — to true intimacy with our Lord.

Winner of the 2017 Christian Book Award for New Author Named one of the top books of 2016 by John Piper's Desiring God ministry To experience why the gospel is good news and answer life’s most foundational questions about identity, destiny, and purpose, we must understand what it means to be united to Christ. If you are a Christian, the Bible says that Christ has united his life to yours, that you are now in Christ and Christ is in you. This almost unfathomable truth is the central theme of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. Yet few Christians today experience or enjoy this reality. Union with Christ reveals the transformational power of this ancient doctrine while addressing the basic questions of the human heart: Who Am I? Why Am I Here? Where Am I Headed? How Will I Get There? Nothing is more practical for living the Christian life than union with Christ. The recovery of this reality provides the anchor and engine for your life with God—for your destiny is not only to see Christ, but to actually become like him.

An accomplished theologian recovers the biblical theme of union with Christ, showing how it affects current theological and ministry issues.

Paul and Union with Christ fills the gap for biblical scholars, theologians, and pastors pondering and debating the meaning of union with Christ. Following a selective survey of the scholarly work on union with Christ through the twentieth century to the present day, Greek scholar Constantine Campbell carefully examines every occurrence of the phrases ‘in Christ’, ‘with Christ’, ‘through Christ’, ‘into Christ,’ and other related expressions, exegeting each passage in context and taking into account the unique lexical contribution of each Greek preposition. Campbell then builds a holistic portrayal of Paul’s thinking and engages contemporary theological discussions about union with Christ by employing his evidence-based understanding of the theme. This volume combines high-level scholarship and a concern for practical application of a topic currently debated in the academy and the church. More than a monograph, this book is a helpful reference tool for students, scholars, and pastors to consult its treatment of any particular instance of any phrase or metaphor that relates to union with Christ in the Pauline corpus.

The Christian's participatory union with Christ is a central element of salvation, both in Scripture and in the historic Christian tradition. In the early twentieth-century, however, this theme gradually began to diminish in its prominence within Lutheran theological writing. Due to a variety of philosophical and theological shifts, many Lutherans began to emphasize forensic justification to the exclusion of participationist motifs. That forensic exclusivism is challenged in this work. In this book, Jordan Cooper articulates an approach to union with Christ that is drawn from both Patristic theology, and the classical Lutheran tradition. Throughout this study, Cooper exposits union with Christ under three distinctive categories: the objective union of God and man through the Incarnation, the formal union of faith in which the believer is united to Christ's person and work, and the mystical union through which the Triune God dwells in the hearts of Christians. This book is the sixth volume in a series titled A Contemporary Protestant Scholastic Theology.

The Mystery of Union with God offers the most extensive, systematic analysis to date of how Albert and Thomas interpreted and transformed the Dionysian Moses "who knows God by unknowing." It shows Albert's and Thomas's philosophical and theological motives to place limits on Dionysian apophatism and to reintegrate mediated knowledge into mystical knowing. The author surfaces many similarities in the two Dominicans' mystical doctrines and exegesis of Dionysius. This work prepares the way for a new consideration of Albert the Great as the father of Rhineland Mysticism. The original presentation of Aquinas's theology of the Spirit's seven gifts breaks new ground in theological scholarship. Finally, the entire book lays out a model for the study of mystical theology from a historical, philosophical and doctrinal perspective.

Thirty selected devotional readings about a Christian's relationship to Christ gleaned from the writings of Charles G. Finney Though Charles Finney is most often associated with evangelism and revival, his heart yearned over the Christian who, though forgiven of past sins, still lived in bondage to sinful habits. L.G. Parkhurst has carefully selected thirty brief but powerful readings from Finney, showing how freedom comes to a Christian only through a relationship with Christ. Chapter titles include: • Jesus My King • Jesus My All in All • Jesus My Strength • Jesus My Hope • Christ My Rock This new book is similar in format to Finney's Principles of Prayer, also edited by Parkhurst.

Regeneration, justification, sanctification. These are the primary words that come to mind when talking about the theology of salvation. However, the Bible teaches that each of these concepts is firmly rooted in something more foundational: our union with Christ. In this accessible book, Johnson introduces us to this neglected doctrine, arguing that it is the dominant organizing concept for salvation in the New Testament. In eight thought-provoking chapters, Johnson shows how a believer's position "in Christ" is the lens through which other all other facets of salvation should be understood. Interacting extensively with the biblical text and drawing on lessons from church history, Johnson presents a compelling case for the unique importance of this beautiful, biblical doctrine.

The doctrine of theosis has enjoyed a recent resurgence among varied theological traditions across the realms of historical, dogmatic, and exegetical theology. In Christification: A Lutheran Approach to Theosis, Jordan Cooper evaluates this teaching from a Lutheran perspective. He examines the teachings of the church fathers, the New Testament, and the Lutheran Confessional tradition in conversation with recent scholarship on theosis. Cooper proposes that the participationist soteriology of the early fathers expressed in terms of theosis is compatible with Luther's doctrine of forensic justification. The historic Lutheran tradition, Scripture, and the patristic sources do not limit soteriological discussions to legal terminology, but instead offer a multifaceted doctrine of salvation that encapsulates both participatory and forensic motifs. This is compared and contrasted with the development of the doctrine of deification in the Eastern tradition arising from the thought of Pseudo-Dionysius. Cooper argues that the doctrine of the earliest fathers--such as Irenaeus, Athanasius, and Justin--is primarily a Christological and economic reality defined as "Christification." This model of theosis is placed in contradistinction to later Neoplatonic forms of deification.

In conversation with historical and systematic theology, Macaskill argues that the union between God and his people is consistently represented by the New Testament authors as covenantal, with the participation of believers in the life of God specifically mediated by Jesus, the covenant Messiah.