/lit/ - Literature

>>22634901
The idea of mystical union with God as the goal of Christianity and the point of Christ isn't Roman Catholic. If anything, it's deeper in the Orthodox church, but it's also deep in Protestant mystics like Boehme too. You also see it in other traditions, in Rumi (Sufi Islam) for example.

Some formulations were indeed treated skeptically by the Latin Church, e.g. the investigation of Meister Eckhart.

Christ largely just serving as atonement for a sky father who sits outside the world, the main goal of religion being "do good things so as not to be punished, but since you can't be good enough, here is a sacrifice," is more Englightenment era theism, and loses something.

Of course, sacrifice is very much part of the story (see Hebrews), but I think it's mistake to assume that all of Saint Paul's language of "living in Christ," "Christ living in us," Christs language about "being one in him as he is one in the father," (Gospel of John), being "in God" Saint John, "living with the will of God," instead of our human will (Saint Peter), is simply metaphorical window dressing for "live the same sort of internal life you lived before Baptism, but just try to be better and know you have a gift of salvation."

"Faith without works," is dead (Saint James). That is, there should be a process if sanctification, and of glorification.

Christ, the divine and mysterious union of man and God, is to be "the first born of many sons and daughters, (Romans 8)." For those he predestined he foreknew, and those he foreknew he will call, and those he called "will be glorified." And how are we glorified as men? We are only glorified "in the fullness of God." (Ephesians).

But if we are, as Paul says, "glorified," then a paired down doctrine that ignores this, and only focuses on justification seems to be missing something quite important. Both are in Romans 8, the one is a route to the other, the sacrifice the bridge to union.