Thursday, May 31, 2018

Adam Miller on Transformative Justification


In his recent book, An Early Resurrection, Adam Miller wrote the following which emphasises the transformative nature of justification and being “in Christ”:

Life in Christ is like this. In Christ, the way I live—my manner of living—is changed from the inside out. Like being in love, living in Christ changes what it means to be alive . . . As Parley Pratt describes it, Spirit has just this effect. It resurrects my flesh, clears my mind, and opens my senses:

The gift of the Holy Spirit adapts itself to all these organs or attributes. It quickens all the intellectual faculties, increases, enlarges, expands and purifies all the natural passions and affections; and adapts them, by the gift of wisdom, to their lawful use. It inspires, developes, cultivates and matures all the fine toned sympathies, joys, tastes, kindred feelings and affections of our nature. It inspires virtue, kindness, goodness, tenderness, gentleness and charity. It developes beauty of person, form and features. It tends to health, vigour, animation and social feeling. It developes and invigorates all the faculties of the physical and intellectual man. It strengthens, invigorates, and gives tone to the nerves. In short, it is, as it were, marrow to the bone, joy to the heart, light to the eyes, music to the ears, and life to the whole being. (Parley P. Pratt, Key to the Science of Theology [Liverpool: F.D. Richards, 1855], 98-99) (Adam S. Miller, An Early Resurrection: Life in Christ Before You Die [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2018], 12, 17)

Elsewhere, Miller wrote the following about the regenerating/transforming nature of water baptism, something I have written a great deal on, including Rom 6 (see, for e.g., Christ's baptism is NOT imputed to the believer). Commenting on Paul’s theology of baptism in Rom 6:3-8, Miller writes:

Paul’s description of baptism may be the best in all of scripture. It rewards a closer look. Rather than describing baptism as an act of ritual cleansing, he describes it as a death and resurrection. I am buried in the water and then raised from that death into a new life . . . In a way, baptism is a time machine. It’s a vehicle for atonement. As a type of baptism is a ritual engine for reordering my experience of time. It shuffles Christ’s resurrected future into my mortal present and, in doing so, frees me from my sinful past . . . Baptism is a gate. As a type, it marks my formal surrender, my willingness to die early. It introduces me to a Christian way of looking forward. Baptism is in the mold into which my repentance is poured. It shapes my impulses to repent into a new way of handling time. My relationships to both my past and future change. Repentant, my past no longer owns me. And, repentant, the future no longer mortgages my present. Rather than being a slave to my past mistakes or future expectations, the past and future becomes servants of my present life. (Ibid., 36, 38, 82-83)

I have written a great deal on the transformative (not declarative merely) nature of justification. For a youtube presentation I posted recently, see: