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:
