Note: From Union with Christ and the Life of Faith (Baker, 2025). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
While it makes sense to speak about “the Christian doctrine of God” or “the Christian doctrine of the incarnation,” it seems less plausible in the contemporary world to assert that there is one single Christian doctrine of salvation. Whatever convergence and agreement there may be in the great, central teachings about God or Christ, these common truths recognized and enshrined in the earliest Christian creeds and liturgies and commentaries, surely when it comes to soteriology there must be more divergence and disagreement. Don’t the various branches of Christendom often do their branching out precisely here, over questions of what salvation is? Conventional wisdom holds that the many complex questions that arise here are the very questions over which we divide into varied traditions (say Roman Catholic and Protestant), distinct denominations (say Lutheran and Reformed) and even antagonistic families or tribes (say Calvinist and Arminian, pedobaptist and credobaptist and so on). So while we would never, in good taste, let ourselves speak of a peculiarly Baptist doctrine of the Trinity (horrors!) or an exclusively Presbyterian doctrine of the incarnation (I shudder), we do sometimes feel that it makes sense to speak of a range or variety of soteriologies. And so we sometimes speak of the Calvinist soteriology, a Wesleyan account of salvation and so on.
Union with Christ Can Unify Christian Traditions
But letting ourselves speak this way can signal an underlying error in our understanding of the faith. To think of Christian traditions as being parceled out and divided up among competing soteriologies is too loose; it illegitimately gives too much importance to the differences within the continuum of belief. Such a taxonomy is too broad and irresponsible to do justice to the actual lay of the land. The soteriological lay of the land, I want to argue, is the domain of the doctrine of union with Christ. There is one Christian soteriology, and that is, by definition, salvation by union with Christ.
Of course there are soteriological differences among Christians and churches. We will consider in chapter 3 the variety of ways in which different theologies understand union with Christ. But the key point here, as we examine the creeds, is that those are differences within the larger context of a broad agreement. This is partly a judgment about scale. If we think of union with Christ in terms of geography, we should think of soteriological disagreements as real estate. And even at that smaller level, we do well to keep a sense of perspective about the difference between large and small parcels of disagreement. Two kinds of Presbyterians may argue about the nature of the covenant; three kinds of Baptists may argue about the status of the law in the Christian life; four kinds of Anglicans may argue about the sacraments. These things matter, but they matter within certain agreed-upon territories of a broader consensus.
Some differences run very deep indeed, and we should be alert to those boundaries that mark the edge of Christian fellowship. If somebody preaches “a different gospel,” as Paul warns the Galatians, that gospel is not really a gospel at all (Galatians 1:6-7). In extreme instances, differences in soteriology lead not just to questioning the Christian status of a rival confession but to outright rejection of that status. Consider J. Gresham Machen’s critique of systematized theological liberalism as a project that claims to be Christian but that “differs from Christianity in its account of the gospel itself.” [J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, p. 117] Machen is in fact reacting against a soteriology so deficient that it fails to be Christian, but the kind of theological liberalism he has in view is also radically deficient “with regard to the presuppositions of the gospel (the view of God and the view of man), with regard to the Book in which the gospel is contained and with regard to the Person whose work the gospel sets forth.” [J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, p. 117] Boundaries exist, and a soteriological system that transgresses them fails to be Christian. But the converse also holds: soteriological systems that don’t cross those boundaries are by definition Christian, despite their regional variations.
We should clearly acknowledge these theological differences, be analytically precise and intellectually honest about them and learn the procedural rules for how to argue well so that our territorial disputes over matters of the gospel are both vigorous and virtuous. Good fences make good neighbors; unclear boundaries invite border skirmishes; sound theology tends to draw distinctions, not dissolve them. But while most active differences in soteriology are about real estate, union with Christ is geography, the vast and fundamental ground itself. Both require surveying, but the surveys operate at radically different scales. And real estate rests on geography for its solidity, its orientation and its possibilities of cultivation.
A Prayer for Union
As an illustration of this principle, consider the doxological prelude printed before this chapter. It is a prayer that asks, “Soul of Christ, hallow me; body of Christ, strengthen me; blood of Christ, ransom me,” and so on through seven requests. It powerfully sets forth the spirituality of union with Christ. Readers familiar with the prayer and readers seeing it for the first time may have quite similar responses to its vivid appeal. It seems to speak from the heart, articulating the Christian desire to be saved to the uttermost by union with all that is in Christ. The prayer is called the Anima Christi, for the first two words in its original Latin. An anonymous prayer, it dates to the fourteenth century and is most familiar in Roman Catholic culture. Here are its impressively Roman Catholic credentials: It has been very popular as a eucharistic hymn and is included in the Roman Missal. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, makes use of it in his Spiritual Exercises – where the prayer is sometimes given the title Aspirations of St. Ignatius and at the popular level is often thought to have been written by Ignatius (though this has long been known to be demonstrably false). A medieval pope declared that penitents who recited it at Mass earned a three-thousand-day indulgence. In the nineteenth century the Anima Christi had a surge of popularity and was once again “indulgenced” by Pius IX in 1854. It is, in other words, extremely Roman Catholic.
But not exclusively so. Most importantly, there is nothing in the text that is uniquely Roman Catholic or that contradicts Protestant theology. Here is the full text:
Soul of Christ, sanctify me.
Body of Christ, save me.
Blood of Christ, inebriate me.
Water from the side of Christ, wash me.
Passion of Christ, strengthen me.
O Good Jesus, hear me.
Within Thy wounds, hide me.
Suffer me not to be parted from Thee.
From the malignant foe, defend me.
At the hour of my death, call me,
And bid me come to Thee,
That with Thy saints I may praise Thee
For all eternity. Amen.
The Anglican Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626) incorporated part of the prayer into his Private Prayers; in fact, his clever arrangement of it in abbreviated form is the excerpt printed as our doxological prelude. The bracket gathers together all the requests and makes them converge terminatively on “me.” But it was not just among high-church Anglicans that the Anima Christi took hold of Protestant hearts. The prayer was translated into German as an expanded rhyming hymn and became popular among various Lutheran Pietist groups. That was where John Wesley picked it up, rendering Johannes Scheffler’s “Die Seele Christi heil’ge mich” into English in the form “Jesu, Thy Soul Renew My Own.” Here are his first two stanzas:
Jesu, thy soul renew my own,
Thy sufferings for my sins atone;
Thy sacred body slain for me
From sin and misery set me free.
The water issuing from thy side
The soldier’s spear had open’d wide,
That bathe my heart, and all thy blood
Refresh and bring me near to God.
The journey of the Anima Christi from Roman Catholic to Anglican to Lutheran to Methodist circles is instructive. What stays constant is the central idea of salvation by union with Christ, expressed by way of a poetic strategy that itemizes the elements of Christ’s death and addresses them almost as personifications. It lists Christ’s soul, his body, his blood, the water from his side (aqua lateris Christi) and his passion, and to each of these it correlates a soteriological benefit: sanctification, salvation, refreshing, cleansing, strength. The point of distinguishing them poetically is not to parcel them out or to choose among them but to gain a sense of the comprehensiveness of total salvation in Christ. This opening strategy then gives way to a direct prayer addressing Jesus and then to a compelling petition for Jesus to make himself the hiding place of those he saves: “O good Jesus, hear me. / Within Thy wounds, hide me.” There could hardly be a stronger or more personal sense of union with Christ than a prayer to be hidden within his wounds. And the final lines look forward to hearing Christ’s own voice summon us into eternal praise. If the opening lines seem to dismember Christ into impersonal personifications, the final lines are relentlessly personal and interpersonal.
As the prayer was naturalized or enculturated into the different Christian traditions, it took on local color and accent. The Roman Catholic placement of it in a eucharistic liturgy resonates with the concrete nouns of the opening lines: “body,” “blood,” “water from the side.” These words certainly function well in the context of the Lord’s Supper; in a eucharistic setting, the body and blood of the prayer and the body and blood of communion with Christ can recirculate the meaning of salvation in Christ. Roman Catholics furthermore have a very distinctively elaborated theology of the mode of Christ’s presence in the elements (transubstantiation). The same words function differently in Lancelot Andrewes’s private prayers. Whatever Andrewes’s own Anglican sacramentology, his use of the Anima Christi was for personal devotion in secret. The Pietists and the Wesleyans refracted the same prayer further. John Wesley made explicit the way Christ’s soul heals the soul of the one praying: “Jesu, thy soul renew my own.” Nobody else praying the Anima Christi had yet mentioned their own soul until the prayer underwent its Wesleyan transformation. The theological differences among those who pray the prayer become more evident the longer one sits with them. Perhaps the well-developed late medieval theology of the human soul of the incarnate God-man is the only possible matrix within which a prayer to the “soul of Christ” could have arisen. And yet, once this prayer about union with Christ was available, it was received in other theological frameworks with subtly differing spiritual emphases. It might even be possible to pick a good theological fight over the meaning of the words of the prayer, if we tried hard enough to draw the differences to the surface and explicate them sharply enough. This is exactly what we would expect, given our commitment to the centrality of union with Christ as the one Christian soteriology. We expect agreement about the main thing (union with Christ) and disagreements about the details.
Creedality and Credibility
There is in fact a common Christian account of what salvation is, and a great deal depends on us learning to see that commonality and to make our approach to that single soteriology even in all the details and complications of our differences, warranted as the differences may be. The one single Christian doctrine of salvation concerns union with Christ; it is characterized by a recognizably Christian way of approaching Christ: paying a particular kind of attention to Christ himself, seeing him for who he truly is, coming to him in need and obedience and uniting to him. This approach to salvation in Christ is so deeply embedded in the Christian faith that it is the spiritual reality that generated the ancient creeds and guided the ecumenical councils, and it continuously underwrites doctrinal contemplation of salvation in a vast array of classic theological sources and their reception. This chapter will consist of discerning the form of union with Christ in those creeds, councils and earliest contemplations.
But first, a word on why such an account of union with Christ aims to be simultaneously creedal and credible. It has to do not only with what we believe (creedal) but with whether we are believable (credible). On the face of it, contemporary culture is more inclined to give Christian truth claims a hearing if the truth claims plausibly represent what Christians as a whole believe rather than what just one of the identifiable subsections of Christians believe. Christian claims tend to be more persuasive when more unified; at least, the inquiring secular mind can proceed more directly to entertaining the truth claims of Christian theology if it can skip over the appearance of plurality and difference. The message of salvation, as it comes to people in the world today, would be more plausible if all who claimed the name of Christ agreed on and were eloquent about the same doctrine of salvation. To that extent, our credibility depends a great deal on the effectiveness of our common creedality. We will be more believable if the “we” in “we believe” includes a vast, global, ancient congregating of the faithful. There is a strategic advantage to being able to invite people to consider a Christian faith whose profile is recognizable from a distance.
If you are like most Christians, you prefer all the Christians in the world to reach doctrinal unanimity by agreeing with you. That would in fact solve the problem and produce unity. But while each of us waits patiently for that to happen, we do well not to exaggerate our differences. The power of unified testimony is part of why Jesus prayed – not just for his first disciples but for those who would believe in him through their testimony – “that they may all be one, so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (John 17:21).
The section of the prayer just quoted begins with unity and ends with credible witness. But between those is a section I omitted from the quotation: “just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us.” That middle section is in fact the crucial link. It connects the unified Christian witness on one side to the world’s acceptance of the message on the other. And it is precisely what this chapter takes up in analyzing the faith. Against the deep, all-sufficient background in the unity of the Trinity (the Father in the Son and the Son in the Father, as the Holy Spirit testifies), Jesus sets forth this reality: “that they also may be in us.” Here is the invitation to a trinitarian account of our union with Christ.
It is worth mentioning in passing that this great prayer of John 17 articulates a profound theological account of the unity of those who believe in Christ. A trinitarian foundation for the unity of the church is suggested here, and it would be possible to draw that very important theme into the foreground. That trinitarian-shaped unity of the church is in fact a more substantial and more significant topic than what we are currently examining. It is the secret at the center. Here, my only point is that the world beyond the church is more likely to pay attention and find Christian claims plausible if they are set forth with some degree of unanimity. That is all – the more creedal, the more credible.
Fred Sanders, professor of theology, Biola University
