The King’s Park Conference Centre, Northampton, was the new venue for the biannual Affinity theological conference in early Spring.
Uniquely, the papers are made available via Dropbox a few weeks earlier, then at the conference an opening outline is followed by small group discussion followed by a summary.
The first papers looked at ‘Union with Christ’ from an exegetical stance. Tim Ward focused on the apostle Paul’s teaching in Galatians. For Paul, union with Christ is the basic fact of Christianity and Tim showed how, in Galatians, the justification of the believer is the articulation of one particular aspect of that union. Cornelis Bennema (of WEST) focused on union in the apostle John’s writings. After a careful analysis he suggested a new category for us: relational ontology.
Calvin and Owen
The second papers took a historical perspective on the theme. Bob Letham’s paper was on John Calvin’s theology of union: Calvin emphasised that soteriological union with Christ involves both a new status and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. These are distinct but inseparable. John Fesko looked at John Owen and his debate on this issue with William Sherlock. He argued that Owen was not dependant on Calvin’s teaching but emphasised the same two foci: The new legal status and the mystical indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
The final papers took a theological slant. David McKay’s paper on justification affirmed the covenant motif as ‘a fruitful framework for understanding both union with Christ and justification’. Paul Wells’s paper on sanctification began with a warning: ‘Individualism that forgets the corporate and covenantal perspectives of union with Christ is the blight of Western evangelical-ism.’ Holiness isolated from covenant theology becomes moralism: ‘Sanctification is God ‘creating’ holy dispositions, not us obtaining them by spiritual gymnastics’.
