SALVATION AS COMMUNION: Partakers of the Divine Nature

Theology Today, Oct 2004 by Heim, S Mark

Human communion with each other is also an instrument of fuller communion with God. Our finite receptions of the triune self-giving multiply in and through each other in a kind of spiritual calculus that deepens each one's participation in the communion of the triune life itself. The key to realizing this potential for participation in the divine life lies in each person's openness for communion through the whole range of the divine dimensions and openness to communion with other persons and with their unique relations with God. I have emphasized that person-to-person communion deepens our connection with God. But the reverse is equally true. Apart from relation with God, our human relations are transient and constrained. Without the transforming work of grace in which God draws near to us, our capacity to love each other must always falter.

Salvation is a relation of communion with the triune God. So far, we have discussed the elements of that definition: relation, communion, and triune God. We should also briefly note that a Christian understanding of the church follows consistently from this basic conviction about salvation as a relation of communion, of koinonia. The church is a body called to live out this communion.1 It is a community of people whose relations with each other are shaped by their common participation in relation with God in Christ through the Holy Spirit. For individuals to be "in Christ" is inextricably to be part of the universal church that is Christ's body. The church is an embodiment of the scriptural injunction that those who say they love God and hate their neighbors are liars. Communion with God that does not, at the same time, encompass concrete communion realized in life with other human beings is a blatant contradiction of the gospel. That is why the common bond of the church is just such concrete communion with the human being Jesus, as constitutive of communion with God. A purely private Christian is impossible. "Saints," from this perspective, include those who have learned to participate by communion in others' relations with God as much as those who have perfected their own faculties for personal unity with God. This is precisely what the "communion of the saints" is all about.2 This is also why, in Christian tradition, the actual concrete body of the church has been regarded as fundamental to Christian life and to salvation itself.

I have tended to stress that this web of human interrelations is necessary for any one of us to have access to the fullness of God's relations with us individually. The other side is also crucial: One can connect to this web, at the extreme, even at just one point. A person can be drawn into this extraordinary, cosmic communion by a single fragile thread. Loving attachment (of the most humble and basic sort), even to one other, if that love has the character not of closed possession but of further openness through the other person, finally can draw someone into the very heart of God. The senior devil in C. S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters counsels his junior tempter to distrust even an innocent love of hot chocolate in his charges. Such a love can be shared . . . and who knows where that might lead? Through Christ, God has established the network that makes this interpersonal sharing possible. In Christ lies the decisive personal relation that can begin when all others are absent-the relation that lies at the root of all enduring human communion.