Our union with God began when we believed, and God wants this union or oneness to grow throughout our lives. We are “engaged” now and God will complete our full union at the marriage supper of the Lamb. The idea that we are united in this mortal life is based on the many passages in the New Testament about our present oneness with God or Christ which includes the passages about God or Christ being in us and us being in God or Christ, as well as the Old Testament passages referring to God’s people as his bride. We will quote only two of them. In 2 Corinthians 11:2 Paul tells the Corinthians that “I betrothed you to one husband, to present you as a pure virgin to Christ” (ESV) and in 1 Corinthians 6:17 he states that “he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him” (ESV).
The great Christian teachers of the past affirm the centrality of our union of love with God. Augustine of Hippo (b. 354 – d. 430) summarized union well: “And when love in the soul reaches the heights of perfection, that soul is raised to a life of intimate and habitual union with God.” Calvin asserts:
Therefore, that joining together of Head and members, that indwelling of Christ in our hearts—in short, that mystical union—are accorded by us the highest degree of importance, so that Christ, having been made ours, makes us sharers with him in the gifts with which he has been endowed.[1]
We yearn to be consumed by this union of love. Historian of Christian spirituality Pierre Pourrat quotes the anonymous author of a later medieval work titled Manuale:
O Love who ever burnest without quenching, O Christ Jesus, most good and sweet, O Love, my God, consume me wholly in thy fire, in thy charity, in thy sweetness, thy love, thy tenderness . . . so that being filled with the sweetness of thy love, wholly consumed with the flame of thy charity, I may love thee, my most sweet and fairest Lord, with all my heart, with all my soul and with all my strength!”[2]
We never become one nature with God and we never fully merge into God. We never become divine. We are created beings and he is the Creator. The two cannot become one in essence. To extinguish our individuality would ruin the blissful union of love that God promises us, for mutual love can only be experienced between separate persons. Thus, it is for love and glory that God created us to be separate persons from him. He desires a union of love with us. This is our final destiny.
[1] Jean Calvin, ed. John T. McNeill, Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 1, The Library of Christian Classics, vol. 20, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 737. Institutes 3.11.10.
[2] Quoted in Pourrat, P., Christian Spirituality, tr. W. H. Mitchell 4 vols., vol. 2 (London: Burns Oates and Washbourne, 1924), 306.
