I knew biblical passages about our solidarity with Christ—we are “in Christ,” we are the body of Christ, and so on. But I wasn’t sure how that connected with our personal spiritual experience of Christ. Was it related to Christ living in us (Gal 2:20)? Was it related to experiencing his resurrection life through the Spirit? After all, ancient Israelites were corporately related to Jacob without a personal experience of Jacob. Humanity is sinful without humans today having ever personally met a guy named Adam.
But of course, as I learned, the nature of the relationship is not exactly the same. We are reckoned in Adam in Rom 5:12-21 as Adam’s heirs, as descendants and fellow sinners. We become reckoned in Christ through baptism into Christ, not through genetic descent. “Adam” might dwell in us in some sense (in terms of solidarity as descendants and sinners), but the Spirit of Christ makes Christ present to us more dynamically (Rom 8:9).
Solidarity with Christ
Paul emphasizes that believers’ solidarity with Christ brings deliverance greater than the defeat effected by our solidarity with Adam (Rom 5:12-21). He then goes on to develop the theme of our union with Christ rather than with the “old person” (6:6) in Adam. Baptized into Christ (6:3-4), we share Christ’s death and resurrection (6:3-6a, 11). Paul can take for granted that being baptized into Christ entails baptism into his death because he understands that immersion into Christ includes sharing his experience. It is not merely theoretical.
“Don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we were buried with him by this baptism into this death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the Father’s glory, we too might live a new life. For since we’ve been grafted together/united with/identified with him in the image of his death, still more certainly we shall be united/identified with him in the image of his resurrection. We know that our old self was crucified with him … So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Rom 6:3-5a, 11, ESV)
This sense of solidarity with Christ is not limited to one passage. Not also Colossians 3: “For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col 3:3 NASB); “Christ who is your life” (3:4, NRSV); you “have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator” (3:10 NIV).
Paul finds partial analogies for this solidarity in shared experience in terms of sharers with Adam in sin (Rom 5:12-21) and Israel’s shared experience with Moses. In 1 Cor 10:2, by analogy with Christian experience of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, Israelites were “baptized into Moses” (though, Paul warns, they failed to persevere). We may think similarly how Jesus recapitulates elements of Israel’s experience in the early chapters of Matthew’s Gospel.
Being baptized into Christ means that we have clothed ourselves with Christ (Gal 3:27); we share in him a new identity. We have put on the new person, recreated in God’s image (Eph 4:22-24; Col 3:9-10), as humanity was created in God’s image in the beginning (Gen 1:26). Obviously this solidarity has a forensic dimension: that is, how God views us in Christ. Yet it also must impact reality on our side as well as God’s. We are called to be what we are in Christ. In Christ, we must put off the old person (what we were in Adam) and put on the new, recreated in God’s image (Eph 4:22-24; cf. Col 3:8). We must live according to the new identity God has conferred on us in Christ.
Paul says that as we bore Adam’s mortal image, we shall also bear the immortal image of Christ (1 Cor 15:49). Progressively (2 Cor 3:17) and ultimately (Rom 8:29) we are conformed to the image of Christ, who is God’s image (2 Cor 4:4; Col 1:15). We are conformed to this image by being shaped by the fruit of the Spirit within us (Gal 5:22-23), essentially by Christ living in us (Gal 2:20).
Immersed in Christ
How is this sharing of Christ effected in us? The Spirit of Christ (Rom 8:9) lives in us.
The Spirit baptizes us into Christ: “by/in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body” (1 Cor 12:13). Ancient Jewish baptisms were ritual immersions, so the picture here is of the Spirit immersing us in Christ. This picture suggests that being clothed with Christ is not limited only to the way God sees us.
Paul’s expressions would make sense to those already familiar with early Christian language inherited from John the Baptist: “he will baptize you in the Holy Spirit” (Matt 3:11; Mark 1:8; Luke 3:16; John 1:33; Acts 1:5; 11:16). (There is also a narrower sense of this phrase in the NT, but at this point I am using the phrase in the more general way.)
Not surprisingly, then, Luke, who speaks of the church being baptized in the Spirit, in his narratives parallels the ministries of the Jerusalem Jesus movement (led by Peter) and the Diaspora mission (led by Paul) with Jesus’s ministry. The same Lord worked in both Peter and Paul (Gal 2:7-8).
Because the Spirit of God is also the Spirit of Christ, being immersed in the Spirit entails being immersed in Christ. We read the Gospels as the story of our hero, but also our model, and the one the Spirit empowers us to follow. Thus in three successive paragraphs, Mark announces Jesus as the Spirit-baptizer (Mark 1:8), the pioneer of the Spirit-baptized life (1:9-11), and as the model of what this looks like as the Spirit thrusts him into conflict with the spiritual enemy (1:12-13). Jesus keeps warning disciples that they must share both his faith (9:19, 23, 29; 11:21-24) and his suffering (8:34; 13:13).
Walking in Christ
“As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, walk in him, rooted and constructed in him” (Col 2:6-7)
“This is how we know that we’re in him: whoever claims to dwell in him ought to walk just as he walked” (1 John 2:5-6)
Our solidarity with Adamic humanity comes by birth. In Adam, we share glorious DNA designed to reflect God’s image yet alienated from God’s presence and purpose by human sin.
Our solidarity with Christ comes by baptism, yes, in water, at the entrance into new life, but also in the Spirit. We share Christ’s life, death, burial and resurrection because we are immersed in him. Through the mind of the Spirit (Rom 8:5), the mind of Christ (1 Cor 2:16), we grow to think in his ways and act how Jesus would. The old adage, “What would Jesus do?” is more than a slogan; it invites us to think and act as Jesus thinks and acts, just as Jesus acted only as he saw the Father acting (John 5:19-20). The Spirit communicates Christ himself in the preaching of the gospel (see John 16:7-11; 1 Thess 2:13). Because Christ lives in us by the Spirit (John 14:17), we bear his fruit like branches on the vine (15:4-5), continuing many aspects of his mission (20:21-22). To walk in the Spirit (Gal 5:16) is also to walk in Christ (Col 2:6).
To the extent that we recognize that God has effected our solidarity with Christ, we can appropriate that identity as members of Christ (i.e., of his body; Rom 12:5; 1 Cor 6:15; Eph 4:25). We can remember that Christ lives in us and trust his character to live through us. The better we know what he is like, the more we can reflect that character by faith. Because we are each unique members of his body, we will individually reflect different aspects of his ministry. None of us is the entire body of Christ to himself.
It should be able to go without saying, but unfortunately often can’t go without saying, that we do not take the place of Jesus; the opposite must be the case: Jesus as Lord reigns in us so as to make his heart known. This comes through our direct relationship with the head, Jesus Christ, who is the source of our new life: Eph 4:15-16; Col 2:19; 3:4a).
We aren’t Jesus, but we are his agents. And when those agents work together, those around can see a fuller picture of Christ’s character through his body functioning together. As his body we together ideally reveal his character, his heart, his purposes, so that it is no longer we who live but Christ who lives in us (Gal 2:20). Immersed in Christ, clothed in Christ, we want our lives to reveal Christ in what we say and do and think. Together as the diverse members of Christ’s body, we are invited to show the world what Christ among them would do, proving God’s transforming power even to the heavenly rulers (Eph 3:10). Ideally, we as Christ’s body should mature into unity in trusting and knowing Christ (Eph 4:12-13). No one has seen God, but by loving one another we give the world a taste of God (1 John 4:12), and we know that we live in him and he in us because he has given us his Spirit (1 John 4:13).
Scholars debate today the meaning of “baptism in the Spirit.” More important than those debates about wording, however (which I deliberately sidestep in this post) is that we really embrace all that the Spirit wants to do in us. God desires to enable us to live like those immersed in his Spirit, and immersed in Christ. God wants people to continue to see what Jesus is like as the Spirit of Christ works in and through us.
