Jesus Died for This Moment

his being is now in Christ’s being, as Christ is in him, because Paul has died with Christ, and through death Jesus has brought him into a new reality made through the ministerial action of the persons of the triune God (again, Gal. 2:20).6

Jesus died crying out to God, ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ All Christian theology and all Christian life is basically an answer to the question which Jesus asked as he died. The atheism of protests and of metaphysical rebellions against God are also answers to this question. Either Jesus who was abandoned by God is the end of all theology o

God is the creator and redeemer of the world, and Jesus’s launch of the kingdom—God’s worldwide sovereignty on earth as in heaven—is the central aim of his mission, the thing for which he lived and died and rose again.

While Paul’s experience is deeply mystical, it is also concrete, for it takes the shape of the lived narrative of Jesus. This is a mystical spirituality that is nevertheless inextricable from the lived and concrete; it is bound in the incarnate humanity of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. This mystical experience that delivers a new narrative