Tony Garcia

BIB202

11/15/2020

Paper #5

Our union with Christ is spiritual because we are united to Christ through the

Holy Spirit. We communicate with Him through the Holy Spirit, and this makes it

spiritual. Our union with Him is extensive, because we are united with Christ through

everything that he has done. This includes His life, death, burial, resurrection,

ascension, and session. It is also a union of life because He is alive in Christians, and

He is seen in everything that we do. All of our actions, words, and thoughts are centered

around Him, so He is alive in us in many different aspects. Our union with Christ is also

federal, because His obedience is accounted to believers. Our union with Him is also

fleshly because Christ came down from Heaven, off of His thrown, and took on flesh to

be with us. In this way, he became one with humanity. Our union is also a faith union, in

a way, because we depend on Christ for nourishment. We need Him to satisfy our

spiritual needs, and, in the long run, our longing to be with Him in Heaven. Our union

with Christ is very deep and very diverse. This is why we choose to live our lives the

way He sees fit, not the way we see fit. This proves difficult day in and day out, but our

deep connection with Him has never failed us. If he is the great, all powerful, almighty

God, then he knows much more than we do, and he loves us, so he wants what is best
for us. Because of this, it is always better to let him take control, instead of trying to do it

our way.

When it comes to perseverance in the faith, Calvinists believe that if you are

really a Christian, then you will persevere in your faith to the very end. They never stop

believing in Jesus Christ. They believe that God has this happen on purpose, through

various factors, like support from a church body, the proclaimed word of God, warning

scriptures in the bible to not fall away, etc. On the other hand, Arminians believe that a

Christian may fall away from God, and this will cause him to perish. To expand on this,

John Wesley said, “[a Christian may] make shipwreck of faith and a good conscience,

that he may fall, not only foully, but finally, so as to perish forever.” So, they do not

believe that you can recover once you have fallen away from God. These views are

similar in this way, that they believe you have to persevere until the very end.

Evangelicals believe that you reach salvation through faith and grace alone. They

believe that you reach salvation solely by faith in Jesus’s atonement. They believe that

people can be “born again” once they convert to Christianity, through the authority of

God to save them. This then motivates them to spread the message of the Gospel, and

to try to bring as many people to Christ as they can. This is how Christianity spreads a

lot, is through personal testimonies showing others the goodness of God. Being able to

go to heaven just through having faith that Jesus Christ was and is the son of God, and

he died on the cross for our sins is a really good message to be spreading. There is a

lot of hope there for a better life after this one, and this is one of the reasons why this

message has spread so quickly and so widely over the last few thousand years.