In this way Gorman’s cruciformity clarifies the Imitatio Christi by emphasizing the Spirit’s role in shaping the believer’s life.Īs time went on, I decided to turn the tools I learned in biblical studies to fantasy literature. In that voluntary self-death in Christ, God will bring resurrection, the new life.

We surrender ourselves as Christ has done in the cross event. The idea draws in spiritual formation connected to the believer’s con formity to Christ. The term that Gorman borrows from engineering is “cruciformity,” a double entendre suggesting that the believer’s life should be cross-shaped, but also formed by the cross. In Gorman’s understanding of Paul’s thought, we are to follow Christ by casting away our life, taking up our cross, dying to self as Christ did. Gorman argues that at the heart of Paul’s spiritual theology is the believer’s conformity to the crucified Jesus, where the primary narrative of Christ is captured in the identification of the believer with the death of Christ. Relatively early in this search, I found Gorman’s important text, Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross (2001). I came to Gorman’s work because I was studying how the Apostle Paul uses story to shape his teachings in letter form. Gorman that I ultimately found the deeper conversation I was looking for. While it was Nee that named this new mental space for me, I knew that I needed to think through his idea of “surrender” in more biblical theological terms. This simple, historical idea gave me that freedom that I knew was the very heartbeat of Christ’s words, the lifeblood of the gospel. It is God, then who creates the resurrection in life. If we are crucified with Christ, all things are his, including my guilt, my shame, my inability. As strange and problematic as Nee’s little book is, his idea of “surrender”-Paul’s idea that “it is no longer I who live…”-helped me find freedom from a tyranny of guilt in my heart. Sometime later, Watchman Nee’s treatment of Galatians 2:19-20 in The Life that Wins was another one of these moments for me. I landed at my graduate program in biblical studies because a professor was able to articulate my understanding of God’s creativity in a way that I couldn’t yet find words for.

Instead, it is more like we are finding words for an idea that has been quietly growing inside us. I suspect that most of us have had one of those experiences where we hear a startlingly new idea, and yet it does not feel new to us. A great post here by Brenton Dickieson, our guest blogger for July.ĭie Before you Die: C.S.

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