So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we
once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if
anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All
this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the
ministry of reconciliation: 2 Corinthians 5:16-18
What man, in his
natural condition, has not got, is Spiritual life—the higher and different sort
of life that exists in God. We use the same word life for
both: but if you thought that both must therefore be the same sort of thing,
that would be like thinking that the 'greatness' of space and the 'greatness'
of God were the same sort of greatness. In reality, the difference between
Biological life and Spiritual life is so important that I am going to give them
two distinct names. The Biological sort which comes to us through Nature, and
which (like everything else in Nature) is always tending to run down and decay
so that it can only be kept up by incessant subsidies from Nature in the form
of air, water, food, etc., is Bios. The Spiritual life which is in
God from all eternity, and which made the whole natural universe, is Zoe. Bios has,
to be sure, a certain shadowy or symbolic resemblance to Zoe: but
only the sort of resemblance there is between a photo and a place, or a statue
and a man. A man who changed from having Bios to having Zoe would
have gone through as big a change as a statue which changed from being a carved
stone to being a real man.
And that is precisely
what Christianity is about. This world is a great sculptor's shop. We are the
statues and there is a rumour going round the shop that some of us are some day
going to come to life.
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