“Part of Something Much Bigger:” Canlis at LATC 2025

I had a chat via email with Julie Canlis about what she’ll be presenting at the Los Angeles Theology Conference (March 12-14 at Biola). Click through to see the list of all 16 presentations, and join us in March if you can. It’s going to be a significant conversation among leading theologians on a major topic. Here’s one quick peek at one plenary speaker’s contribution:

Q: LATC 2025’s theme is Receiving Redemption, and it focuses on how salvation is received by human persons and communities. Why is this aspect of soteriology worth close theological attention?

A: Sometimes I think we are so fixated on salvation, that we forget that we have a part to play. Jesus saved us so that we can become the kind of people who experience salvation in all the depths of our being now – so we can become living icons of salvation. If we have a theology that sees salvation as an event in our past (or Jesus’ past), then our theology has closed us down rather than opened us up to God’s ongoing work in our life. 

Q: The title of your plenary address is “Conformed to his image: Recapitulating Christ in the Church Calendar.” How will you be approaching the conference theme?

A: Ever since I was raising kids without the “normal” structures I was used to (Sunday School, youth group, small groups), I began to grope around for other handholds to help me make sense of my life in Christ, and to help my children understand that they were part of something much bigger – and more alive – than they could imagine. I suddenly found myself holding on to the church calendar for dear life. And without knowing it, I had grasped the underside of the systematic theology that I had written about but was still puzzling over how to make “real.” The church calendar had already done all the work for me – and it was I who needed to step into the invitation of Ephesians for the church to gain the full maturity of Christ.

Q: Can you describe how this new talk fits in with your previous theological work?

A: It’s the mirror image of participation in Christ, but participation laid out on a timeline for the church to enter again and again. There is no “timeline” for being in Christ, and yet we are timebound people, and the church calendar gives a temporal structure to a timeless reality. Being “in Christ” is both eminently mystical, and eminently ordinary – and for this reason it has accrued to itself particular practices, cultures, historical eras, and other details appropriate to a God incarnate.

Q: What are you looking forward to at the conference? Are there any papers or issues that have especially caught your eye?

A: I’m looking forward to all the papers on the Spirit, and the ways in which the Spirit brings us into the person of Christ. As George MacDonald says (echoing Cyril of Jerusalem and countless others), “O Christ, my life, possess me utterly. / Take me and make a little Christ of me.”