The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe

1

Christ Is Not Jesus’s Last Name

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, Let there be light, and there was light.

—Genesis 1:1–3

Across the thirty thousand or so varieties of Christianity, believers love Jesus and (at least in theory) seem to have no trouble accepting his full humanity and his full divinity. Many express a personal relationship with Jesus—perhaps a flash of inspiration of his intimate presence in their lives, perhaps a fear of his judgment or wrath. Others trust in his compassion, and often see him as a justification for their worldviews and politics. But how might the notion of Christ change the whole equation? Is Christ simply Jesus’s last name, or is it a revealing title that deserves our full attention? How is Christ’s function or role different from Jesus’s? What does Scripture mean when Peter says in his very first address to the crowds after Pentecost that God has made this Jesus…both Lord and Christ (Acts 2:36)? Weren’t they always one and the same, starting at Jesus’s birth?

To answer these questions, we must go back and ask, What was God up to in those first moments of creation? Was God totally invisible before the universe began, or is there even such a thing as before? Why did God create at all? What was God’s purpose in creating? Is the universe itself eternal, or is the universe a creation in time as we know it—like Jesus himself?

Let’s admit that we will probably never know the how or even the when of creation. But the question that religion tries to answer is mostly the why. Is there any evidence for why God created the heavens and the earth? What was God up to? Was there any divine intention or goal, or do we even need a creator God to explain the universe?

Most of the perennial traditions have offered explanations, and they usually go something like this: Everything that exists in material form is the offspring of some Primal Source, which originally existed only as Spirit. This Infinite Primal Source somehow poured itself into finite, visible forms, creating everything from rocks to water, plants, organisms, animals, and human beings—everything that we see with our eyes. This self-disclosure of whomever you call God into physical creation was the first Incarnation (the general term for any enfleshment of spirit), long before the personal, second Incarnation that Christians believe happened with Jesus. To put this idea in Franciscan language, creation is the First Bible, and it existed for 13.7 billion years before the second Bible was written.*1

When Christians hear the word incarnation, most of us think about the birth of Jesus, who personally demonstrated God’s radical unity with humanity. But in this book, I want to suggest that the first Incarnation was the moment described in Genesis 1, when God joined in unity with the physical universe and became the light inside of everything. (This, I believe, is why light is the subject of the first day of creation, and its speed is now recognized as the one universal constant.) The Incarnation, then, is not only God becoming Jesus. It is a much broader event, which is why John first describes God’s presence in the general word flesh (John 1:14). John is speaking of the ubiquitous Christ that Caryll Houselander so vividly encountered, the Christ that the rest of us continue to encounter in other human beings, a mountain, a blade of grass, or a starling.

Everything visible, without exception, is the outpouring of God. What else could it really be? Christ is a word for the Primordial Template (Logos) through whom "all things came into being, and not one thing had its being except through him" (John 1:3). Seeing in this way has reframed, reenergized, and broadened my own religious belief, and I believe it could be Christianity’s unique contribution among the world religions.*2

If you can overlook how John uses a masculine pronoun to describe something that is clearly beyond gender, you can see that he is giving us a sacred cosmology in his Prologue (1:1–18), and not just a theology. Long before Jesus’s personal incarnation, Christ was deeply embedded in all things—as all things! The first lines of the Bible say that the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters, or the formless void, and immediately the material universe became fully visible in its depths and meaning (Genesis 1:1ff.). Time, of course, has no meaning at this point. The Christ Mystery is the New Testament’s attempt to name this visibility or see-ability that occurred on the first day.

Remember, light is not so much what you directly see as that by which you see everything else. This is why in John’s Gospel, Jesus Christ makes the almost boastful statement I am the Light of the world (John 8:12). Jesus Christ is the amalgam of matter and spirit put together in one place, so we ourselves can put it together in all places, and enjoy things in their fullness. It can even enable us to see as God sees, if that is not expecting too much.

Scientists have discovered that what looks like darkness to the human eye is actually filled with tiny particles called neutrinos, slivers of light that pass through the entire universe. Apparently there is no such thing as total darkness anywhere, even though the human eye thinks there is. John’s Gospel was more accurate than we realized when it described Christ as a light that darkness cannot overcome (1:5). Knowing that the inner light of things cannot be eliminated or destroyed is deeply hopeful. And, as if that is not enough, John’s choice of an active verb (The true light…was coming into the world, 1:9) shows us that the Christ Mystery is not a one-time event, but an ongoing process throughout time—as constant as the light that fills the universe. And God saw that light was good (Genesis 1:4). Hold on to that!

But the symbolism deepens and tightens. Christians believe that this universal presence was later born of a woman under the law (Galatians 4:4) in a moment of chronological time. This is the great Christian leap of faith, which not everyone is willing to make. We daringly believe that God’s presence was poured into a single human being, so that humanity and divinity can be seen to be operating as one in him—and therefore in us! But instead of saying that God came into the world through Jesus, maybe it would be better to say that Jesus came out of an already Christ-soaked world. The second Incarnation flowed out of the first, out of God’s loving union with physical creation. If that still sounds strange to you, just trust me for a bit. I promise you it will only deepen and broaden your faith in both Jesus and the Christ. This is an important reframing of who God might be and what such a God is doing—a God we might need if we want to find a better response to the questions that opened this chapter.

My point is this: When I know that the world around me is both the hiding place and the revelation of God, I can no longer make a significant distinction between the natural and the supernatural, between the holy and the profane. (A divine voice makes this exactly clear to a very resistant Peter in Acts 10.) Everything I see and know is indeed one uni-verse, revolving around one coherent center. This Divine Presence seeks connection and communion, not separation or division—except for the sake of an even deeper future union.

What a difference this makes in the way I walk through the world, in how I encounter every person I see in the course of my day! It is as though everything that seemed disappointing and fallen, all the major pushbacks against the flow of history, can now be seen as one whole movement, still enchanted and made use of by God’s love. All of it must somehow be usable and filled with potency, even the things that appear as betrayals or crucifixions. Why else and how else could we love this world? Nothing, and no one, needs to be excluded.

The kind of wholeness I’m describing is something that our postmodern world no longer enjoys, and even vigorously denies. I always wonder why, after the triumph of rationalism in the Enlightenment, we would prefer such incoherence. I thought we had agreed that coherence, pattern, and some final meaning were good. But intellectuals in the last century have denied the existence and power of such great wholeness—and in Christianity, we have made the mistake of limiting the Creator’s presence to just one human manifestation, Jesus. The implications of our very selective seeing have been massively destructive for history and humanity. Creation was deemed profane, a pretty accident, a mere backdrop for the real drama of God’s concern—which is always and only us. (Or, even more troublesome, God!) It is impossible to make individuals feel sacred inside of a profane, empty, or accidental universe. This way of seeing makes us feel separate and competitive, striving to be superior instead of deeply connected, seeking ever-larger circles of union.

But God loves things by becoming them.

God loves things by uniting with them, not by excluding them.

Through the act of creation, God manifested the eternally outflowing Divine Presence into the physical and material world.*3 Ordinary matter is the hiding place for Spirit, and thus the very Body of God. Honestly, what else could it be, if we believe—as orthodox Jews, Christians, and Muslims do—that one God created all things? Since the very beginning of time, God’s Spirit has been revealing its glory and goodness through the physical creation. So many of the psalms already assert this, speaking of rivers clapping their hands and mountains singing for joy. When Paul wrote, There is only Christ. He is everything and he is in everything (Colossians 3:11), was he a naïve pantheist, or did he really understand the full implication of the Gospel of Incarnation?

God seems to have chosen to manifest the invisible in what we call the visible, so that all things visible are the revelation of God’s endlessly diffusive spiritual energy. Once a person recognizes that, it is hard to ever be lonely in this world again.

A Universal and Personal God

Numerous Scriptures make it very clear that this Christ has existed from the beginning (John 1:1–18, Colossians 1:15–20, and Ephesians 1:3–14 being primary sources), so the Christ cannot be coterminous with Jesus. But by attaching the word Christ to Jesus as if it were his last name, instead of a means by which God’s presence has enchanted all matter throughout all of history, Christians got pretty sloppy in their thinking. Our faith became a competitive theology with various parochial theories of salvation, instead of a universal cosmology inside of which all can live with an inherent dignity.

Right now, perhaps more than ever, we need a God as big as the still-expanding universe, or educated people will continue to think of God as a mere add-on to a world that is already awesome, beautiful, and worthy of praise in itself. If Jesus is not also presented as Christ, I predict more and more people will not so much actively rebel against Christianity as just gradually lose interest in it. Many research scientists, biologists, and social workers have honored the Christ Mystery without needing any specific Jesus language at all. The Divine has never seemed very worried about us getting his or her exact name right (see Exodus 3:14). As Jesus himself says, "Do not believe those who say ‘Lord, Lord’ (Matthew 7:21, Luke 6:46, italics added). He says it is those who do it right that matter, not those who say it right. Yet verbal orthodoxy has been Christianity’s preoccupation, at times even allowing us to burn people at the stake for not saying it right."

This is what happens when we focus solely on an exclusive Jesus, on having a personal relationship with him, and on what he can do to save you and me from some eternal, fiery torment. For the first two thousand years of Christianity, we framed our faith in terms of a problem and a threat. But if you believe Jesus’s main purpose is to provide a means of personal, individual salvation, it is all too easy to think that he doesn’t have anything to do with human history—with war or injustice, or destruction of nature, or anything that contradicts our egos’ desires or our cultural biases. We ended up spreading our national cultures under the rubric of Jesus, instead of a universally liberating message under the name of Christ.

Without a sense of the inherent sacredness of the world—of every tiny bit of life and death—we struggle to see God in our own reality, let alone to respect reality, protect it, or love it. The consequences of this ignorance are all around us, seen in the way we have exploited and damaged our fellow human beings, the dear animals, the web of growing things, the land, the waters, and the very air. It took until the twenty-first century for a pope to clearly say this, in Pope Francis’s prophetic document Laudato Sí. May it not be too late, and may the unnecessary gap between practical seeing (science) and holistic seeing (religion) be fully overcome. They still need each other.

What I am calling in this book an incarnational worldview is the profound recognition of the presence of the divine in literally every thing and every one. It is the key to mental and spiritual health, as well as to a kind of basic contentment and happiness. An incarnational worldview is the only way we can reconcile our inner worlds with the outer one, unity with diversity, physical with spiritual, individual with corporate, and divine with human.

In the early second century, the church began to call itself catholic, meaning universal, as it recognized its own universal character and message. Only later was catholic circumscribed by the word Roman as the church lost its sense of delivering an undivided and inclusive message. Then, after an entirely needed Reformation in 1517, we just kept dividing into ever-smaller and competing fractals. Paul had already warned the Corinthians about this, asking a question that should still stop us in our tracks: Can Christ be parceled out? (1 Corinthians 1:13). But we’ve done plenty of parceling in the years since those words were written.

Christianity has become clannish, to put it mildly. But it need not remain there. The full Christian leap of faith is trusting that Jesus together with Christ gave us one human but fully accurate window into the Eternal Now that we call God (John 8:58, Colossians 1:15, Hebrews 1:3, 2 Peter 3:8). This is a leap of faith that many believe they have made when they say Jesus is God! But strictly speaking, those words are not theologically correct.

Christ is God, and Jesus is the Christ’s historical manifestation in time.

Jesus is a Third Someone, not just God and not just man, but God and human together.

Such is the unique and central message of Christianity, and it has massive theological, psychological, and political implications—and very good ones at that. But if we cannot put these two seeming opposites of God and human together in Jesus Christ, we usually cannot put these two together in ourselves, or in the rest of the physical universe. That has been our major impasse up to now. Jesus was supposed to be the code breaker, but without uniting him to Christ, we lost the core of what Christianity might have become.

A merely personal God becomes tribal and sentimental, and a merely universal God never leaves the realm of abstract theory and philosophical principles. But when we learn to put them together, Jesus and Christ give us a God who is both personal and universal. The Christ Mystery anoints all physical matter with eternal purpose from the very beginning. (We should not be surprised that the word we translate from the Greek as Christ comes from the Hebrew word mesach, meaning the anointed one, or Messiah. He reveals that all is anointed!) Many are still praying and waiting for something that has already been given to us three times: first in creation; second in Jesus, so that we could hear him, see him with our eyes, watch him, and touch him with our hands, the Word who is life (1 John 1:1); and third, in the ongoing beloved community (what Christians call the Body of Christ), which is slowly evolving throughout all of human history (Romans 8:18ff.). We are still in the Flow.

Given our present evolution of consciousness, and especially the historical and technological access we now have to the whole picture, I now wonder if a sincere person can even have a healthy and holy personal relationship with God if that God does not also connect them to the universal. A personal God cannot mean a smaller God, nor can God make you in any way smaller—or such would not be God.

Ironically, millions of the very devout who are waiting for the Second Coming have largely missed the first—and the third! I’ll say it again: God loves things by becoming them. And as we’ve just seen, God did so in the creation of the universe and of Jesus, and continues to do so in the ongoing human Body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:12ff.) and even in simple elements like bread and wine. Sadly, we have a whole section of Christianity that is looking for—even praying for—an exit from God’s ongoing creation toward some kind of Armageddon or Rapture. Talk about missing the point! The most effective lies are often the really big ones.

The evolving, universe-spanning Christ Mystery, in which all of us take part, is the subject of this book. Jesus is a map for the time-bound and personal level of life, and Christ is the blueprint for all time and space and life itself. Both reveal the universal pattern of self-emptying and infilling (Christ) and death and resurrection (Jesus), which is the process we have called holiness, salvation, or just growth, at different times in our history. For Christians, this universal pattern perfectly mimics the inner life of the Trinity in Christian theology,*4 which is our template for how reality unfolds, since all things are created in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26–27).

For me, a true comprehension of the full Christ Mystery is the key to the foundational reform of the Christian religion, which alone will move us beyond any attempts to corral or capture God into our exclusive group. As the New Testament dramatically and clearly puts it, Before the world was made, we have been chosen in Christ…claimed as God’s own, and chosen from the very beginning (Ephesians 1:4, 11) so that he could bring everything together under the headship of Christ (1:10). If all of this is true, we have a theological basis for a very natural religion that includes everybody. The problem was solved from the beginning. Take your Christian head off, shake it wildly, and put it back on!

Jesus, Christ, and the Beloved Community

The Franciscan philosopher and theologian John Duns Scotus (1266–1308), whom I studied for four years, tried to express this primal and cosmic notion when he wrote that "God wills Christ first of all as the summum opus dei, or supreme greatest work."*5 In other words, God’s first idea and priority was to make the Godself both visible and shareable. The word used in the Bible for this idea was Logos, which was taken from Greek philosophy, and which I would translate as the Blueprint or Primordial Pattern for reality. The whole of creation—not just Jesus—is the beloved community, the partner in the divine dance. Everything is the child of God. No exceptions. When you think of it, what else could anything be? All creatures must in some way carry the divine DNA of their