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Similarly, any ability that we may have to live a grace-filled life is, first and foremost, a gift that comes to us from the outside, not the product of our own resources. And the Prologue to St John’s Gospel teaches that, while Christ is indeed the Word through whom the universe was created, yet he was not, and is not universally, received. Here, Christianity finds its root and its destiny in all things, in all matter, in all creation. and here, we find our connection to universal belonging, to universal trust, and to universal love. This book will change religion and make it tender and gentle and transformational. The word Christ means “anointed one.” The divine anointing began with the first incarnation when God decided to show God’s self, almost 13.8 billion years ago. We now call it the Big Bang. Franciscan philosopher John Duns Scotus basically taught that the first idea in the mind of God was Christ. Christ was the Alpha point. Good biblical theology calls creation itself the birth of the Christ, the materialization of God. Whenever matter and spirit coinhere, coincide, you have the Christ Mystery, which is a phrase the Apostle Paul introduces. Paul has a deep intuition of this, which leads to his understanding of the Eucharistic Body of Christ. Paul intuits that this incarnation of Christ is spread throughout creation, human nature, and even the elements of bread and wine. It’s everywhere.
The perennial tradition "trains you to connect the dots and see what themes keep recurring" in Scripture, he said.
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What if we’ve missed the point of who Christ is, what Christ is, and where Christ is? I believe that a Christian is simply one who has learned to see Christ everywhere. ( Sunday) A prolific author with more than 30 books in print, Rohr says "The Universal Christ" is the culmination of everything else he has written and taught and preached in a lifetime of ministry and contemplative practice. It is his magnum opus, if you will. So does everyone have to become Christian to know the Christ? Absolutely not; Christ is more than Jesus. Christ is the communion of divine personal love expressed in every created form of reality—every star, leaf, bird, fish, tree, rabbit and every human person. Everything is christified because everything expresses divine love incarnate. However, Jesus Christ is the “thisness” of God (“God is like this and this is God”) so what Jesus is by nature everything else is by grace (divine love). We are not God but every single person is born out of the love of God, expresses this love in [their] unique personal form and has the capacity to be united with God. . . . Because Jesus is the Christ, every human is already reconciled with every other human in the mystery of divine [love] so that Christ is more than Jesus alone; Christ is the whole reality bound in a union of love.
Rohr’s attempts to downplay Jesus and extol a false version of “the Christ” notwithstanding, the Incarnation was a one-of-a-kind and once-for-all event.In another passage Rohr calls Jesus a “wonderful symbiosis of divinity and humanity” (130). Yet “symbiosis” implies that Jesus may have been simply a man who interacted with God. Again Rohr writes: “We spent a great deal of time worshiping the messenger and trying to get other people to do the same. . . . [Jesus] did ask us several times to follow him, and never once to worship him” (32). Rohr’s Redefinitions of Key Terms In his decades as a globally recognized teacher, Richard Rohr has helped millions realize what is at stake in matters of faith and spirituality. Yet Rohr has never written on the most perennially talked about topic in Christianity: Jesus. Most know who Jesus was, but who was Christ? Is the word simply Jesus’s last name? Too often, Rohr writes, our understandings have been limited by culture, religious debate, and the human tendency to put ourselves at the center. There is something somnolent in Rohr’s sunlit satisfaction that everyone’s fine and everything’s okay. No one with real problems in life—a violent gang infesting one’s street, an alcohol or drug addiction, a family member who committed suicide—will find much encouragement in learning that “Christ is another name for everything.” Those crushed by life might respond to Rohr’s Panglossian optimism with outrage. Despite Rohr’s talk in The Universal Christ about overcoming social privilege, this is a book likely to be read by the comfortable and privileged few. It’s not a book that someone in a homeless shelter is going to read or appreciate. To quote Dorothy Parker, “This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown aside with great force.” Real Christian Spirituality Love requires a lover and a loved. If God becomes the things He loves, then the love would cease, since there would be no object left for God to love.
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