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The Christ Mystery is thus the template for all creation and, even more precisely, the crucified Christ, who reveals the necessary cycle of loss and renewal that kee...
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harsh judge rather than a shining exemplar of humanity “holding all things in unity” (Colossians 1:17–20).
Most people today are not sure where we came from, who we are, and where we are going. Many do not even seem to care about the questions.
Bonaventure described the Great Chain of Being both in a historical and a linear way—but also in terms of cosmic connectedness along the way. He was following Paul in Colossians: “In his body lives the fullness of divinity, and in him you will find your own fulfillment” (2:9–10) or “There is only Christ: He is everything, and he is in everything” (3:11). We were created in unity, proceed forward insofar as we are in unity, and return to God’s full gift of final unity, according to Bonaventure’s reading of the Gospels. It is grace before, during, and after.
that everything belongs. They both describe and defend the universal belonging of all creation and show us that such a cosmic divine victory makes the fear-based preoccupations of later exclusionary and punitive Christianity seem so small and unnecessary.
“If these are the creatures, what must the creator be like?” I see this same humble awe in many great scientists today. Cosmology is the new name for much theology now.
The entire universe is about connection and relationship—from the smallest atom to the galaxies and everything in between. Sin and evil emerge when we try to stand outside of that circle of connection.
“process theologian”
Bonaventure overheard the present and futile debate between creationism or evolution, he would humbly say, “I don’t see the problem.” He would recognize that God has brilliantly created things that continue to create themselves, and God is so humble, patient, and hidden out of sight that God lets us (or science) take all the credit. God is quite willing to be an anonymous donor to creation and remains fully hidden except to those who desire to see.
God, for him, is “a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” Now you know that all things, you included, live safely and happily inside of that one good circle.15
These are three world-changing ideas. One changes our philosophy, the second our cosmology, and the last our foundational Christian theology.
I am convinced that Scotus was laying the philosophical foundation for what Michael Talbot (1953–1992) and Ken Wilber in our time are calling a holographic universe, where “everything is a holon,”2 and also Mandelbrot’s discovery of fractals, the repetitive and imitative patterns found in nature, mathematics, and art.
In these discoveries, we know that the part contains the whole or replicates the whole, and yet each part still has a wholeness within itself. This “appreciative accumulation” is what makes the whole Whole! We now believe such wholeness is true physically, biologically, and spiritually, and can even be seen as a basis for any understanding of mystical union.
It implies that there is an “inherent sympathy” between God and all created things, and between the other “ten thousand things” too. Each...
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any sense that God was engaged with the individual and ordinary soul (which is precisely mysticism). The corporate, the ninety-nine, the ethnic identity were preferred over the individual soul, which is exactly why most wars could be waged at all. This is first-tier or tribal consciousness.
He is fully an incarnationalist, which is our great Christian trump card. The universal incarnation always shows itself in the specific, the concrete, and the particular, and it refuses to be a mere abstraction. No one states this better than Christian Wiman: “If nature abhors a vacuum, Christ abhors a vagueness. If God is love, Christ is love for this one person, this one place, this one time-bound and time-ravaged self.”5
His entire philosophy makes love, and the will to love in a particular way, more important than intellect or under-standing, or any theories about love itself.
For Scotus, as for Bonaventure, the Trinity is the absolute beginning point—and ending point too. Outpouring Love is the inherent shape of the universe, and when we love, only then do we fully exist in this universe. We do not need to “understand” what is happening, or who God is, before we can live in love. The will to love precedes any need to fully understand what we are doing, the Franciscan School would say.
If Scotus’ understanding of the “how” and meaning of redemption (his “atonement theory”) had been taught, we would have had a much more positive understanding of Jesus and even more of God the Father. Christian people have paid a huge price for what theologians after Anselm called “substitutionary atonement theory”: the idea that, before God could love
creation, God needed and demanded Jesus to be a blood sacrifice to atone for a sin-drenched humanity.
Scotus, however, insisted on the absolute and perfect freedom of God to love and forgive as God chooses, which is the core meaning of grace. Such a God could not be bound by some supposedly offended justice. For Scotus, the Incarnation of God and the redemption of the world could not be a mere reaction to human sinfulness, but in fact the exact, free, and proactive
work of God from the very beginning. We were “chosen in Christ before the world was made,” as Paul states in Ephesians (1:4). Sin or problems could not be the motive for divine incarnation, but only perfect love!
The
Wrong ideas about God create wrong ideas about everything else too.
our only goal is to love, there is no such thing as failure.
Death
itself will only “keep opening, and opening, and opening,” and I think that is exactly what we mean by resurrection.10
As we state in one of our core principles at the Center for Action and Contemplation, “We do not think ourselves into a new way of living, but we live ourselves into a new way of thinking.”
Human history is one giant wave of unearned grace, and each of us is now another wave crashing onto the sands of time, edged forward by the many waves behind us. We are fully adopted sons and daughters in God’s one eternal family. To accept such an objective truth is the only sense in which we need to be a Christian or a Franciscan. It is the best and deepest understanding of how the Risen Christ spreads his forgiving heart through history.
It is not role or office or group that we are passing along—that is not the meaning of “apostolic succession.” It is Love that we are passing on from age to age—even the very love of God.
We are saved by simply remaining in the one circle of life and love, not by standing separate or superior. This is the One Love that will lead and carry us across when we die.
Life is never about being correct, but only and always about being connected. Just stay connected! At all costs, stay connected. Our only holiness is by participation and surrender to the Body of Love, and not by any private performance.
