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

by Richard Rohr

All I know is that creationists and evolutionists do not have to be enemies. The evolutionists rightly want to say the universe is unfolding, while believers can rightly insist on the personal meaning of that unfolding. We give the phenomenon of life and matter a positive and certain end point, which we call “resurrection,” while also accounting for lots of suffering and death along the way, which we call “crucifixion.” That is, indeed, a momentous and grand vision, and it explains a lot, but it also carries so much extra baggage that I can see why rational and scientifically minded folks usually resist it. Yet to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead is actually not a leap of faith. Resurrection and renewal are, in fact, the universal and observable pattern of everything. We might just as well use nonreligious terms like “springtime,” “regeneration,” “healing,” “forgiveness,” “life cycles,” “darkness,” and “light.” If incarnation is real, then resurrection in multitudinous forms is to be fully expected, or, to paraphrase that earlier statement attributed to Albert Einstein, it is not that one thing is a miracle, but that the whole thing is a miracle! This point is worth sitting with for a few moments. Every time you take in a breath, you are repeating the pattern of taking spirit into matter, and thus repeating the first creation of Adam. And every time you breathe out, you are repeating the pattern of returning spirit to the material universe.