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by
Richard Rohr
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January 6 - March 12, 2022
enlightened people see oneness because they look out from oneness, instead of labeling everything as superior and inferior, in or out. If you think you are privately “saved” or enlightened, then you are neither saved nor enlightened, it seems to me!
Jesus did not come to earth so theologians alone could understand and make their good distinctions, but so that “they all may be one” (John 17:21). He came to unite and “to reconcile all things in himself, everything in heaven and everything on earth” (Colossians 1:20).
Contemplation is waiting patiently for the gaps to be filled in, and it does not insist on quick closure or easy answers. It never rushes to judgment, and in fact avoids making quick judgments because judgments have more to do with egoic, personal control than with a loving search for truth.
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
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.
But God loves things by becoming them. God loves things by uniting with them, not by excluding them.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Frankly, Jesus came to show us how to be human much more than how to be spiritual, and the process still seems to be in its early stages.
Most Catholics and Protestants still think of the Incarnation as a one-time and one-person event having to do only with the person of Jesus of Nazareth, instead of a cosmic event that has soaked all of history in the Divine Presence from the very beginning.
Thus salvation might best be called “restoration,” rather than the retributive agenda most of us were offered.
That as long as we keep God imprisoned in a retributive frame instead of a restorative frame, we really have no substantial good news; it is neither good nor new, but the same old tired story line of history. We pull God down to our level. Faith at its essential core is accepting that we are accepted!
Start with Jesus, continue with yourself, and finally expand to everything else.
Have you ever noticed that the expression “the light of the world” is used to describe the Christ (John 8:12), but that Jesus also applies the same phrase to us? (Matthew 5:14, “You are the light of the world.”) Few preachers ever pointed that out to me.
We need to look at Jesus until we can look out at the world with his kind of eyes. The world no longer trusts Christians who “love Jesus” but do not seem to love anything else.
I have never been separate from God, nor can I be, except in my mind.
This is not heresy, universalism, or a cheap version of Unitarianism. This is the Cosmic Christ, who always was, who became incarnate in time, and who is still being revealed. We would have helped history and individuals so much more if we had spent our time revealing how Christ is everywhere instead of proving that Jesus was God. But big ideas take time to settle in.
They will have long discarded the notion of Christian salvation as a private evacuation plan that gets a select few humans into the next world.
This gives me so much hope. Its what i want for my kids.
No doubt you’re aware that many traditional Christians today consider the concept of universal anything—including salvation—heresy.
I find these convictions quite strange for a religion that believes that “one God created all things.”
How can anyone read the whole or even a small part of John 17 and think either Christ or Jesus is about anything other than unity and union? “Father, may they all be one,” Christ says in verse 21, repeating this same desire and intention in many ways in the full prayer. I suspect God gets what God prays for!
Authentic God experience always expands your seeing and never constricts it. What else would be worthy of God? In God you do not include less and less; you always see and love more and more.
Catholics declared the Pope to be “infallible,” and Evangelicals decided the Bible was “inerrant,” despite the fact that we had gotten along for most of eighteen hundred years without either belief. In fact, these claims would have seemed idolatrous to most early Christians.
and teaching because all we needed was the sacrificial event of his death. Jesus became a mere mop-up exercise for sin, and sin management has dominated the entire religious story line and agenda to this day. This is no exaggeration.
Mere obedience is far too often a detour around actual love. Obedience is usually about cleaning up, love is about waking up.
How does anyone achieve such a holding together of opposites—things like inner acceptance and outer resistance, intense suffering and perfect freedom, my little self and an infinite God, sensuality and intense spirituality, the need to blame somebody and the freedom to blame nobody? Etty Hillesum demonstrated this ability like few people I have ever studied. Either such people are the cutting edge of human consciousness and civilization, or they are mentally deranged. They surely far transcend any formal religion.
There is no doubt that God allows suffering. In fact, God seems to send us on the path toward our own wholeness not by eliminating the obstacles, but by making use of them.
“whole-making instinct.”
Intuitive truth, that inner whole-making instinct, just feels too much like our own thoughts and feelings, and most of us are not willing to call this “God,” even when that voice prompts us toward compassion instead of hatred, forgiveness instead of resentment, generosity instead of stinginess, bigness instead of pettiness. But think about it: If the Incarnation is true, then of course God speaks to you through your own thoughts!
Most Christians have been taught to hate or confess our sin before we’ve even recognized its true shape. But if you nurture hatred toward yourself, it won’t be long before it shows itself as hatred toward others.
Jesus quite clearly believed in change. In fact, the first public word out of his mouth was the Greek imperative verb metanoeite, which literally translates as “change your mind” or “go beyond your mind” (Matthew 3:2, 4:17, and Mark 1:15). Unfortunately, in the fourth century, St. Jerome translated the word into Latin as paenitentia (“repent” or “do penance”), initiating a host of moralistic connotations that have colored Christians’ understanding of the Gospels ever since. The word metanoeite, however, is describing a primal change of mind, worldview, or your way of processing—and only by
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God is not in competition with anybody, but only in deep-time cooperation with everybody who loves (Romans 8:28).
but a story about believing that someone could be wounded and also resurrected at the same time! That is a quite different message, and still desperately needed. “Put your finger here,” Jesus says to Thomas (20:27). And, like Thomas, we are indeed wounded and resurrected at the same time—all of us.
For most of Christian history, no single consensus prevailed on what it means when Christians say, “Jesus died for our sins,” but in recent centuries one theory did take over. It was often referred to as the “penal substitutionary atonement theory,” especially once it was developed after the Reformation. Substitutionary atonement is the theory that Christ, by his own sacrificial choice, was punished in the place of us sinners, thus satisfying the “demands of justice” so that God could forgive our sins.
Nor are they told that it is just a theory, even though some groups take it as long-standing dogma. The early church never heard of this; at best, they had some idea of “ransom” from the many biblical metaphors.
Salvation became a one-time transactional affair between Jesus and his Father, instead of an ongoing transformational lesson for the human soul and for all of history.
At best, the theory of substitutionary atonement has inoculated us against the true effects of the Gospel, causing us to largely “thank” Jesus instead of honestly imitating him. At worst, it led us to see God as a cold, brutal figure, who demands acts of violence before God can love God’s own creation.
Anthropologically speaking, these words and assumptions reflect a magical, or what I call “transactional,” way of thinking. By that I mean that if you just believe the right thing, say the right prayer, or practice the right ritual, things will go right for you in the divine courtroom. In my experience, this way of thinking loses its power as people and cultures grow up and seek actual changes in their minds and hearts. Then, transformational thinking tends to supplant transactional thinking.
It’s time for Christianity to rediscover the deeper biblical theme of restorative justice, which focuses on rehabilitation and reconciliation, not punishment. (Read Ezekiel 16 for a supreme example of this.) We could call Jesus’s story line the “myth of redemptive suffering”—not as in “paying a price” but as in offering the self for the other, or “at-one-ment” instead of atonement!
Jesus represents the real and deeper level of teaching of the Jewish Prophets. Jesus never punished anybody! Yes, he challenged people, but always for the sake of insight, healing, and restoration of people and situations to their divine origin and source. Once a person recognizes that Jesus’s mission (obvious in all four Gospels) was to heal people, not punish them, the dominant theories of retributive justice begin to lose their appeal and their authority.
In authoritarian and patriarchal cultures, most people were fully programmed to think this way—working to appease an authority figure who was angry, punitive, and even violent in his reactions. Many still operate this way, especially if they had an angry or abusive parent. People respond to this kind of God because it fits their own story line.
In the Franciscan school, God did not need to be paid in order to love and forgive God’s own creation for its failures. Love cannot be bought by some “necessary sacrifice”; if it could, it would not and could not work its transformative effects. Try loving your spouse or children that way, and see where it gets you. Scotus and his followers were committed to protecting the absolute freedom and love of God. If forgiveness needs to be bought or paid for, then it is not authentic forgiveness at all, which must be a free letting-go.
A religion based on necessary and required sacrifices, and those ending up required primarily of Jesus and later the underclass, is just not glorious enough for, hopeful enough for, or even befitting the marvelous creation that we are all a part of. To those who cling to Anselm’s understanding, I would say, as J. B. Phillips wrote many years ago, “Your God is too small.”*2
It is not God who is violent. We are. It is not that God demands suffering of humans. We do.
God does not need or want suffering—neither in Jesus nor in us.
Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897), there is a science about which God knows nothing—addition and subtraction. Thérèse understood the full and final meaning of being saved by grace alone as few have in all of Christian history.
He hung between a good thief and a bad thief, between heaven and earth, inside of both humanity and divinity, a male body with a feminine soul, utterly whole and yet utterly disfigured—all the primary opposites.
Christians are meant to be the visible compassion of God on earth more than “those who are going to heaven.” They are the leaven who agree to share the fate of God for the life of the world now, and thus keep the whole batch of dough from falling back on itself. A Christian is invited, not required, to accept and live the cruciform shape of all reality.
