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

by Richard Rohr

I was in an underground train, a crowded train in which all sorts of people jostled together, sitting and strap-hanging—workers of every description going home at the end of the day. Quite suddenly I saw with my mind, but as vividly as a wonderful picture, Christ in them all. But I saw more than that; not only was Christ in every one of them, living in them, dying in them, rejoicing in them, sorrowing in them—but because He was in them, and because they were here, the whole world was here too, here in this underground train; not only the world as it was at that moment, not only all the people in all the countries of the world, but all those people who had lived in the past, and all those yet to come.

Realization of our oneness in Christ is the only cure for human loneliness. For me, too, it is the only ultimate meaning of life, the only thing that gives meaning and purpose to every life.

In our time, however, this deep mode of seeing must be approached as something of a reclamation project. When the Western church separated from the East in the Great Schism of 1054, we gradually lost this profound understanding of how God has been liberating and loving all that is. Instead, we gradually limited the Divine Presence to the single body of Jesus, when perhaps it is as ubiquitous as light itself—and uncircumscribable by human boundaries.

This is surely what John meant when he wrote in his Gospel, “The word became flesh” itself (John 1:14), using a universal and generic term (sarx) instead of referring to a single human body.*2 In fact, the lone word “Jesus” is never mentioned in the Prologue! Did you ever notice that? “Jesus Christ” is finally mentioned, but not until the second to last verse.

What if Christ is a name for the transcendent within of every “thing” in the universe? What if Christ is a name for the immense spaciousness of all true Love? What if Christ refers to an infinite horizon that pulls us from within and pulls us forward too? What if Christ is another name for everything—in its fullness?

Christ as a “what” not a “who” (Jesus)

If my own experience is any indication, the message in this book can transform the way you see and the way you live in your everyday world. It can offer you the deep and universal meaning that Western civilization seems to lack and long for today. It has the potential to reground Christianity as a natural religion and not one simply based on a special revelation, available only to a few lucky enlightened people.

The term “natural religion” is interesting. What is the opposite of it? Natural because it’s grounded in the physicality of the world? Natural because it’s somehow organic and not fabricated?

As G. K. Chesterton once wrote, Your religion is not the church you belong to, but the cosmos you live inside of. Once we know that the entire physical world around us, all of creation, is both the hiding place and the revelation place for God, this world becomes home, safe, enchanted, offering grace to any who look deeply. I call that kind of deep and calm seeing “contemplation.”

The essential function of religion is to radically connect us with everything. (Re-ligio = to re-ligament or reconnect.) It is to help us see the world and ourselves in wholeness, and not just in parts. Truly 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!

A cosmic notion of the Christ competes with and excludes no one, but includes everyone and everything (Acts 10:15, 34) and allows Jesus Christ to finally be a God figure worthy of the entire universe. In this understanding of the Christian message, the Creator’s love and presence are grounded in the created world, and the mental distinction between “natural” and “supernatural” sort of falls apart. As Albert Einstein is supposed to have said, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” In the pages ahead, I will opt for the latter!

Why above then does he say that we can come to see Christianity as a “natural” religion and not just a revelation?

In the monastic tradition, this practice of lingering and going to the depths of a text is called “Lectio Divina.” It is a contemplative way of reading that goes deeper than the mental comprehension of words, or using words to give answers, or solve immediate problems or concerns.

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.

When I use the word “mystic” I am referring to experiential knowing instead of just textbook or dogmatic knowing. The difference tends to be that the mystic sees things in their wholeness, their connection, their universal and divine frame, instead of just their particularity. Mystics get the whole gestalt in one picture, as it were, and thus they often bypass our more sequential and separated way of seeing the moment. In this, they tend to be closer to poets and artists than to linear thinkers. Obviously, there is a place for both, but since the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there has been less and less appreciation of such seeing in wholes. The mystic was indeed considered an “eccentric” (off center), but maybe mystics are the most centered of all?

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?

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?

Everything that exists in material form is the offspring of some Primal Source, which originally existed only as Spirit.

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.

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.)

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).

light is not so much what you directly see as that by which you see everything else.

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.

So Jesus’s purpose was to come as an embodiment of Spirit and Body to show us the Spirit in all physical creation (the way God sees all things)

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 1:3). Hold on to that!

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.

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.

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 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, him!) 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.

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.

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.

I agree with this, but how to help people understand “Christ” as Rohr is describing vs the limited current view of so many will be a challenge. Particularly for “Christians” who won’t want to see Christ as universal because it will mean only seeing Jesus as a part of that universality, not THE ONE way.

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...

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.

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

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.

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.

I’m confused by the language here. I don’t think that Christians have a difficult time putting God and Jesus together. I think that’s exactly how they assume superiority or being set apart from other faiths. Jesus is the only great teacher who IS God. I don’t think that’s what we need more of. I think the part about us recognizing that Christ is God and Jesus is a manifestation makes sense. I feel like this language here is more going back to saying Jesus is God. Although maybe he is trying to show how Christians forget the HUMAN part of the equation — the putting together of God and human. So maybe he’s trying to emphasize how Christians want to bypass the idea of Jesus as a manifestation in a human body, not that Jesus is simply God.

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.

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 1–2); 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.).

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.

God’s “first idea” and priority was to make the Godself both visible and shareable.

Unfortunately, the notion of faith that emerged in the West was much more a rational assent to the truth of certain mental beliefs, rather than a calm and hopeful trust that God is inherent in all things, and that this whole thing is going somewhere good.

Predictably, we soon separated intellectual belief (which tends to differentiate and limit) from love and hope (which unite and thus eternalize).

Faith, hope, and love are the very nature of God, and thus the nature of all Being. Such goodness cannot die. (Which is what we mean when we say “heaven.”)

No one religion will ever encompass the depth of such faith. No ethnicity has a monopoly on such hope. No nationality can control or limit this Flow of such universal love.

Christ is a good and simple metaphor for absolute wholeness, complete incarnation, and the integrity of creation. Jesus is the archetypal human just like us (Hebrews 4:15), who showed us what the Full Human might look like if we could fully live into it (Ephesians 4:12–16). 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.

believe the Christ Mystery specifically applies to thingness, materiality, physicality. I do not think of concepts and ideas as Christ. They might well communicate the Christ Mystery, as I will try to do here, but “Christ” for me refers to ideas that have specifically “become flesh” (John 1:14).

But in John’s Gospel, dated somewhere between A.D. 90 and 110, the voice of Christ steps forward to do almost all of the speaking. This helps make sense of some statements that seem out of character coming from Jesus’s mouth, like “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6) or “Before Abraham ever was, I am” (John 8:58). Jesus of Nazareth would not likely have talked that way, but if these are the words of the Eternal Christ, then “I am the way, the truth, and the life” is a very fair statement that should neither offend nor threaten anyone. After all, Jesus is not talking about joining or excluding any group; rather, he is describing the “Way” by which all humans and all religions must allow matter and Spirit to operate as one.

Yes! Jesus talking about himself as a “what” instead of a “who” — the “what” being the Universal Christ

Divinity and humanity must somehow be able to speak as one, for if the union of God and humankind is “true” in Jesus, there is hope that it might be true in all of us too.