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

by Richard Rohr

The full Christian story is saying that Jesus died, and Christ “arose”—yes, still as Jesus, but now also as the Corporate Personality who includes and reveals all of creation in its full purpose and goal.

Or, as the “Father of Orthodoxy,” St. Athanasius (296–373), wrote when the church had a more social, historical, and revolutionary sense of itself: “God was consistent in working through one man to reveal himself everywhere, as well as through the other parts of His creation, so that nothing was left devoid of his Divinity and his self-knowledge…so that ‘the whole universe was filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters fill the sea.’

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.

That God is not an old man on a throne. God is Relationship itself, a dynamism of Infinite Love between Divine Diversity, as the doctrine of the Trinity demonstrates. (Notice that Genesis 1:26–27 uses two plural pronouns to describe the Creator, “let us create in our image.”) That God’s infinite love has always included all that God created from the very beginning (Ephesians 1:3–14). The connection is inherent and absolute. The Torah calls it “covenant love,” an unconditional agreement, both offered and consummated from God’s side (even if and when we do not reciprocate). That the Divine “DNA” of the Creator is therefore held in all the creatures. What we call the “soul” of every creature could easily be seen as the self knowledge of God in that creature! It knows who it is and grows into that identity, just like every seed and egg. Thus salvation might best be called “restoration,” rather than the retributive agenda most of us were offered. This alone deserves to be called “divine justice.” 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.

Every resurrection story seems to strongly affirm an ambiguous—yet certain—presence in very ordinary settings, like walking on the road to Emmaus with a stranger, roasting fish on the beach, or what appeared like a gardener to the Magdalene.*3 These moments from Scripture set a stage of expectation and desire that God’s presence can be seen in the ordinary and the material, and we do not have to wait for supernatural apparitions.

The sacramental principle is this: Begin with a concrete moment of encounter, based in this physical world, and the soul universalizes from there, so that what is true here becomes true everywhere else too.

Apparently, light is less something you see directly, and more something by which you see all other things. In other words, we have faith in Christ so we can have the faith of Christ.

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.

In Jesus Christ, God’s own broad, deep, and all-inclusive worldview is made available to us.

That might just be the whole point of the Gospels. You have to trust the messenger before you can trust the message, and that seems to be the Jesus Christ strategy. Too often, w...

Christ is the light that allows people to see things in their fullness.

Yes, The Christ...not only Jesus

A mature Christian sees Christ in everything and everyone else.

The point of the Christian life is not to distinguish oneself from the ungodly, but to stand in radical solidarity with everyone and everything else. This is the full, final, and intended effect of the Incarnation—symbolized by its finality in the cross, which is God’s great act of solidarity instead of judgment.

The only people that Jesus seemed to exclude were precisely those who refused to know they were ordinary sinners like everyone else. The only thing he excluded was exclusion itself. Do check me out on that, and you might see that I am correct.

We must be honest and humble about this: Many people of other faiths, like Sufi masters, Jewish prophets, many philosophers, and Hindu mystics, have lived in light of the Divine encounter better than many Christians.

The Christ is always way too much for us, larger than any one era, culture, empire, or religion. Its radical inclusivity is a threat to any power structure and any form of arrogant thinking. Jesus by himself has usually been limited by the evolution of human consciousness in these first two thousand years, and held captive by culture, by nationalism, and by Christianity’s own cultural captivity to a white, bourgeois, and Eurocentric worldview.

To be loved by Jesus enlarges our heart capacity. To be loved by the Christ enlarges our mental capacity. We need both a Jesus and a Christ, in my opinion, to get the full picture. A truly transformative God—for both the individual and history—needs to be experienced as both personal and universal.

History has clearly shown that worship of Jesus without worship of Christ invariably becomes a time- and culture-bound religion, often ethnic or even implicitly racist, which excludes much of humanity from God’s embrace.

there has never been a single soul who was not possessed by the Christ, even in the ages when Jesus was not.

If it helps you to love and to hope, then it is the true religion of Christ. No circumscribed group can ever claim that title!

For you who have loved Jesus—perhaps with great passion and protectiveness—do you recognize that any God worthy of the name must transcend creeds and denominations, time and place, nations and ethnicities, and all the vagaries of gender, extending to the limits of all we can see, suffer, and enjoy? You are not your gender, your nationality, your ethnicity, your skin color, or your social class. Why, oh why, do Christians allow these temporary costumes, or what Thomas Merton called the “false self,” to pass for the substantial self, which is always “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3)? It seems that we really do not know our own Gospel. You are a child of God, and always will be, even when you don’t believe it.

When Christ calls himself the “Light of the World” (John 8:12), he is not telling us to look just at him, but to look out at life with his all-merciful eyes. We see him so we can see like him, and with the same infinite compassion.

The deep and abiding significance of Saul’s encounter is that he hears Jesus speak as if there’s a moral equivalence between Jesus and the people Saul is persecuting. The voice twice calls the people “me”! From that day forward, this astounding reversal of perspective became the foundation for Paul’s evolving worldview and his exciting discovery of “the Christ.” This fundamental awakening moved Saul from his beloved, but ethnic-bound, religion of Judaism toward a universal vision of religion, so much so that he changed his Hebrew name to its Latin form, Paul. Later, he calls himself the “apostle” and “servant” to the very people he once disparaged as “pagans,” “Gentiles,” or “the nations” (Ephesians 3:1, Romans 11:13).

In Paul’s story we find the archetypal spiritual pattern, wherein people move from what they thought they always knew to what they now fully recognize.

Paul’s driving mission was “to demonstrate that Jesus was the Christ” (Acts 9:22b), which is why we are called “Christians” to this day, and not Jesuits!

Describing the encounter in his letter to the Galatians, Paul writes a most telling line. He does not say “God revealed his Son to me” as you might expect. Instead, he says, “God revealed his Son in me” (Galatians 1:16).

Except for the rare Augustine, and many of the Catholic mystics and hermits, it took more widespread literacy and the availability of the written word in the sixteenth century to move us toward a more interior and introspective Christianity, both for good and for ill.*1

See how this is discussed in my Enneagram course

But let’s note Paul’s primary criterion for authentic faith, which is quite extraordinary: “Examine yourselves to make sure you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Do you acknowledge that Jesus Christ is really in you? If not, you have failed the test” (2 Corinthians 13:5–6).

God must reveal himself in you before God can fully reveal himself to you.

When you can honor and receive your own moment of sadness or fullness as a gracious participation in the eternal sadness or fullness of God, you are beginning to recognize yourself as a participating member of this one universal Body. You are moving from I to We.

Quite daringly, he declares that even so-called pagans, “who do not possess the law…can be said to be the law” (see Romans 2:14–15).

We see that in his bold exclamation “There is only Christ. He is everything and he is in everything” (Colossians 3:11). If I were to write that today, people would call me a pantheist (the universe is God), whereas I am really a panentheist (God lies within all things, but also transcends them), exactly like both Jesus and Paul.

I’m a panentheist too!

Paul summarizes his corporate understanding of salvation with his shorthand phrase “en Cristo,” using it more than any single phrase in all of his letters: a total of 164 times. En Cristo seems to be Paul’s code word for the gracious, participatory experience of salvation, the path that he so urgently wanted to share with the world. Succinctly put, this identity means humanity has never been separate from God—unless and except by its own negative choice. All of us, without exception, are living inside of a cosmic identity, already in place, that is driving and guiding us forward. We are all en Cristo, willingly or unwillingly, happily or unhappily, consciously or unconsciously. Paul seemed to understand that the lone individual was far too small, insecure, and short-lived to bear either the “weight of glory” or the “burden of sin.” Only the whole could carry such a cosmic mystery of constant loss and renewal. Paul’s knowledge of “in Christ” allowed him to give God’s universal story a name, a focus, a love, and a certain victorious direction so that coming generations could trustingly jump on this cosmic and collective ride.

Paul calls this bigger Divine identity the “mystery of his purpose, the hidden plan he so kindly made en Cristo from the very beginning” (Ephesians 1:9). Today, we might call it the “collective unconscious.”

Salvation for Paul is an ontological and cosmological message (which is solid) before it ever becomes a moral or psychological one (which is always unstable).

I have never been separate from God, nor can I be, except in my mind. I would love for you to bring this realization to loving consciousness! In fact, why not stop reading now, and just breathe and let it sink in. It is crucial that you know this experientially and at a cellular level—which is, in fact, a real way of knowing just as much as rational knowing. Its primary characteristic is that it is a non-dual and thus an open-ended way of knowing, which does not close down so quickly and so definitively as dualistic thought does.*2

We create the separation. Humans chose to believe that we were separate from our Creator until Jesus. Cellular level of knowing — makes me think of intuition and a spiritual knowing

Christ forever keeps Jesus firmly inside the Trinity, not a mere later add-on or a somewhat arbitrary incarnation. Trinitarianism keeps God as Relationship Itself from the very beginning, and not a mere monarch.

Doesn’t Jesus being in the Trinity elevate him above all other manifestations of the Divine? I find the Trinity problematic for this reason. It doesn’t seem inclusive to say that Jesus is God, but other manifestations aren’t, or if others are as well, why does this particular manifestation need to be distinguished this way?

Perhaps the primary example of our lack of attention to the Christ Mystery can be seen in the way we continue to pollute and ravage planet earth, the very thing we all stand on and live from. Science now appears to love and respect physicality more than most religion does! No wonder that science and business have taken over as the major explainers of meaning for the vast majority of people today (even many who still go to church). We Christians did not take this world seriously, I am afraid, because our notion of God or salvation didn’t include or honor the physical universe. And now, I am afraid, the world does not take us seriously.

Hope cannot be had by the individual if everything is corporately hopeless. It is hard to heal individuals when the whole thing is seen as unhealable.

Every religion, each in its own way, is looking for the gateway, the conduit, the Sacrament, the Avatar, the finger that points to the moon. We need someone to model and exemplify the journey from physical incarnation, through a rather ordinary human existence, through trials and death, and into a Universal Presence unlimited by space and time (which we call “resurrection”). Most of us know about Jesus walking this journey, but far fewer know that Christ is the collective and eternal manifestation of the same—and that “the Christ” image includes all of us and every thing.

Jesus can hold together one group or religion. Christ can hold together everything.

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.

For Paul, Christ is “that mystery which for endless ages has been kept secret” (Romans 16:25–27). And a well-kept secret it still remains for most Christians.

Creation exists first of all for its own good sake; second to show forth God’s goodness, diversity, and beneficence; and then for humans’ appropriate use. Our small, scarcity-based worldview is the real aberration here, and I believe it has largely contributed to the rise of atheism and the “practical atheism” that is the actual operative religion of most Western countries today. The God we’ve been presenting people with is just too small and too stingy for a big-hearted person to trust or to love back.

You might wonder how, exactly, primitive peoples and pre-Christian civilizations could’ve had access to God. I believe it was through the universal and normal transformative journeys of great love and great suffering,*5 which all individuals have undergone from the beginnings of the human race.

The Christ, especially when twinned with Jesus, is a clear message about universal love and necessary suffering as the divine pattern—starting with the three persons of the Trinity, where God is said to be both endlessly outpouring and self-emptying. Like three revolving buckets on a waterwheel, this process keeps the Flow flowing eternally—inside and outside of God, and in one positive direction.

Controlling people try to control people, and they do the same with God—but loving anything always means a certain giving up of control. You tend to create a God who is just like you—whereas it was supposed to be the other way around.

Any kind of authentic God experience will usually feel like love or suffering, or both.

The proof that you are a Christian is that you can see Christ everywhere else.

God you do not include less and less; you always see and love more and more.