The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For and Believe by Richard Rohr, OFM (SPCK, London, 2019). Pbk. 250 pages. £9.99.
An ‘impulse buy’, from the bookshop of the Benedictine Abbey Church of Downside in Somerset, Father Rohr’s book has been a Christological ‘Godsend’, for a man who has read a great deal of scholarship on the person of Jesus of Nazareth (Hick, Vermes, Spong, Ehrman, Fredriksen, Bauckham, etc), but who then found himself ‘stuck’ on the ‘historical’ Jesus, the great teacher about God: unable and illequipped to progress to a position as to how that figure within history became the Christ of faith, onto whom the projection of the divine Logos was felt to be reasonable, in the prologue to the Gospel of John.
How that step was necessary for the Primitive Church to take, and why that step is still required for us to take today. Richard Rohr’s book has not supplied all of the answers (that would leave little room for ‘faith’), but he has provided grounds for this Theist member of SOF to appreciate how essential, and reasonable, is the Universal Christ for Christian belief.
Throughout Fr Rohr’s work I detect the notion of a ‘God-in-process’ theology, which amounts to little less than a complete revision of the Church’s restrictive conception of incarnation; reinterpreting it away from a single historical event (the birth of Jesus) to an active and ongoing process, present since the very ‘decision’ to create, and still present in the Church, today. There is a plurality to God during Creation (Gen: 1: 26-27) which the John the Evangelist would later attribute to the presence of Logos, through whom all things came into being; but which Rohr also sees as evidence that: ‘God is Relationship itself, a dynamism of Infinite Love between Divine Diversity, as the doctrine of the Trinity demonstrates’. (p 28) For him, the notion of ‘one’ incarnation, confined to the various birth accounts surrounding Jesus of Nazareth, will not do: and is just one of the Church’s errors which are identified by Rohr in this book.
Another is the Church’s conception of sin. The notion of original sin created the problem, but the dreadful doctrine of ‘substitutionary atonement’ ensured that the wrong message has been preached by sections of the Church ever since. Referring to Jesus, Fr Rohr writes: ‘His death instead of his life was defined as saving us! This is no small point. The shift in what we valued often allowed us to avoid Jesus’ actual life 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 storyline and agenda to this day.’ He is able to claim that future generations may well refer to the first two thousand years of Christianity as the ‘early’ Church; given that incarnation is developing today. Indeed, he envisages dangers when we limit the divine/physical interaction to the person of Jesus. ‘The world no longer trusts Christians who “love Jesus” but do not seem to love anything else’ (p32). If there is one section which encapsulates the entire way Rohr conceives of the difficulty, it is where he criticises the theology of those who claim, ‘Jesus is God!’, by setting out his own Christology. ‘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’ (p 19).
Jesus died: the Universal Christ arose! Rohr describes this as the unique and central message of Christianity; which has massive theological, psychological, and political implications: all of them very good.
Two problems I found with Fr Rohr’s work are a certain elitism: one quotation ought to suffice: ‘Right now, perhaps more than ever, we need a God as big as the still-expanding universe, or educated people (my emphasis) will continue to think of God as a mere add-on to a world that is already awesome, beautiful, and worthy of praise in itself.’ What of uneducated people? Secondly, the theology of Richard Rohr is decidedly ‘progressive’, and somewhat ‘romantic’ when it comes to nature. This is particularly apparent, when it comes to his discussions on suffering: there seems little awareness of the work of, for example, Stanley Hauerwas; and absolutely nothing of Tennyson’s opinion on nature! But for those who are looking to make sense of ‘the Christian message’ today, this book is a superb aid.
Mark Dyer is a retired nurse and teacher who lives in Somerset.