In his review of best-selling author Richard Rohr’s most recent book The Universal Christ (New York: Convergent Books, 2019), Fuller Professor Ian Paul labels the Franciscan teacher as something of a “Marmite” theologian; that is, in a way similar to the polarizing sticky brown spread hailing from England, “people either adore him or loathe him.”[1] Such a reaction is to be expected from a book whose subtitle claims that a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe. Though he writes at the popular level, Rohr’s insights offer an epistemological framework that has the power to release and expand the most tightly held Christological credos symptomatic of post modernity.

The book consists of two broad strokes—each concerned with one aspect of the two-part label Jesus Christ. The “forgotten reality” that the book’s title touts is the distinction between the two — one Rohr claims is evidenced within the “tricycle” of scripture, tradition, and experience[2] and corrects Christianity’s mistake of “limiting the creator’s presence to just one human manifestation.”[3] Part one, then, deals with the broader Christ, defined as the “means by which God’s presence has enchanted all matter throughout all of history”[4] made manifest in the universal reality — or “Primordial Pattern” — of self-emptying, death, and resurrection.[5]

This “Christ Mystery,” which Rohr suggests is the Alpha Point of time, exists in every incarnation of spirit and matter. Where the first incarnation presumably occurred at the Big Bang, the second incarnation was breathed in the person of Jesus, who is taken up in the second part of The Universal Christ. Because this dichotomy is wrought with confusion, Rohr offers several analogies to aid in distinguishing between the two; for example, where Jesus is the map for the time-bound and personal level of life, Christ is the blueprint for all time and space. Alternatively, where Christ refers to God, Jesus refers to “Christ’s historical manifestation in time,”[6] and where “Jesus can hold together one group or religion, Christ can hold together everything.”[7] In other words, Jesus is Christ, but Christ is not just Jesus; “Jesus came out of an already Christ-soaked world.”[8]

Rohr titled this part “The Great Comma,” referring to all that is encapsulated in the comma between “born of the Virgin Mary” and “suffered under Pontius Pilate” in the Apostle’s Creed. On the one hand, Rohr bemoans this comma, as — at least for the purposes of this book — it is the period betwixt the two statements that fashions Jesus as the true archetypal human (as opposed to his mere existence or atoning death). That is, Jesus’s life and teaching should eclipse the how and why of his death; in this ordering transformation trumps transaction.[9] However, Rohr repeatedly emphasizes his idiom that “God loves things by becoming them,” which places the importance back on what precedes this infamous comma. To complicate things further, Rohr uses the cross and resurrection — the post-comma credos — as the basis for his claim that reality follows a cruciform pattern. The comma is actually what he spends the least time discussing.

By the same token, Rohr’s refusal to claim a historical Jesus complicates his notions of this second part. To be precise, Rohr never explicitly denies Jesus’s factual existence, and even praises the Eastern Church’s insistence upon it. Moreover, some of his arguments logically depend on this truth. However, the evangelical impulse to hold the measuring stick of heresy against The Universal Christ is not unfounded; that is, if a strictly symbolic reading of Jesus is to be considered heretical (as reviewers like Ian Paul are wont to do). Rohr himself admits: “We usually have to let go of Jesus on one level before we can accept and believe in ‘Jesus the Christ’.”[10] His treatment of Mary Magdalene is one place where this interpretation can be pressed.

In John’s gospel, Mary is depicted as the first person to witness the empty tomb. Surprised, she immediately tells of and shows other disciples the sight: a stone rolled away, linen cloths folded and set aside. After the men leave, two angels appear to Mary from inside and ask why she weeps. She replies, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” She then turns around to find the one she mourns standing find before her; however, the text says “she did not now that it was Jesus.” He reiterates the angels’ question, and “supposing him to be the gardener,” Mary explains the situation. Afterwards, Jesus calls her by name, and suddenly she turns and exclaims “Rabboni!,” meaning: “teacher.”[11] In recounting this dramatic moment in scripture, Rohr claims that Mary sees the one before her relationally rather than merely physically. He then breaks down Jesus’s subsequent command (“Do not cling to me”):

I don’t believe the resurrected Jesus was being aloof or rejecting Mary’s friendship, nor was he afraid of intimacy. He was saying that the Christ is untouchable in singular form because he is omnipresent in all forms — as we soon see as the “gardener” at the tomb (John 20:15), as a wayfaraer on the road to Ammaus (Luke 24:13), as a man tending a cooking fire by the side of a lake (John 21:4)….Jesus of Nazareth, an individual man, has become the Corporate Personality.[12]

Later, Rohr puts us in the place of Mary: “we must somehow hear our name pronounced, must hear ourselves being addressed and regarded by Love, before we can recognize this Christ in our midst.” Rohr claims we need this intimate inner knowing because “we cant be left at the visual level or we will always think we can localize, limit, or capture God as a private possession…, or as something that can or must be ‘proven’ to others.” Fleshing out this line of thought, he concludes that the Divine presence “must necessarily be everywhere and universally everywhere”[13]

This explanation certainly begs the hypothetical question: what if, in the context of this story, Jesus really was just a gardener? It wouldn’t be too far of a jump to say that for Rohr, it wouldn’t really matter. In fact, he claims many biblical authors processed reality non-rationally, aided by a contemplative mind that allows one to see Christ in all things. Theologically known as panentheism, Rohr calls this an “incarnational worldview,” which is “the profound recognition of the presence of the divine in literally ‘every thing’ and ‘every one’” and is the key to mental and spiritual health as well as a truly catholic Christianity.[14]

When all is said and done, Rohr seems to be comfortable with an ambiguous stance on the historical Jesus debate — contented with a both/and, rather than an either/or. Evangelical Christianity’s insistence on an answer effectively places all the emphasis on the particulars of Jesus and little on the universality of Christ, when it is precisely Rohr’s point that you need both; “A merely personal God becomes tribal and sentimental, and a merely universal God never leaves the ream of abstract theory and philosophical principles.”[15] An imbalanced favoring of the former shapes Christianity into a clannish and anthropomorphic religion. Thus, Rohr is right to ask if “we really think that God had nothing at all to say for 13.7 billion years, and started speaking only in the latest nanosecond of geological time?”[16] His answer: of course not. Rather, we need a God as big as the still-expanding universe that is also made flesh in and around us.

Notes

[1] Ian Paul, “is Richard Rohr’s ‘Universal Christ’ Christian?” Psephizo, June 12, 2019, accessed July 15, 2019, https://www.psephizo.com/reviews/is-richard-rohrs-universal-christ-christian/.

[2] Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe (New York, NY: Convergent Books, 2019), 213.

[3] Ibi., 15.

[4]

[5] Ibid., 22.

[6] Ibid., 19.

[7] Ibid., 47.

[8] Ibid., 15.

[9] Ibid., 141.

[10] Ibid., 194.

[11] John 20: 11-18.

[12] Rohr, The Universal Christ, 191.

[13] Ibid., 192.

[14] Ibid., 19.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid., 58.

Bibliography

Paul, Ian. "Is Richard Rohr's 'Universal Christ' Christian?" Psephizo. June 12, 2019. Accessed July 15, 2019. https://www.psephizo.com/reviews/is-richard-rohrs-universal-christ-christian/.

Rohr, Richard. The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe. New York, NY: Convergent Books, 2019.