The name “God” points to this mystery of love in its unlimited depth, the center of all that is; love that overflows onto new life. God is not a super-natural Being hovering above earth, but the supra-personal whole, the Omega, who exists in all and through all.
.. From all eternity, God has sought to love another, to be love in another, and to be loved by the other forever—this other is the Christ who is the aim and purpose of this evolutionary universe.
.. Christian life is a commitment to love, to give birth to God in one’s own life and to become midwives of divinity in this evolving cosmos. We are to be wholemakers of love in a world of change.
In summary, this is why I (Richard) say we need to switch our thinking from “Jesus came to fulfill us” to “we have come to fulfill Christ.” We are a part of this ever-growing cosmic Christ that is coming to be in this one great big act of giving birth described in Romans 8:22. [1]
Richard Rohr: Abstract to Personal
At the top of the hourglass are ideas of God too big for the human mind to grasp. We start with the Trinity, with God as
love and relationship. Creation happens in, through, and for the pre-existent Christ, the second person of the Trinity.
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For in him were created all things in heaven and on earth. —Colossians 1:15-16
.. This grew into the notion of the eternal wisdom that was eventually going to leap “down” from heaven, into the human and time-limited realm. The eternal wisdom was personified as Sophia, the divine feminine, as we see in the Book of Proverbs and the Book of Wisdom. It is a compassionate abstraction of Divine Reality, but not yet personable and personal.
.. In the Book of Daniel, the pre-existent Christ moves toward greater personification with the notion of the “son of man,” the phrase Jesus most frequently uses to identify himself.
.. Though so much of life is filled with suffering, disappointment, disillusionment, absurdity, and dying, God will turn all of our crucifixions into resurrections.
Richard Rohr: God in All Things: The Cosmic Christ
God’s first “idea” was to become manifest—to pour out divine, infinite love into finite, visible forms. The “Big Bang” is now our scientific name for that first idea; and “Christ” is our theological name. Both are about love and beauty exploding outward in all directions.
.. But it seems we so fell in love with this personal interface with Jesus that we forgot about the Eternal Christ, the Body of God, which is all of creation, which is really the “First Bible.” Jesus and Christ are not exactly the same. In the early Christian era, only a few Eastern Fathers (such as Origen of Alexandria and Maximus the Confessor) cared to notice that the Christ was clearly historically older, larger, and different than Jesus himself. They mystically saw that Jesus is the union of human and divine in space and time, and the Christ is the eternal union of matter and Spirit from the beginning of time
.. When we believe in Jesus Christ, we’re believing in something much bigger than just the historical incarnation that we call Jesus. Jesus is just the visible map. The entire sweep of the meaning of the Anointed One, the Christ, includes us and includes all of creation since the beginning of time.