The Cosmic Christ
Does the Cosmic Christ wear a cape? What about an eye mask akin to the Lone Ranger, or a Marvel hero? I’ve been told that he has come to save the provincial antiquated gospel from the hungry gullet of modern thought. In one way or another several writers I admire have presented this heroic overarching savior to a world that has outgrown the simplicity of traditional categories. Serious thinkers always seem to think more broadly and philosophically than the average person—seeming more global, universal, and inclusive. Because they are bright, they attempt to fit all peoples into their theological matrix. The non-studious person rolls through these issues relying on tradition, intuition, culture, and media to form their opinions. Behind the effort of these respected thinkers is a sincere effort to find what is true, and frankly, what is palatable to a more modern taste. They wonder if somehow we could broaden the appeal of the Christian message, then the gospel would become more acceptable and the moral conduct of people would improve. Poverty, war, injustice, disease, political corruption, selfishness, environmental destruction, even the climate could improve if we could reform or reframe the Christian message.
Behind this is a quest for the universal Christ, one that pops in and out of religious categories. One that defies religious categories. Incarnation has its place, it serves a certain segment of the world during a period of time, but The Cosmic Christ can pop out of the Christian reality and jump into the Buddhist story, or the Confucius story or even the Islamic story—if Jesus would accept the moniker “Prophet” instead of “God.” A “Christ” for John MacArthur and a “Christ” for Deepak Chopra. And we all get to pray and invite “Jesus” into our hearts and enter into our own version of heaven when we die. Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me introduce my three thinker/writers that I admire. We will consider them in order of their birthdates. Lesslie Newbigin, (1919-1998), Dallas Willard, (1935-2013) and Richard Rohr, (1943-present) I will restrict my comments to their published comments on the sticky issue of the exclusiveness of the historic Christ and their attempts to broaden his appeal.
Lesslie Newbigin
Newbigin was a combination of dedicated churchman, missionary statesmen, ecumenical leader, scholar, writer and cross-cultural sociologist. His two most famous written works are The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society, 1989 and Foolishness to the Greeks, 1986. Right there with them is bit of a Jewel, Sin and Salvation, written while he was Bishop of Madura and Ramnad in 1956. He spent 37 years in India interrupted by returns to England and other travel having to do with the World Council of Churches. The 1984 Warfield Lectures at Princeton Seminary are well remembered for their provocative title, Missiological Problem: Can the West be Converted? He often lectured throughout the academic world on Theology and Mission. He spoke on everything from Nihilism to various world religions. He was considered a kind and thoughtful man of integrity with a keen mind.
In one of my favorite Newbigin lectures, Nihilism,[1] he tackles the problem that Nietzsche presented as major obstacle to non-believers. The challenge of reconstructing a moral system that would hold up in the more modern scientific world. Newbigin pointed out that Nietzsche was right, the secularists could not do it. Therefore, they couldn’t go beyond good and evil and when all morality collapsed into the will to power, the survival of the fittest, nihilism was the result. The will to power in the United States is presently in the hands of the Federal Government. The President calls anyone who disagrees with him, i.e. voted for Trump, a fascist. I doubt that Biden could define a fascist, but he certainly doesn’t know what one is. Essentially, the fascist elements in American life right now are found on the left—the executive branch, the media, and big tech, those who control the levers of power and who crush dissent. They have censored political speech, dissent, and have thrown mostly harmless people who wandered through the US Capital on January 6 with holy disdain and have denied them basic rights under the constitution of the United States. Congresses’ kangaroo court is to their shame and a stain on the history of this country.
Only in America can corrupt elites spin a yarn that makes totalitarianism appear to be democracy. How do we know it’s democracy? Because they say it is! When socialism fails, and it does 100% of the time, fascism is not far behind. Then come the prosecutions, the jails, the prison camps. At least more great books will be created from prison—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Victor Frankel come to mind. They have the military, the surveillance cameras, the social media companies and the Internal Revenue Service with 87,000 new employees to intimidate you. This has developed out of the growing nihilism that permeates the American soil. For those in power, democracy working is getting their way and staying in power. They assume higher moral ground by changing morality and then punish and ostracize those who don’t comply. If you don’t see Orwell’s 1984 coming to pass right now in America, you are not paying attention. When you are asked by the IRS agent, “How many fingers am I holding up?” You had better know the right number or the torture will ensue, just ask Winston Smith.[2] By the way, the right answer is, “As many as you say there are.”
The search for absolute truth
How does a radical gospel and the daring mission of Christ to make disciples work its way through this philosophical and political morass? Newbigin tells us not to allow the secularists to make the rules that define knowledge and truth. If you want to play tennis, but your opponent insists that you do so on a soccer field, you begin at a great disadvantage. If skeptics only use reason and science to define knowledge, then one of the Christian’s greatest advantages is taken away. That advantage is spiritual knowledge based on divine revelation. What has happened in the past 200 years is that divine revelation has been eliminated from public life.
Modern philosophy in Hume, Kant and Nietzsche provided a gradual change from belief being a valid form of knowledge to skepticism being a higher form of knowledge.
Kant believed that what we could see was only the appearance of a thing, but we could not go beyond that and know ultimate reality. But Kant was required to hold his beliefs uncritically. It was just his opinion based on philosophical guess work. He was exercising faith, for him, since he had rejected his father’s faith—since he would not accept the Biblical record, he determined that knowledge was out of reach. As Newbigin liked to say,
“it is now the common place of every man and woman on the street that we cannot know ultimate reality. That if we speak about God, it is only our opinion. Yet, of course, once again, one has to point out that this is a logical absurdity. Because in order to know that ultimate reality is unknowable, you would have to know what ultimate reality is. One has to ask, how do you know that ultimate reality is unknowable> It is itself a truth claim.”[3]
This would be a perfect time for the Cosmic Christ to don his cape and swoop in and solve the problem with superior knowledge. Is Newbigin in or out on the idea of a Christ being bigger than the Christian faith? Bigger than the Church, than Christendom?[4] What restrictions or borders does this great and varied thinker put on Christ? Newbigin takes a slightly different track before he gives an answer.
He presents several paragraphs showing the limits of history and culture as a reliable means of finding absolute truth. You see, some truth, partial truth, various cultural truths are not good enough for him-he seeks absolute truth. Speaking of philosophy and history he says,
“Therefore, it cannot be the place where you find final truth. Final Truth is to be discovered by the use of human powers of observation and reason, by the contemplation of the philosopher, by religious practices of the Ossetic so that the mind and the soul grasp some eternal reality which beyond history, and history is the field of the transient. We know also that in the midst of that classical world, there was another people, a strange people present in the synagogues in every great city of the classical world, who had a different belief, who believed in contrast, in contradiction to the prevailing culture that truth is to be found in a history, in a story.[5]
That story was of the mighty acts of God in a people, Israel. Abraham was at the center of the story along with Moses and a law was given. These people would be taught, cared for, developed, disciplined, delayed, and nearly destroyed—but they would survive with their story—And a deliverer would come from them with his own vision of reality where their God would become the God of the nations. Then Newbigin ties it together,
“…the old classical world view is fundamentally challenged with a completely new view. That the ultimate reality, the ultimate secret of the eternal truth for which the Greeks gave many names but one of them was the name logos, the word, the reason which ultimately beyond history is the logos of reliable truth. That this word has become flesh in the man Jesus Christ, whose ministry, death and resurrection is the manifestation of God’s eternal being.”[6]
“Now, that created a profound crisis that the ultimate reality is no longer something available to reason and to the mind of the philosopher. It is to be known by accepting and following the core of Jesus. That the answer to the question, what is the ultimate secret of the universe is this man Jesus.”[7]
Christ, then, is a new starting point, he is the embodiment of truth. He becomes either the stumbling block or the cornerstone. You cannot fit Christ like one brick into a building that is built on another plan. The building is the ultimate truth about humans, the earth, the universe. It is about the beginning and the end. Christ doesn’t fit various world religions or philosophies. He doesn’t wear a cape, he is not masked except to the skeptics, he doesn’t pop in and out of various religions, making guest appearances to tie everything together so our wee little minds can grasp it.
We find ourselves, like Saint Augustine, seated in the now famous garden and the Bible on the table beside him. He heard a voice say, “tole lege, tole lege, tole lege. Pick it up and read it, Pick it up and read it, Pick it up and read it!” He picked it up and read it. That was his new starting point, the cornerstone for the cathedral of truth in which he was to live the rest of his life. Later he used the well-known phrase, “Credo ut intelligam, I believe in order to understand.” In other words, In order to understand the world, I have to start here with this man, Jesus. Suddenly, the world began to make sense. I must start with belief, not doubt, with faith, not with skepticism. Rick Warren’s best seller, The Purpose Driven Life begins with, “It’s not about you!” When Jesus opens a bible, he could exclaim, “It’s all about me!” and he would be right.
I believe in order to understand. Belief precedes doubt. Faith is not inferior to skepticism. Only the academy thinks that, and whatever they think ends in spiritual darkness and impractical mush. Faith is primary in life, doubt is secondary. There are only two modes of humans knowing something. The first is reason, the second is revelation. The only reason to rank reason above revelation is hubris. You would think with the train wreck that humans have made in our pursuit of knowledge and a better life, we would appreciate the help. So pick it up and read it, and I recommend starting here:
In the beginning the Word already existed. The Word was with God, and the Word was God. He existed in the beginning with God. God created everything through him, and nothing was created except through him. John 1:1-3 NLT.
Just sit on that phrase, “Nothing was created except through him.” Without Christ, there is nothing that we know or experience. He is the creator of all human reality. Newbigin didn’t believe or advocate anything other than Jesus being God incarnate and the center of all things. Jesus is reality, the ultimate reality on which everyone can base their life. The last thing I want to point out from Newbigin is his lament concerning the age of Descartes. The famous “I think, therefore, I am” Descartes. Descartes was a Catholic Priest, he was dedicated to human reason. He believed that the human mind was like a disembodied eye which could look at the world from the outside without being involved in it. Jesus himself is the antithesis of such a notion. Truth is not to be found in abstract argument and reason alone, in fact that has very little to do with what is true. What is true is God incarnate, come to earth, to dwell among us, to be one of us—that is truth.
“The knowing of anything comes out of our bodily engagement with the world, our commitment to the world and, of course, the crucial question is that our commitment should be to the one who made the world and who has called us to be the true representatives of his praise in the midst of the world. The terrible error or nihilism arises from the illusion that we can have a kind of certainty that does not depend on faith.”[8]
Nihilism is a dark world. It is a world filled with confusion, anger, resentment and finally, despair. I was reminded this week of an ancient story of the prisoners who had never been outside of the prison. They thought that life in the prison was the only life, there was nothing else. Prisoners had lived their entire life being told, “This is all there is, there is nothing else.” This seems a lot like Nihilism which literally means nothing. Then one day a new prisoner comes who claims to be from the outside. He describes the world outside to his fellow prisoners. He scratches on the wall a drawing of a tree, he describes colors, Red, Yellow, Blue, and tells them about forests, rivers, oceans, mountains, the prisoners wonder if it is true. He also tells them a story of a prince who one day will break into the prison and free them. Some of the prisoners begin to hope, they dream about a new and different existence. One day they hear someone digging through the prison wall from the outside. Eventually they smell fresh air, they hear voices of children playing, they see light. A voice tells them to hold on, help is on the way. Some of the believing prisoners begin to change the way they are living. They begin to treat each other better, they begin to live as those who will be rescued. They will have a better life and they need to prepare for it.
A bit of light and hope changes us. We begin to live as though Jesus were objectively true. But that hope will not be a mythical character fully caped and masked. He won’t be a capricious figure changing identities to suit the whims of a temperamental society. He will be a savior, your Lord, take hold of his hand and follow him, he will teach you everything you will ever need to know.
Bill Hull
September 2022
[2] In Orwell’s novel, 1984 Winston Smith is the central character. He is being interrogated in the story and is asked how many fingers the interrogator is holding up. He answers according to what he sees, i.e. the reality. But the correct answer according the state is a different number. Smith then is tortured until he agrees with the number the state told him he should see.
[4] Christendom: The joining of church and state under a single leader armed with a military and national interests. This was challenged and broken apart piece by piece, country by country, by the Reformation starting in 1517.
He is speaking of the Jewish people and the Mosaic Law
[6] Ibid
[7] Ibid
[8] Ibid