A Fully Participatory Universe
I cannot help but think that future generations will label the first two thousand
years of Christianity “early Christianity.” They will, I believe, draw out more
and more of the massive implications of this understanding of a Cosmic Christ.
They will have long discarded the notion of Christian salvation as a private
evacuation plan that gets a select few humans into the next world. The current
world has been largely taken for granted or ignored, unless it could be exploited
for our individual benefit. Why would people with such a belief ever feel at
home in heaven? They didn’t even practice for it! Nor did they learn how to feel
at home on earth.
(In calling out the limitations of this kind of gospel, I’m speaking primarily to
privileged, mostly white Christians in the Northern Hemisphere. I don’t for a
minute forget how hard most people’s lives have been in almost all of history.
Life has been, and remains, “a vale of tears” for countless millions, and I can
surely understand why only the hope of a better world gave these brothers and
sisters reason to put one foot in front of the other and live another day.)
No doubt you’re aware that many traditional Christians today consider the
concept of universal anything—including salvation—heresy. Many do not even
like the United Nations. And many Catholics and Orthodox Christians use the
lines of ethnicity to determine who’s in and who’s out. I find these convictions
quite strange for a religion that believes that “one God created all things.” Surely
God is at least as big and mysterious as what we now know the shape of the
universe to be—a universe that is expanding at ever faster speeds, just like the
evolution of consciousness that has been proceeding for centuries. How can
anyone read the whole or even a small part of John 17 and think either Christ or
Jesus is about anything other than unity and union? “Father, may they all be
one,” Christ says in verse 21, repeating this same desire and intention in many
ways in the full prayer. I suspect God gets what God prays for!
Along with en Cristo, Paul loves to use words like “wisdom,” “secret,”
“hidden plan,” and “mystery.” He uses them so many times, we probably jump
over them quickly, assuming we know what he means. Most of us assume he’s
talking about Jesus, which is partly right. But the direct meaning of Paul’s secret
mystery is the Christ we are talking about in this book. For Paul, Christ is “that