life and death—we struggle to see God in our own reality, let alone to respect
reality, protect it, or love it. The consequences of this ignorance are all around
us, seen in the way we have exploited and damaged our fellow human beings,
the dear animals, the web of growing things, the land, the waters, and the very
air. It took until the twenty-first century for a Pope to clearly say this, in Pope
Francis’s prophetic document Laudato Si. May it not be too late, and may the
unnecessary gap between practical seeing (science) and holistic seeing (religion)
be fully overcome. They still need each other.
What I am calling in this book an incarnational worldview is the profound
recognition of the presence of the divine in literally “every thing” and “every
one.” It is the key to mental and spiritual health, as well as to a kind of basic
contentment and happiness. An incarnational worldview is the only way we
can reconcile our inner worlds with the outer one, unity with diversity,
physical with spiritual, individual with corporate, and divine with human.
In the early second century, the church began to call itself “catholic,”
meaning universal, as it recognized its own universal character and message.
Only later was “catholic” circumscribed by the word “Roman” as the church lost
its sense of delivering an undivided and inclusive message. Then, after an
entirely needed Reformation in 1517, we just kept dividing into ever-smaller
and competing fractals. Paul had already warned the Corinthians about this,
asking a question that should still stop us in our tracks: “Can Christ be parceled
out?” (1 Corinthians 1:12). But we’ve done plenty of parceling in the years since
those words were written.
Christianity has become clannish, to put it mildly. But it need not remain
there. The full Christian leap of faith is trusting that Jesus together with Christ
gave us one human but fully accurate window into the Eternal Now that we call
God (John 8:58, Colossians 1:15, Hebrews 1:3, 2 Peter 3:8). This is a leap of faith
that many believe they have made when they say “Jesus is God!” But strictly
speaking, those words are not theologically correct.
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.
Such is the unique and central message of Christianity, and it has massive
theological, psychological, and political implications—and very good ones at
that. But if we cannot put these two seeming opposites of God and human
together in Jesus Christ, we usually cannot put these two together in ourselves,