(This update is based on a few sources: Marianne Sawicki’s “Seeing The Lord: Resurrection and Early Christian Practices”, Lecture #2 of Sharon Betcher’s “Constructive Theology II: Christology” course at Vancouver School of Theology, and my own reflections and accumulated insights. The one reference to Jay McDaniel is from his book “Living From the Center”.)
In her book “Seeing The Lord”, Marianne Sawicki outlines a key conceptual difference between the Hellenic and Northern European languages (including Greek and English) and the Semitic languages (including Hebrew and Aramaic). While the northern languages, originating in locales where hardship is represented by cold, wet, dirty, and dark (evocative of winter), favour light, cleanliness, and spaciousness as hallmarks of goodness, the Semitic languages, originating in desert regions where heat, light, and exposure to the air are threats to wellbeing, place value in the cool, wet, dimness of twilight and the earthy, “fleshy” solidity of gardens, riverbanks, and orchards. One of the responsibilities of Christian interpreters in post-modernity is to identify locations in our tradition where this (essentially irreconcilable) interface has resulted in confusion, distortion, or abuse.
“Cosmic Christologies” describe a theology of the nature of Christ relative to the doctrine of creation, as a counterpoint to a reductionist, mechanical, essentialist understanding. This understanding consigns the Christ-event to a moment in history and reduces the definition of Christ to the figure of Jesus. Alternately, a cosmic Christology, while acknowledging a decisive significance for the life and times of Jesus, allows the universe itself to serve as the vessel for the Christ-principle. The Christ is the “wisdom” or “spirit” present in the cosmos, which became visible and enfleshed in Jesus of Nazareth.
The above conceptual interface between the Hellenic and the Semitic comes into play heavily when it comes to the relationship between the Christ and the Cosmos. It is not difficult to imagine, given the Hellenic value of spaciousness, cleanliness, and light, that it is the Greek influence which gives us the notion of a Christ that exists outside or beyond the world - free of the “muck” and shadow and ambiguity of enfleshed life. This Christ must, by its own divine agency, inject itself into history in order to redeem humankind from its shadowed, impure, unclean sinfulness. The Christ travels from the pure “light” of the divine into the “fallen” cosmos, pulling humanity out of the earth in a once-and-for-all ontological gesture of atonement.
Cosmic Christology, however, tends to favour the Semitic view - that the cosmos is heavy or “saturated” with the divine. The divine settles upon us like dew upon the mulch at twilight, and rests in the corners of reality the way blessed shadows cover the corners of a room. The incarnation of the Christ in Jesus is thus not a once-and-for-all injection of divinity into the world, but a “recapitulation” or reminder of the way in which the divine has operated in the cosmos from the very beginning. The Christ-principle (differently described as Sophia/Wisdom or Logos/Word) is revealed in Jesus not as a coming-from-without, but as a surfacing-from-within.
I have used the Hellenic/Semitic dialectic in order to highlight an important element of Cosmic Christology: it is neither new, nor is it a fringe-view. But because the dualistic/reductionist/mechanical/essentialist worldview has held sway in the post-Enlightenment West, it may seem that contrary ideas are novel or revolutionary. Especially so in this case, as this Christology bears much similarity to Mahayana Buddhism, which holds that the Buddha-individual is an earthly projection of the eternal Dharmakaya principle, and thus may be perceived as a post-modern syncretism or “new age” novelty.
As revolutionary as this view may seem to many on-the-ground in our Christian communities, it is nonetheless extremely ancient in the Church and has much to offer us in post-modernity. One gift that it offers is the very compatibility with certain other world religions that I mentioned above. The good here is not in any attempt to manufacture a “super-religion” or to blur the boundaries between the faith traditions, but is in finding components of the traditions that can be laid side-by-side and appreciated across those boundaries.
The primary gift of this view for post-modernity depends on the difficulty that post-moderns have with the notion of a fallen world that needed to be redeemed through an act of atonement by the ontologically-unique figure of Jesus. This is a sticking point for many in our congregations (especially in the United Church of Canada) and the ability to offer an alternative view that is rooted in cultural dialectics that were already current in the first century CE is a great boon. The flipside to this benefit is the relative peripheralization of the cross and of Jesus himself. Do Jesus and the cross remain constitutive of the church in this theology?
Certainly the cross, according to this view, is moved out of the center of things, to be replaced by the reconciling love of God. And in a sense, this theology would be entirely available to humankind without the life and story of Jesus. However, both remain constitutive because the life and story of Jesus show us how the love of God operates in the world, and the cross reminds us that love continues to be crucified (after Jay McDaniel).
And, finally, given the present dramatic increase in ecological awareness and concern, we could do worse than to embrace a Cosmic Christology, which sees the Christ-principle as pervading and enlivening the entire world. For according to this view, when we take advantage of the world which was generated by God’s creative love, we engage in nothing less than the crucifixion of the Christ.
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