Book Review by Ellen Haroutunian:

Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe. New York: Convergent Books, 2019.

It is timely that I write this during Holy Week, as we lean into the Paschal Mystery, which focuses us upon the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. There’s no question that the world is a hot mess right now, with rapidly increasing greed, divisions, violence, and cruelty. It seems that the Paschal Mystery should have something profound to offer such a pain-filled world, yet the pain of the world and the confessions of the church seem to rarely meet. And so, Fr. Richard Rohr begins his newest book, The Universal Christ, with the tender words of a pastor, speaking first to those who are alienated and lonely. This Mystery, he says, is the indwelling of the Divine Presence in everyone and everything, and the reality of this oneness in Christ is the cure for human loneliness and strife. It is the pattern of Reality and the path of transformation. This book is theologically challenging but highlights and resurrects a larger hope that has long been in our tradition. It deserves to be read slowly, like Lectio Divina, allowing our weary souls to soak deeply in its riches.  

Before I delve further into this book, however, it is important to say that Fr. Rohr speaks from a solid, Catholic Christology. His magnanimous view of the heart of God is misunderstood by some to be counter to Christian tradition. To be clear, Rohr teaches that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, begotten not made, the second Person of the Trinity, the Word of God incarnated in human flesh, fully divine and fully man. He died on the cross for the forgiveness of sins and was bodily resurrected, demonstrating God’s victory over sin, death and hell. Catholics have long taught, as Rohr does, that the Paschal Mystery, which involves actual events in time through Jesus, is always happening still, over and over again.

Fr. Rohr calls us beyond theology into a beautiful and transformative Reality which is the Universal Christ. He contends that much of Christianity’s focus has been on salvation as merely an evacuation plan, being good, and the promise of heaven. Indeed, the faith has become privatized and “time and culture-bound, often ethnic or overtly racist, excluding much of humanity from God’s embrace.”[1]This is because, Rohr writes, we have in effect taken Jesus Christ out of the Trinity and have lost sight of the larger Christ story, which is what God is doing universally throughout all Creation.

This is actually not new stuff. From the beginning, the whole cosmos has been infused with the presence of God, specifically the Word through whom everything was brought into being and who sustains everything in being. The ongoing unfolding of the universe is the work of the Word of God, the Christ, and Christ will bring everything to its ultimate telos: the consummation of everything in God at the end of time. Rohr insists that the implications of having eyes to see and embrace that the Christ is the pattern of Reality itself changes everything. Our notion of faith in the West, he says, has been “rational assent to beliefs instead of a calm and hopeful trust that God is inherent in all things, and that this whole thing is going somewhere good.”[2]To see in this way is what Rohr names as an incarnational worldview. Essentially, it opens our eyes to see transcendence again, after the disenchantment and secularization of the modern era.