• Christ/ Jesus. The book “The Universal Christ”, written by Richard Rohr, is divided in two halves: in the first half he presents his panentheism position that is a mixture of “monotheism” and “gnosticism”: Christ should be distinguished from Jesus. Christ is universal, being inside as well as outside of the World; while Jesus is personal, being only inside of the World. As for the second half of the book, Rohr tries to fill the gap in the Apostles’ Creed concerning Jesus Christ: the gap is hiding such things as “love”, “hope”, “heal”, “forgive”, etc and is represented by a comma between i) “born of the Virgin Mary” and ii) “suffered under Pontius Pilate”. In fact, in this second half of the book, Rohr is talking about life, death, suffering and loving in the name of Christ: those four moments – living, dying, suffering and loving – are a starting point for what the author calls “the contemplation” (the inside and passive mind represented by Buddha and his eyes closed) and “the transformation” (the outside and active mind represented by Jesus and his opened eyes). Those two halves are very well summarized by two appendixes at the end of the book. On the one hand, the First Appendix illustrates four worldviews – the material, the spiritual, the material versus the spiritual, and finally both the material and the spiritual worldviews. On the other hand, the Second Appendix presents three stages of the spiritual transformation: from order, through disorder, to reorder.

The map:

Resources:

• Richard Rohr (2019): “The Universal Christ. How a forgotten reality can change everything we see, hope for and believe”, Convergent Books