Battered yet Unbroken? Tending to the Ethereal, the Visceral, and the Extraterrestrial in Christology

An essay by William Kuncken (a graduate student of Sr. Ilia Delio’s)

Introduction 

A few Lents ago, I attended a parish talk titled “Unveiling the Truth of Christ’s Passion according to the Shroud of Turin.” The speaker, an enthusiastic devotee of the much-publicized artifact, provided a vibrant lay presentation of the medical research that had been conducted on the burial cloak, coupled with an assortment of items [mostly torture devices] he insisted were replicas of what would have been utilized during a first-century crucifixion. Shortly following the conclusion of his animated exhibition, a hand shot up from the audience. At that point, a rather boisterous male onlooker thanked the speaker and coupled his gratitude with the assertion that such a display decidedly pointed to Christ’s divinity, as from his perspective, no mere human could have sustained such brutality and subsequent bodily injury. I sat there quietly for a moment, wondering if the speaker would intervene with an emendation. It was clear that this comment neglected the critical point of the demonstration, as it contradicts the visceral intimacy of Christ’s passion, rescinding the humanity of Christ at the heart of the narrative that underscores his common experience of human pain and suffering.¹ Admittedly, these dilettante gatherings are always rather tricky situations to navigate. As many of my colleagues in my discipline know, there is a fine line between declining to comment to avoid an awkward social encounter and the outright dereliction of one’s duty as a theologian and educator to offer some helpful insights. Alas, a few more moments went by until the presenter finally provided a lukewarm retort that gently reminded the man that Christ was indeed fully human. This muted yet crucial clarification probably stuck with me because of the strong association it held in my mind with what I contest to be the three most consequential developments in conventional Christology, the realization of Christ’s three natures. First, his divinity in Paul’s attestation of Christ as the pleroma of deity; second, his humanity, climactically acknowledged in Maximus’s confession of his fully distinct human will;² and most recently in Teilhard’s articulation of the cosmic significance of Christ. 

Realizing the Divinity of Christ 

At the culmination of what would eventually come to be identified as the Second Temple period of Judaism, there were a variety of eclectic beliefs and practices across the Roman territory of Palestine. Apocalyptic cults centered around messianic figures were common and the followers of Jesus would have been one of nearly a dozen fringe groups each which claimed to fulfill the assorted prognosticating wisdom of the prophets. What set the followers of Jesus apart from their counterparts, however, were early leaders like Paul, who insisted upon Christ’s divinity, “for in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily”³ and “in him, we live, move and have our being.”⁴ This claim asserts that Christ is truly interconnected in all things, present at the commencement of the cosmogenic unfolding of life, directing and guiding life forward. By highlighting Christ’s divinity, Paul extended the messianic hopes of a divided and scattered people to the emergent reality that surrounded them. The figure of Christ became recognized as an organizing principle, an eternal logos⁵ that gave intelligibility to the evolutionary developments of the world. Christ’s divinity indicated Christ’s underlying unity with an incomplete and fractured reality.⁶ As Christ emblematically makes manifest, God is not separate from this unraveling of the universe but the integral ground for an ongoing dynamic process.⁷ Properly understood, the realization of Christ’s divinity enables us to move away from both a reductive historicization of Christ and an individualistic extropian soteriological expectation, transitioning alternatively toward a unifying force that encompasses the whole of creation. God’s relationship with creation was not a static one, but part of an unfinished journey. As Jesuit moral theologian, Ed Vacek remarks, “We contribute by our actions to God’s own development,”⁸ thus it can be stated that “the supreme dignity of work, then, is that it is Christogenic.”⁹ Therefore, in Paul’s acute pronouncement of Christ’s divinity, we become aware of God who accompanies and communes with us, in a state of vulnerability.¹⁰ Christ, who in God’s divine nature, is best illustrated through lowliness and fragility rather than from a position of ascendency or authority. 

Appreciating the Humanity of Christ

Inseparable from the divinity of Christ, is the full reconciliation of Christ’s human nature. While this may seem intuitive to the contemporary Christian, the distinct expression of this underlying reality of Christ emerges in the centuries following the proclamation of Jesus’s divinity.¹¹ Initially through the councils of Nicaea [325], Ephesus [431], and Chalcedon [451], and decisively in the confession of Christ’s distinct human will in the exegesis of Maximus.¹² By tending to the visceral experience of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, Maximus reached the climax of centuries of embittered debate. At great personal risk,¹³ in his commentary, Maximus insists upon the indication of anxiety as well as resistance in Christ’s human nature and what he contends to be a series of raw emotional outbursts that conflict with the resolute will of his divine nature. Maximus asserts, “It follows, then, that having become like us for our sake, he was calling on his God and Father in a human manner when he said, Let not what I will, but what you will prevail, inasmuch as, being God by nature, he also in his humanity has, as his human volition, the fulfillment of the will of the Father.”¹⁴ Maximus’s emphasis on the authenticity of Christ’s agony tempered the exulted Christology of his time and retrieved the battered Christ of the Gospel of Matthew.¹⁵ In doing so, Maximus recovers the humanity of Christ, reestablishing an intimate connection between the passion of Christ and the experience of human suffering. 

Uncovering the Cosmic Christ 

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Christological reflections emerged in a time of rapid technological advancement, evolutionary discovery, and subsequent social change. A renowned paleontologist and natural philosopher, while examining the origins of our early hominid ancestor, Teilhard adopted an increasingly progressive/future-oriented Christological outlook that necessitated a revision of the traditional dichotomy of the human and divine natures of Christ.¹⁶ Teilhard saw that the very future of Christology rested on our ability to recognize a “logical and biological fulfillment in [the] direction of some Pan-Christism.”¹⁷ For Teilhard, Christ became, “universalized in his operation, in virtue of, and by virtue of, his resurrection.”¹⁸ Thus, to say that Christ was cosmic in nature was to tether the interrelated experiences of Christ’s divinity and humanity to the interconnected reality to which humanity had become awakened. Not only were we to tend to the personalized account of Christ’s exposure on the wood of the cross, but we now were called to witness and give utterance to the universalization of Christ interwoven in the fabric of our existence. Rather than reduce Christ to an unchanging principle, Teilhard’s treatment of Christ’s cosmic nature invites us to explore the emotional depth of the universe and the divine love that binds it together and presses it forward. Moreover, the cosmic dimension of Christ dilates the exposure of Christ in the classical interplay of humanity and divinity and cracks open a new way of approaching vulnerability, which opens up profoundly novel ways of relating to and caring for the other in our midst. Distinguishable from Christ’s divine and human natures, his comic nature guides us toward greater wholeness. Christ as the driving force behind the evolutionary emergence of consciousness, pushes us beyond terrestrial boundaries and invites us to continue the process of complexification by integrating our religious curiosity with scientific insights.¹⁹

Remaining Challenges and Closing Remarks 

While the last two millennia of Christological reflections have offered some keen insights, further details surrounding the divine, human, and cosmic natures of Christ remain shrouded in obscurity. From its earliest developments, Christological narratives have been interpreted, translated, and conveyed through the lens of androcentric writers, who themselves adopted and advanced the outlook of one particular male thinker, Paul of Tarsus. This presents a fundamental obstacle that scholars have just begun to grapple with. As Sheila McGinn remarks, “An understanding of Paul as virtually infallible has become an icon for many Christian scholars, but this view is simply untenable,” further stating that despite this historical reality, “the presumption of the priority of Paul is at least as influential among average Christians today as among scholars.”²⁰ The consequences of the male-dominated formation and presentation of Christology are so extensive and wide-reaching that it is hard to even speculate on what an alternative Christology might look like. Nevertheless, a growing number of voices have made some notable strides. Perhaps, some of the most innovative and striking examples of this can be witnessed in the work of queer theology. Scholars like Marcella Althaus-Reid who, in their work, challenge the predominantly masculinized depictions of Christ and the emphasis these illustrations place on pain and suffering as the primary point of intimacy between humanity and God.²¹ In an echo of the enigmatic mystic, Julian of Norwich,²² whose true identity remains a mystery, these utterances of alternative visions of Christ remind us that the work of Christology is far from complete. 

1. In the most extreme of cases, the comment infers a diminution of Christ’s full humanity, echoing a Christology of Docetism that would have Ignatius of Antioch’s relics rolling under the altar of the Basilica di San Clemente. See “Ignatius of Antioch’s Letters to the Smyrneans 2, 3, 5, & 7, Trallians 9 – 11, and Ephesians 7,” in Historical Jesus Theories: Early Christian Writings, tr. Peter Kirby, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com.  ↩︎
2. This is further articulated vividly in the expansive writings of liberation theologians like Jon Sorbino and James Cone. In Sorbino’s The Principle of Mercy and Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree, the authors respectively contend that through the full realization of Christ’s humanity, we recognize Christ’s transformative solidarity with those in the midst of misery, providing the oppressed with an ironic tenacity that enables perseverance in the wake of violence, loss, and tragedy.   ↩︎
3. Colossians 2:9.  ↩︎
4. Acts 17:28. ↩︎
5. As it would be articulated by the later Christian apologists who sought to synthesize the messianic Jesus movement with the wider Greco-Roman milieu.  ↩︎
6. Sheila McGinn writes, “In Paul’s understanding, because Christ had ushered in the beginning of God’s reign on earth, worldly distinctions, such as those between Jews and Gentiles, freed persons and slaves, men and women, were part of an old age that was contrary to God’s plan and was now passing away (cf. Gal. 3:26-28).” Sheila McGinn, “Early Missionary Expansion,” in The Jesus Movement and the World of the Early Church, (Winona: Anselm Academic, 2014), 113.  ↩︎
7. Gerald O’ Collins writes, “The resurrection [of Christ] disclosed that his self-sacrifice had been accepted and that, instead of being a mere messianic pretender as the title on the cross asserted, he was/is the Messiah and his crucifixion had truly been the death of the Messiah. In short, the resurrection fully and finally revealed the meaning and truth of Christ’s life, person, work, and death. It set a divine seal on Jesus and his ministry.” Gerald O’ Collins, “The Resurrection,” In Christology: A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study of Jesus, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 104.  ↩︎
8. Edward Vacek, “An Evolving Christian Morality: Eppur si muove,” in From Teilhard to Omega: Co-creating an Unfinished Universe, edited by Ilia Delio, (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2014), 111.  ↩︎
9. Ibid., 114.  ↩︎
10. Christ’s divinity is revealed to humanity through his exposure and insecurity. Perhaps, the most moving articulations of this come through the writings of mystical authors. For example, the early modern spiritual guide, Angelus Silesius places the vulnerability of Christ at the center of his writings. In The Cherubinic Wanderer, Silesius connects the feeling of vulnerability to the exposure of God in the Blessed Mother’s womb and as an infant thereafter. In his divinity, Christ is not contained nor is he protected from danger. Thus, the notion of God is transformed from one of strength to one of compromise and modesty. Silesius writes, “The word which supports everything, even God, the Old One, must be carried here in frail arms by a young virgin.” Angelus Silesius, “Cherubinic Wanderer” translated by Maria M. Böhm, in Angelus Silesius’ Cherubinischer Wandersmann: A Modern Reading with Selected Translations, (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1997), 53. ↩︎
11. Sheila McGinn writes in respect to this ongoing process of acknowledging Christ’s humanity, “The post-Resurrection Christ became so central to the message that modern scholars believe that the historical Jesus was virtually lost in the image of the risen. Paul would be the great preacher of Christ crucified and raised from the dead (1 Cor 1:23), with hardly a quote of Jesus’s teachings nor reference to the events in Jesus’ earthly ministry.” Sheila McGinn, “Life after Jesus,” In The Jesus Movement and the World of the Early Church, (Winona: Anselm Academic, 2014), 89.  ↩︎
12. Andrew Summerson writes, “Maximus is a decisive figure in post-Chalcedonian theology for his precise account of the two wills of Christ,” stating that “In dealing with the subject of the passions in light of biblical exegesis, Maximus followed a long tradition of adapting and reforming philosophical attitudes about human passibility through the lens of Scripture” Andrew J. Summerson, “Introduction,” In Divine Scripture and Human Emotion in Maximus the Confessor: Exegesis of the Human Heart, (Boston: Brill, 2021), 2.  ↩︎
13. After refusing to recant his views, Maximus was publicly mutilated by having his tongue ripped out and right hand forcibly amputated according to hagiographical accounts of his life, most notably from his student, Anastasius Bibliothecarius.  ↩︎
14. Maximus the Confessor, “Opusculum 64 – On the Two Wills of Christ,” In On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings from Maximus the Confessor, tr. P. Blowers, (Yonkers: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003).  ↩︎
15. As Summerson explains, “Maximus’s comfort with the presence of fear in Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane is a distinct departure from earlier Christian writers. For example, Origen prefers to speak of Christ’s grief in the garden as ‘the initial stirrings of grief,’ [Comm. in Matt. 92.] but maintains that Jesus does not cede to the vicious emotion itself,” Andrew J. Summerson, “Fear: The Teacher of Eternal Awe” in Divine Scripture and Human Emotion in Maximus the Confessor: Exegesis of the Human Heart, (Boston: Brill, 2021), 76 – 77. ↩︎
16. In her remarks on Teilhard, Catholic theologian and Franciscan sister, Ilia Delio writes, “Evolution was not merely an explanation of physical life for Teilhard; it ushered in a whole new weltanschauung that affects every aspect of created life. Evolution, he maintained, is neither theory nor particular fact but a ‘dimension’ to which all thinking in whatever area must conform. In 1940, he completed his most important work, The Phenomenon of Man, where he described the fourfold sequence of the evolution of galaxies, Earth, life, and consciousness. The human person is not a ready-made fact but the outflow of billions of years of evolution, beginning with cosmogenesis and the billions of years that led to biogenesis.” Ilia Delio, “Teilhard de Chardin and the Evolution of the Human Person” (unpublished manuscript, March 1, 2023), typescript, 1. ↩︎
17. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “III. The Christic, or the Centric – d. Towards the Discovery of God, or An Appeal to Him who Comes” in The Heart of Matter, Edited and Translated by Rene Hague, (New York: Houghton, 1979), 55.  ↩︎
18. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “A Sequel to the Problem of Human Origins: The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds” in Christianity and Evolution: Reflections on Science and Religion, Edited and Translated by Rene Hague, (New York: Harcourt, 1974), 234. ↩︎
19. As Ed Vacek remarks, “We must exercise our own creativity if God is to achieve what God intends. Without our effort, God not only will not but cannot bring about ‘thy kingdom come.’” Edward Vacek, “An Evolving Christian Morality: Eppur si muove,” in From Teilhard to Omega: Co-creating an Unfinished Universe, edited by Ilia Delio, (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2014), 112. ↩︎
20. Sheila McGinn, “Preface,” in The Jesus Movement and the World of the Early Church, (Winona: Anselm Academic, 2014), 17. ↩︎
21. As Marcella Althaus-Reid explains further, “Queer texts, even if fictional, are able to convey images and experiences which we sometimes find ourselves unable to express. This is particularly true as we struggle for our sexual theological identity while using phallocratic language to speak of God and ourselves. At the end of our hermeneutical praxis, we are trying to unveil or rediscover the face of the Queer God who manifests Godself in our life of sexual, emotional, and political relationships. This is a God who depends on our experience of pleasure and despair in intimacy to manifest Godself, but who has been displaced, theologically speaking, by a God of grand heterosexual illusions, phantasmatic assumptions of the order of love and sexuality.” Marcella Althaus-Reid, “The Economy of God’s Exchange Rate Mechanism” in The Queer God, (New York: Routledge, 2003), 108. ↩︎
22. See Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love – The Long Text, 86.  ↩︎

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