Interview: Richard Rohr and the Universal Christ

In our lively and wide-ranging conversation on “The Spiritual Life,” the spiritual master Richard Rohr, O.F.M., often makes mention of one of his most well-known phrases, the “Universal Christ,” which is also the title of one of his most popular books. 

But what does it mean? In his book, Richard Rohr introduces the topic in this way: The Universal Christ is “the Christ Mystery, the indwelling of the Divine Presence in everyone and everything since the beginning of time as we know it.”

As I understand it, Rohr is inviting us to focus on what theologians might call the “Christ of faith,” which we might say is the risen one who is now present to us through the Holy Spirit. (And of course, he is also the second person of the Trinity.) Theologically, this is distinguished from the “Jesus of history,” the man who walked the dusty roads of first-century Galilee and Judea.

One important thing to remember is that the “two” are, of course, the same person. The Christ of faith is indeed the Jesus of history. One of my favorite insights on this topic comes from the New Testament scholar Stanley Marrow, S.J., who spoke about this concept as it applies to the resurrection. For Jesus to have been raised from the dead as anyone other than the man whom the disciples knew, Father Marrow said, would “void the resurrection of all meaning.” In other words, the risen one is the same man with whom they ate and drank, slept and traveled, and whose miracles and preaching they witnessed. Interestingly, in most of the resurrection stories in the Gospels, he is simply called Jesus.

Richard Rohr’s idea is that we have been focused too much on the historical Jesus and not enough on the Christ of faith. And as Christ, the second person of the Trinity in whom the two other “persons” are present, he is present in all things. This does not mean that “everything is God,” as a pantheist might say. The computer I am currently writing on is not God. (It breaks down too often for me to even suspect it to be God!) But God is present through and in everything, and therefore, so is Christ. 

Richard Rohr’s mission is to awaken in us an appreciation for how Christ dwells in all things, and thus awaken in us an appreciation of all things, especially all human beings, millions of whom the world ignores, rejects or even persecutes. As the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, “Christ plays in ten thousand places,/ Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his/ To the Father through the features of men’s faces.”

In the end, an appreciation of both the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith is essential for any Christian. We look to Jesus as the way, the truth and the light, the one who shows us the way not only to the Father but also to a moral life. We look to the Universal Christ as present in all things, and so we are invited to reverence and respect not only every person but all of creation.