Sunday, 16 June 2019

the Universal Christ

This book by ecumenical thought-leader Richard Rohr is an astounding treasure. It dives into the wholesale glorious mysteries of the biblical gospel, reminding us of the meaning of 'Christ', the freedom of forgiveness, the reality that Creation was God's testimony to us of heavenly truth long before scripture was written, the nature of spirit and incarnation, the sheer uncontainable universality of grace and peace and love...
   I don't have anything particuarly clever to say in reflection on this book. It simply pulled off the boots of my own Christian faith, shook them upside-down to dislodge a few large lumpy pebbles of English-evangelical intellectual cowardice and tribal complacency, then gently eased them back onto my feet as a liberating send-off back to the Jesus I had always known but now saw afresh. It is written accessibly enough for non-theologians, even non-Christians, and has a moral sensibility and wholesome common-good heartiness that I defy you to not find beautiful, challenging, and totally eternally counter-cultural: this is not Rohr's ideas unfolding themself but the very basics in implication of the gospel of Christ crucified and risen. A dazzling pragmatic inclusive truth, that has so long since been contained and constrained by overthinking underliving Christian commentary, the stultification of which Rohr here does a supremely excellent work in decolonizing Christ-consciousness from, yet never descending into partisan critique.
   I am giving this book to my mother and buying another copy to lend out.

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