Envisioning the Cosmic Body of Christ

Embodiment, Plurality and Incarnation

Aurica Jax, Saskia Wendel, Aurica Jax, Saskia Wendel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000682373
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Systematische Theologie & Ethik

The metaphor of the cosmos as the Body of Christ offers an opportunity to escape the aporias of standard Body of Christ imagery, which has often proved anthropocentric, exclusivist, triumphalist and/or sexist in the analyses of classical theologies. The body motif in particular contains starting points for current body discourses of gender-sensitive and ecological theologies, especially in their mutual overlaps. This book offers a critical evaluation of the prospects and boundaries of an updated metaphor of the Body of Christ, especially in its cosmic dimension.

The first part of the book addresses the complex tradition in which the universal dimension of cosmological Christologies is located, including the thinking of the Apostles Paul and John, Origen, Cusanus, Teilhard de Chardin, McFague, and Panikkar. In the second part of the book, representatives of various innovative concepts will contribute to the anthology.

This is a wide-ranging study of the implications of a new cosmic Body of Christ. As such, it will be of interest to academics working in Religion and Gender, Religion and the Environment, Theology and Christology.

Part I
Reconstructions

1 “And wisdom became matter”

Materialist explorations of the Cosmic Body of Christ

Aurica Jax

“And wisdom became matter and lived among us.”¹ This is how the “Bibel in gerechter Sprache,” the project of a Bible translation into German that intends to be sensitive about antijudaism, gender, and social justice issues, translates verse 14 from the prologue to the Gospel of John. “And wisdom became matter and lived among us.” This translation goes along with the line of my argument, which examines the metaphor of a Cosmic Body of Christ from the perspective of New Materialism.² This means, as I am going to argue, that we should understand the Body of Christ in a cosmic sense, in the sense of the corporeality and materiality as a result of a creatio continua and incarnatio continua.

In the following, I will first explain some characteristics of New Materialism and then highlight a few examples of a cosmic – or “Christian materialist”³ – understanding of the Body of Christ in the past and present of theology. For the latter, I will examine a number of authors with regard to the following aspects: First, how do these theologians reflect on Christ’s nature? “Nature” is meant in a double sense here: concerning the Christological dogma – this also includes how Jesus of Nazareth and the cosmic Christ are related to one another – but also the relationship to nature in the sense of materiality. The second question is about inclusivism and exclusivism: who (and what) participates in this “nature of Christ” and how? Third, what relevance do ecological concerns have for the authors analyzed here?

Perspectives of New Materialism

Theories of the so-called New Materialisms determine the relationship of discursive constructions and the underlying materiality of the body – and of everything that is. They appreciate the dynamics of the material without undermining the insight into the social construction of reality, and their theological reception offers interesting starting points. They do not represent a consistent theory or school of thought, but rather a bundle of approaches and disciplines, for example “environmentalism, […] feminism, […] queer theory or postcolonial studies.”⁴ The observation that motivates the “New Materialists” is that the material still seems to be regarded as inferior to the nonmaterial, to language, discourse, spirit, and so on. Thus New Materialisms develop “changing conceptions of material causality and the significance of corporeality, both of which we see as crucial for a materialist theory of politics or agency.”⁵ Not going against the cultural turn, but rather beyond, it is now time to deal radically with matter again. At least since the turn of the millennium – with a forerunner in the “corporeal materialism” of feminist theories – there is a marked reorientation toward the “materialism of Deleuze’s philosophy” as well as Whitehead’s “processontologies.”⁶ They can be found in authors such as Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, Jane Bennett, and Karen Barad.⁷

The main feature of New Materialisms is their posthumanist reorientation – “posthumanist in the sense that it conceives of matter itself as lively or exhibiting agency”⁸ – and thus there is a special emphasis on the productivity and resilience of matter. Posthumanism aims at “transgressing the previous divisions between nature-culture, object-subject, man-machine”⁹ and at describing matter as “active, autonomous and historically changeable.”¹⁰ This is clearly reminiscent of what Donna Haraway already wrote years ago. Posthumanism thus questions any privileging of the human over the nonhuman – this is interesting for the notion of incarnation because it can raise the awareness for the anthropocentrism of traditional concepts of incarnation.

Reasons for the emergence of New Materialisms are to be found in the advances in scientific knowledge – for example, in the understanding of matter in physics, as well as in ethical and political challenges (climate change, globalization, migration, biotechnologies, ecology). “We unavoidably find ourselves having to think in new ways about the nature of matter and the matter of nature; about the elements of life, the resilience of the planet, and the distinctiveness of the human.”¹¹ The news value of New Materialisms can thus be found in the combination of scientific findings with political themes and in their emphasis of complexity, plurality, and processuality. And very interestingly for (political) theologians, sociologist Andreas Folkers perceives an element of speculation in these theories:

What is new about the new materialism is not that it has a new vision of society, but that it is prepared for the new, the incoming. In this speculative attitude lies the politically important moment of the new materialism.¹²

From Cusa to Keller: traces of the Cosmic Body of Christ

To come back to the translation by the Bibel in gerechter Sprache, the prologue to the Gospel of John echoes the creation story – and maybe to translate its famous first sentence as “[i]n the beginning, there was wisdom”/“Im Anfang war die Weisheit” not only hints at the “relationship of the prologue to early Jewish wisdom traditions”¹³ but also distances itself from an exclusive Christological interpretation.¹⁴ Moreover, “wisdom” became not only flesh but also matter – this wording illustrates the “extreme turnaround, a transition from the celestial to the earthly” that John intended to indicate. This translation fits perfectly with a materialist interpretation of the Body of Christ and more precisely a cosmic understanding as I will explain now, tracing a few stages in the history and present of theology.

To begin, we focus on the 15th-century theologian Nicholas of Cusa and his Christology, which owns a cosmological perspective: His speculative concept of God as coincidentia oppositorum corresponds to his Christological considerations, or perhaps was even stimulated by them – concretely by the Council of Chalcedon – along with the neo-Platonic influences.

The individual Body of Christ is considered by Cusanus especially in the context of his sermons. As not surprising for a text from the 15th century, he interprets the body completely in the context of salvation history. The biological and cultural gender of Jesus explicitly does not matter to Cusanus – but implicitly, of course, the “Body of Christ” is male because it is undoubtedly identical to the “exquisite body” of Jesus Christ. Without often using the term “the Body of Christ,” Cusanus, nevertheless, makes a determination of the relationship between the individual and universal Body of Christ by connecting the human Body of Christ with the cosmos. Being both God and human, Christ himself represents the coincidentia oppositorum, so that the coincidentia is also evident in salvation history and does not contradict the cosmological dimension – on the contrary, it points to “the cosmic motivation of incarnation in the entirety of Cusa’s reasoning.”¹⁵

Cusanus applies to his Christology the “relation of the unified enfolding and manifold unfolding (complicatio – explicatio), which underlies his conception of the God-world relation.”¹⁶ The enfolding of nature and the unity of all are connected with the maximity of Christ who is the “perfection of the universe and of human nature” because he “enfolds all of nature.”¹⁷ Cusanus connects this vision of coincidence with Paul’s, the egalitarian enfolding of all into the Body of Christ in Galatians 3:28.

And so, we see how it is that our nature, which is not other than Christ’s, is, in Christ, most perfect. And here take note of the fact that Christ coincides with the nature of humanity, through which all men are men. […] In the Oneness of Christ – where there is neither Jew nor Gentile nor male nor female but where Christ is all in all – they are present without difference.¹⁸

Almost 500 years after Cusanus, the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin meditated on Christ in cosmic dimensions too. For him, the individual and Cosmic Body of Christ are in continuity with each other as the cosmic Christ is the enlargement of Jesus’s body.

And since Christ was born, and ceased to grow, and died, everything has continued in motion because he has not yet attained the fullness of his form. He has not gathered about Him [sic!] the last folds of the garment of flesh and love woven for him by his faithful. The mystical Christ has not reached the peak of his growth – nor therefore has the cosmic Christ.¹⁹

Teilhard dynamizes and universalizes the incarnation, which affects the entire cosmos. “God is incarnate in matter, in flesh, in all of creation, in the cosmos. The incarnation of Christ becomes extended to the dimensions of the cosmos; it is an event and mystery of cosmic extension.”²⁰ In Teilhard’s “rich theology of the body of Christ,”²¹ the Body of Christ carries different meanings that merge into one another.

It can refer to the person of Jesus of Nazareth, but it is also a body that forms a personal center for humanity and the material world. It is a physical, organic center, a christic element in all things, so that all things can be an opening, a disclosure of Christ to us.²²

Teilhard revolutionized the Christian theology of creation by bringing it permanently into conversation with the theory of evolution. He imagined the evolution of the world as deeply theo- and Christocentric, and established the idea of “God in transition.”²³ Likewise, his worldview is inclusivist to the highest degree: to him, the bodily integration of the faithful into the collective Body of Christ is the only unique goal of the cosmos: “The exclusive task of the world is the physical incorporation of the faithful in the Christ who is of God. This cardinal task is being carried out with the rigour and harmony of a natural evolution.”²⁴

Sallie McFague is famous for her ecologically...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Reconstructions
• Part II Investigations