Christology Without Christ?

1100 words, 5 minute read

Earlier, we presented a Christology that dates back to the very early days of the Christian Church. Paul features it in his Letter to Colossians (1: 15 – 20):

“He (Christ) is the image of the invisible God,

the first-born of all creation,

for in him all things were created…

All things were created through him and for him.

He is before all things,

and in him all things hold together…

He is the beginning, the first-born from the dead.

For in him all fullness was pleased to dwell,

and through him to reconcile all things for him…"

This early Christology became the pattern for future theologies and cosmologies. This substantiates Christianity’s claim to be directly descended from the Apostolic era. In fact, most Christians today believe more or less exactly what Christians believed c. 50 CE. That in itself is remarkable!

But what if Jesus is not your cup of tea? There’s an old hymn that goes, “Jesus is just all right with me.” But what if he’s not just all right with you? Can Colossians still provide a valid cosmological framework for folks who don’t follow Jesus, or even believe in God?

The answer is, “Yes!” (Or at least that’s what I’m about to argue.) Jewish and Roman Catholic thinking has consistently affirmed a role for observation and reason in the discovery of truth. While Revelation is the crown jewel of gnosis, observation and reason by themselves can still lead someone to a reasonable facsimile of Aletheia (truth). Judeo-Christianity is an empirical religious tradition, not a magical one.

Pope Benedict XVI viewed faith and reason as symbiotic, neither valid without the other. In that spirit then, can the theological language of Colossians (above) be ‘secularized’ and still deliver a sufficient, and perhaps even necessary, cosmology, suitable for the 21^stcentury? Can it resolve the three fundamental problems of cosmology:

(1)     How is it that there is a World at all? (i.e. something rather than nothing)

(2)     How is it that the World is both One and Many?

(3)     How is it that the world is both stable (permanence) and in flux (change)?

Every important Western philosopher has taken a swing at this three-headed piñata… generally with no more success than most children have at birthday parties. From Parmenides and Heraclitus through Whitehead and Sartre, these problems have been center stage, and any cosmology worth the toner it’s printed with must address these questions.

So how does Paul’s Christology account for the World as we experience it?

Christ is the sensible image of insensible God. Christ is logos, order per se, and also the ordering principle itself; therefore ‘Christ’ must be ‘the state of minimal entropy’. Since entropy inexorably increases from the moment of Big Bang to Heat Death, Christ, minimal entropy, must precede, logically, every other event. Therefore, Christ precedes even spacetime itself and so Christ is eternal (atemporal) and universal (aspatial). Therefore, Christ is co-present to every other entity:

(1)     Christ is the milieu in which all entities that come to be come to be and because Christ is the locus of every event, all things hold together in him.

(2)     Christ is the origin (Alpha, efficient cause, through him) of whatever is, was, or will be; therefore, Christ is an element in the constitution of every event.

(3)     Christ is the destiny (Omega, final cause, for him) of all entities; therefore, all entities come to participate in Christ’s eternity.

(4)     Christ is the essence, the nature, of whatever comes to be. Non-being (or death) is synonymous with maximal entropy so whatever comes to be constitutes an incremental increase in order and so manifests Christ, i.e. logos, the ordering principle of the cosmos and order per se (above).

As the sensible image of insensible God, Christ is God’s avatar and so Christ is God (in him all fullness was pleased to dwell) by another name.

Entropy increases in the spatiotemporal world due to conflict between entities. Outside of spacetime (inChrist), reconciliation (through Christ) transmutes order-eroding conflict into intensity-enhancing contrast (forChrist).

Paul’s “Christ”, a title given to Jesus by the early Church, also functions as a philosophical concept. The Apostle John, for example, borrows a secular term from pre-Socratic Greek philosophy, i.e. logos, and uses that term as a synonym for Christ and Jesus: “In the beginning was the logos and the logos was with God and the logos was God… Though logos everything that came to be came to be…and the logos became flesh and dwelt among us.” (John 1: 1 - 14) Substitute Christ and/or Jesus for logos.

Importantly, Paul does not claim to have proven anything about either the historical Jesus or the cosmological Christ. For Christians, the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus is that proof. What Paul has done is show that ‘Christ’ offers a sufficient solution to the 3 fundamental problems of cosmology listed above, i.e. that the concept of Christ adequately accounts for the phenomena collectively called the World.

Christ accounts for the world as we experience it:  (1) that it is, (2) that it is both one and many, and (3) that it is both stable and in flux. To show this, we turn again to the cosmological elements presented by Paul in the Letter to Colossians – but this time desacralized:

“The World exists for its own sake, as a manifestation of Being itself. The World is one, but it consists of many entities. Entities come to be in the World for the sake of the World; they cohere and ultimately harmonize so that multiplicity may be unity.”

If I’ve done my job, I’ve convinced you that Christ is sufficient to account for the World as we experience it. But have I also proved that it is necessary, i.e. that there is no other way to account for the World as it is?

Christology 101 (2022) closed with a challenge: Can anyone come up with a different model that adequately accounts for the key features of the empirical World (above) and cannot be mapped onto the model presented by Paul in Colossians? To date, no one has taken me up on that challenge. How about you?