Update: Richard Rohr has an article on Huffpo, which is also on the incarnation. Except, the incarnation he is interested in is the big bang.
Here are a few choice quotes:
"The Incarnation of God did not happen in Bethlehem 2000 years ago. That is just when we started taking it seriously. The incarnation actually happened 14.5 billion years ago with a moment that we now call "The Big Bang." That is when God actually decided to materializeand to self expose."
[...]
I know it is no longer words, doctrines, and mental belief systems that can or will reveal the fullness of this Cosmic Christ. This earth indeed is the very Body of God, and it is from this body that we are born, live, suffer, and resurrect to eternal life. Either all is God's Great Project, or we may rightly wonder whether anything is God's Great Project. One wonders if we humans will be the last to accept this."
What does this have to do with Scotus? Well, he does come up:
Christ, for John Duns Scotus (1265/66-1308) was the very first idea in the mind of God, and God has never stopped thinking, dreaming, and creating the Christ. "The immense diversity and pluriformity of this creation more perfectly represents God than any one creature alone or by itself," adds Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) in his Summa Theologica(47:1).
He even quotes Scotus:
God remains in immediate sustaining attentiveness to everything that exists, precisely in its 'thisness.'" -- John Duns Scotus
I fail to see why we can't have doctrines and arguments and still take care of the earth, or "earth" as the haters of pronouns would have it. Can't say that I've ever seen Scotus say that Christ was the first divine idea, but I suppose that's not really the point; the quote from Scotus looks like it was translated by Matthew Fox. But hey, any publicity is good publicity. Perhaps now when the powers that be see Scotus on my CV or grant application they'll fork over the cash because they think he's just like them.
1 comment:
The Scotist position on the Incarnation has two enemies: those who say that the primary (even exclusive) reason for the Incarnation is as a remedy for man's sin; those who say they agree with Scotus but in the end embrace some form of pantheism (the "cosmic Christ" of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin). At any rate, there is a website entirely dedicated to the topic at www.absoluteprimacyofchrist.org , in case anyone wishes to study this more.
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