Exploratory, Interfaith Christology

Exploratory Christology is the activity reflecting on Christ in an experimental, open-ended, dialogical way. It is conversational not didactic. Such conversations do not arrive at final conclusions that end discussion. They arrive at proposals for further consideration. 

In this instance, ours is an exercise in exploratory interfaith Christology, since one of us is Muslim and the other Christian. To our knowledge, there are not many examples of interfaith, exploratory Christology in the world today. We hope our example will provide inspiration for others, including people of many different faiths, to do the same.

Finally, we should add that our conversation is shaped by process philosophy, which provides a framework or context for our dialogue and exploration. Thus it is an instance of process, interfaith, exploratory Christology. 

- Jared Morningstar, Jay McDaniel

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​​Some Neoplatonic
Process Christology Musings

​Jared Morningstar

One of the ways in which Christ conquered and triumphed over death was due to the very nature of the incarnation. By exemplifying the perfect nexus of divine and human in his own self-nature, he shows possibility of a mode of existence perfectly balanced between unmanifested occultation on the one hand, and excessive réification on the other.

To unpack this a bit, because that is painfully abstract: one of the “problems” with God’s essential nature, is that it is entirely virtual and not actual. The Godhead as pure Unicity and Existence itself has no exemplification or actual, concrete instances of existence—by definition, it cannot. It is only after this essence has been refracted into the particular divine attributes (Mercy, Love, Majesty, etc) that it can then be exemplified in particular modes in creation.

But the actuality of concrete, material bodies likewise has a ”problem.” For at this “level” of creation, things tend towards non-being through over-réification. If a particular object is considered totally in isolation from other entities and abstracted from the flow of time intrinsic to creation, it becomes entirely dead. Such a thing is completely lacking any vitality, since it can neither change nor be changed. Stasis and essentialism is one important form of death.

In the incarnation, Christ exemplifies a Golden Mean between these two extremes; lacking actuality on the one hand, and lacking vitality on the other. Following the path of Jesus, on the account, means becoming at peace with the flux and impermanence of the world, realizing that to wish things were otherwise—somehow frozen—is just to wish for a total darkening of the radiant cosmos.

Yet neither is it Gnosticism in the pejorative sense, thinking that true spiritual value exists only outside of the messiness of the actual cosmos—exterior to this actual world, one only encounters unmanifest potentiality. Beautiful in its purity, to be sure, but deficient in the myriad contrasts of different shades of particularity that gives a vibrance to the created world that is absent in the divine essence outside of this relationship.

There’s definitely a Mahāyāna tone to this Christology, since Jesus becomes a sign pointing to the fact that death has already been overcome in the cosmos, just as the emptiness of the dharma preached by the Buddha points to the fact that samsara is already nothing other than nirvana.

Augustine: “I no longer wished for a better world, because I was thinking of the whole creation, and in the light of this clearer discernment I had come to see that although the higher things are better than the lower, the sum of all creation is better than the higher things alone” Confessions, VII, xiii, 19, tr. R.S. Pine-Coffin (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1961), 149.

The revelation of the incarnate Christ is the dawning of consciousness of this totality—that the intense harmonies produced as a result of the myriad contrasts in actual existence obtain a richness that is neither possible in pure Divine occultation nor perfect, static actuality. And along with this comes the historical consciousness that we as subjects are not external to all of this, but right in the midst of it, and it is up to us in each moment how we decide to contribute—whether in Beautiful ways, as Jesus exemplifies, or in the ugly ways of either trying to extract oneself from actuality into purely higher realms, or in trying to make reality stand completely still, strangling it’s vitality.
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I would be interested to hear from Christian friends whether this resonates or if there’s anything you’d add/qualify coming from your own understandings of these matters. From my Islamic perspective, I find this framework liberating as it appropriates some of the cosmic significance of Jesus within Christianity, without closing into a total exclusivism. Muhammad and the other Abrahamic prophets may certainly act as similar exemplifiers, though each in their own particular way.

Response from a Christian Friend

Jay McDaniel

Process theology offers an opportunity for many different Christologies. They can be created by Muslims and people who follow paths other than Christianity and, of course, by Christians. The cosmic significance of Jesus does not belong to Christians alone. I see you, Jared, as offering the seeds of a Neoplatonic, Muslim-influenced Christology. You invite responses from Christian friends. I offer one:

​One helpful form of process Christianity was developed by John Cobb in Christ in a Pluralistic Age. In that book he identified Christ with what the New Testament calls the Logos which became flesh in, but was not exhausted by, the historical Jesus. Christ is, for Cobb, the Spirit of Creative Transformation at work in the world. When creatures in the world respond to this Spirit with their own creativity, making it "flesh," God is incarnate in the world. Thus, for Cobb, God was incarnate in Jesus, but not in Jesus alone. God has also been incarnate on other people who have responding the Spirit's aims and in the more-than-human world: the hills and rivers, trees and stars.

Each incarnation of God is unique, because each creature is unique. This means that the way the Spirit was incarnate in, say, Gautama the Buddha or in prophet Muhammad is different from the way God was incarnate in Jesus. The difference is not in how open they were to God's aims, but rather in what God's aims were for them, relative to the historical and social circumstances of their lives. Gautama was not beckoned by the Spirit to become the long-awaited messiah of Judaism, for example, and Jesus was not beckoned by the Spirit to become a fully awakened "enlightened one" such as the Buddha. There is no need equate modes of incarnation; they are multiple.

Cobb's suggestion is that the Spirit in light of his own Jewish heritage and the needs of the time. It was to bring about a community of love and justice, a “basileia theou" in which the will of God is done "on earth as it is in heaven." In his troubled time Jesus responded to the Spirit, not simply by espousing high ideals as a teacher but by embodying ideals in a concrete way of living (a healer) such that, when people were in Jesus' presence, they felt the radiance of the spirit in Jesus' own life. He was, for them, the Spirit incarnate.

As has been said, the Spirit can be incarnate in others, too, and in us, albeit in our ways. Each person, each living cell, each heavenly body, has its own unique way of incarnating the Spirit, and the divine aims given to each are relative to their circumstances as they unfold in the thick of history.

This Spirit is God in the world. However, this is not the whole of God. In process theology God has a timeless dimension (the primordial nature) that contains all the pure potentialities for the universe; and a temporal dimension (the consequent nature) that feels the feelings of all things. You might think of the first as the divine Mind and the second as the divine Companion. There is also dimension that weaves the two together and influences the world out of this weaving. This third dimension is the Spirit of Creative transformation or the Logos. It is God's own energetic radiance in the world.

This energetic radiance is felt as a Deep Listening and as a Calling Presence. It has a priestly side and prophetic side. It was in Jesus, and it is in the rest of the world. In the Spirit there is no occultation and no stasis; no essentialism or rigidity; no escape into hardened heavens or hardened dogmas. There is, instead, love as a felt energy adaptive to each circumstance.

Importantly, this love is not complete on its own. The Spirit of Creative Transformation, the incarnation of God in the world, requires and includes our own action, our own responsiveness to the call, in order to be fulfilled. The timelessness of God is not complete without the temporality of God (God's empathy and calling presence) and the temporality of the world.

​Might there be other modes and concretizations of divine light apart from Jesus? Surely so. Each unique, each important. And, who knows, when we act in love, we might ourselves be among them, too? Surely so.

Do these incarnations conquer death? Perhaps not in a literal sense. There is still perpetual perishing. But they add something to the ongoing life of God, a kind of new energy, that is beautiful in its own right, and that is recycled back into the world, again and again, through fresh possibilities from the Spirit. The conquest of death does not occur through force, it occurs through love.

- Jay McDaniel