The Universal Christ

Reviews and more on my blog: Entering the Enchanted Castle

I appreciate Rohr's emphasis on universal love and seeing God in all things, but this book had too much fuzzy logic, ungrounded assumptions and muddled references that undermined the argument, such as it was. Other reviews have pointed out some of the issues, like a misunderstanding of the nature of neutrinos and misquoting Richard Dawkins; others that I noticed were Rohr making much of a Greek word spoken by Jesus (who presumably spoke Aramaic, not Greek) and saying that the New Testament was mostly written by Jesus and Paul (Jesus did not leave any writings whatsoever). A good editor should have caught these howlers before publication!

Aside from that, I could not be so startled as Rohr seems to expect by the revolutionary new way of seeing Christ that he is proclaiming, perhaps because it is not new to me. Indeed it has always seemed obvious to me that the nature of Christ cannot be sectarian, or even limited to one religion, and a Christian path cannot be solely about individual salvation. Is it because I was not raised in any ironclad religious mindset that I don't find this a huge revelation? It seems to me that there are other writers and thinkers who have talked about the universal Christ in a much more lucid and cogent way, Rudolf Steiner being the one who has brought me the most coherent insights.

I'm sorry the message is marred by lack of intellectual rigor, because it is important, and Rohr is clearly very passionate about it and a person who wants to bring light and healing to many. There are some pointers here in the right direction, but also some that may lead off to false paths, I fear. Embracing a Christ who loves and is present for all humanity does not mean losing all sense of distinction and borders between ideas and phenomena, as Rohr does when he makes sweeping statements like “The whole world is Christ.” Some sifting and discernment needs to be done to discover what's what. No spiritual text should ever be swallowed whole and unthinkingly, but this one could have done with a bit more digestion before going out into the world.