Christ, creation and the question of uniqueness

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Every Christology — the branch of theology concerned with the nature and significance of Jesus Christ — faces a structural problem: How can we understand the uniqueness of Jesus of Nazareth without dissolving it into an abstract concept?

And how can we understand his universality without reducing it to a particular, contingent event relegated to some corner of history?

Tradition has largely answered through a vertical model. Jesus is unique because he is the incarnate Word of God. This uniqueness places him at the apex of an ontological hierarchy: he is the first, but the first above the others. Primus super pares (“first above equals”).

The universal, that is, the Word, exists before and separately from particular instances; it descends from above, becomes incarnate at a specific point in history and, from that point, radiates its efficacy to all humanity.

I would like to propose a different reading, one that begins with an opposing philosophical premise.

The universal does not exist separately from particulars: it manifests itself, takes shape and is realized only through them.

Applied to Jesus, this premise produces a Christology in which uniqueness is not vertical but horizontal; not a matter of essence but of epiphany; not causal but revelatory.

Jesus is not separate from others: he is one with them. And for that reason, he is one for them. He is the first, but he is not above the others.

The discussion will unfold in three stages.

First, exegesis: What does the New Testament say when it calls Jesus “firstborn”? Next, the philosophical structure and its theological consequences. Finally, a very simple image — a piece of fabric lifted with two fingers — will help us hold together elements that formulas struggle to reconcile.

1. The firstborn: a uniqueness of journey

Let us begin with the text. The New Testament calls Jesus the “firstborn of the dead” (Rev. 1:5), “the firstborn among many brothers and sisters” (Rom. 8:29), and “the firstborn from the dead” (Col. 1:18). How should we interpret these expressions?

One possibility is to understand this as a primacy of excellence: Jesus is first because he stands above, precedes and rules over the others.

Alternatively, it can be understood as a primacy of the path: Jesus is the first to pass through death, the first to travel a road that everyone is called to follow. I believe the second interpretation is more faithful to the text.

Jesus conquered death because he was not afraid of it: because he was a man of faith. That is why the Letter to the Hebrews invites us to keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, “the pioneer and perfecter of faith” (Heb. 12:2).

Literally: the archēgós and the teleiotḗs, the one who opens the way and brings it to completion. Not a sovereign who looks down from above, but a guide who walks ahead while remaining part of the group.

There is a second element: the Pauline language of adoption, or huiothesía.

When Paul uses this term, huiothesía, he does not contrast it with a “divine nature.” He relates it to nomothesía, legislation.

In Rom. 9:4, he writes that the Israelites have adoption, glory, covenants, the giving of the law, worship and promises. Israel participates in the promise through its inheritance of the Law; those who believe in Jesus, the Messiah, participate through sonship.

Paul faces a very concrete problem: How can non-Jews enter God’s family without belonging to Israel by blood and without observing the Law, beginning with circumcision?

The answer is: they enter as adopted children. They do not become Israel, nor do they share the same ancestry. They share the inheritance.

Now let us turn our attention to Jesus. There are two ways of being a child. Jesus is the Son in an original sense, as the first fruit, as the firstborn. Others become children in a derived sense, through adoption: we might use an old term and call them “younger siblings,” those who are not firstborn.

They enter the same family, but not under the same title. This is not a choice between “begotten” and “adopted,” but the recognition of a single dimension with two aspects: the original and the derived.

The Greek term monogenés, which the evangelist John uses, brings together mónos, meaning “only,” and génos, meaning “kind” or “race.” A child may be unique because they are an only child, but may also be unique within their category, like the wisdom described in the Book of Wisdom (Wis. 7:22).

This is not a minor detail: the oldest Latin manuscripts of the Gospels, dating to the mid-fourth century, translate the term as unicus, not unigenitus. If I read it as “only-begotten,” the uniqueness of Jesus becomes an exclusive difference: he is the first, ontologically different from everyone else.

The Lord. If I read it as “unique,” his uniqueness becomes one of complete closeness: he is ahead of the others, before them, because he is the first fruit, but he is fully with them because he fully experienced the same condition.

His position within the group does not separate him from the group; it defines him in relation to the group.

This reading finds confirmation in Paul’s image of the “new Adam” (1 Cor. 15; Rom. 5).

Jesus does not replace humanity or act in the place of human beings: he recapitulates it, in the sense given to the term by Irenaeus of Lyons(a second-century bishop and early Church Father whose doctrine of “recapitulation” held that Christ sums up and restores the whole of human history within himself).

He is the point at which humanity reaches its fullest expression. He is truly human, with us and like us. His uniqueness is horizontal: primus inter pares — the first among equals.

And the Letter to the Hebrews tells us that he lived “without sin” (Heb. 4:15), a condition that is therefore possible for every human being.

2. The concrete universal

Let us turn to philosophy. The category of the “concrete universal” has a specific history that goes back to Hegel(the 19th-century German philosopher whose dialectical system held that universal concepts become real only as they unfold through concrete historical particulars).

The abstract universal — Humanity as an empty concept, Goodness as a separate idea — is realized only through the mediation of historical particulars. Spirit does not hover above history: it takes shape through its concrete manifestations and progressively recognizes itself in them.

The concrete universal is that which does not exist before and above particulars, but emerges through them, leading them toward their fulfillment.

Applied to Jesus, this structure gives rise to a very different Christology. Jesus is not the place where the universal descends from outside upon the particular, a scheme that tradition has always regarded as risky because it comes close to adoptionism and Nestorianism.

Adoptionism and Nestorianism are two early Christological positions the Church later condemned as heresies: adoptionism held that Jesus was born merely human and was later “adopted” as God’s son, while Nestorianism was accused of so dividing Christ’s human and divine natures that he became, in effect, two separate persons.

Nor is he a humanity assumed by the universal without a person of its own, as the doctrine of anhypostasia would suggest (Jesus Christ without a human person of his own, but only with the divine person).

He is the place where the particular brings its own internal structure to fulfillment, a structure already inhabited by the universal from the beginning.

The difference between Jesus and other human beings, therefore, does not concern their ontological structure. It is a difference of degree, of transparency, of realization. A difference of epiphany.

Jesus is the concrete universal not because others are excluded from it, but because, in him, the universal structure of the creature — what I will call being-with-and-for-others, the openness to the Word — reaches its fullest realization and complete self-understanding.

3. Every creature, a real symbol of God

I come now to the most radical step. I maintain that the Word does not identify exclusively with Jesus, but with every human being and every creature. This identity is not reciprocal.

Between God and Jesus there is no absolute identity, “God = Jesus,” but a relative identity. Jesus is never alone as a creature, but always with others.

The foundation for this relative identity is found in the prologue of John: “The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world” (John 1:9). Even before stating that the Word became flesh, the prologue says that to all who received him, he gave power to become children of God, “who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12-13).

Every human being, as such, is illuminated by the Word, sustained by the Word and constituted by the Word in their deepest identity. The Incarnation is not exclusive: the Word became flesh in us, enhēmîn.

If we accept this premise, the Formula of Chalcedon — the 451 A.D. ecumenical council’s definition of Christ as “two natures in one person,” long treated as the normative statement of Christian orthodoxy on the subject — no longer describes an ontological exception in relation to other human beings.

It describes the case in which the universal structure becomes conscious of itself, names itself and offers itself as a recognizable paradigm. Jesus does not have privileged access to the Word — by virtue of the identification between the Logos and Jesus’ human nature — that other human beings and other creatures do not have.

Jesus possesses a quality of presence to the Word, a transparency, a fullness that makes visible what every creature already is in its deepest structure. This quality of presence constitutes his complete and perfect likeness to the Word.

Therefore, there is a real difference between us and Jesus, but it is one of degree. Like Jesus, we too are the “image of God” (Adam); Jesus, however, is the new Adam: the full likeness to the Word.

This does not diminish the uniqueness of Jesus; it restores its original meaning, uni-cum, one with all others. His excellence does not consist in belonging to another category, but in having fully realized what everyone is called to become.

Karl Rahner(1904–1984, a German Jesuit and one of the most influential Catholic theologians of the 20th century) developed the notion of the “real symbol.”

The body is a real symbol of the soul because the soul is constitutively expressed in the body. In the same way, Jesus is the real symbol of the Word.

A real symbol is not an external sign pointing to something else: it is the form through which a reality essentially manifests itself, the place where it is present, not merely indicated.

The proposal is to universalize this category, something Rahner himself did not go so far as to explore: every creature is a real symbol of God. Not through a diminished analogy, nor through an additional grace, but constitutively, by virtue of the ontological structure that makes it what it is.

Transparency is not a special property of Jesus: it is the ontological vocation of every human being. Jesus realizes it fully; others realize it to varying degrees, along the continuum leading to the eschaton.

The consequence is of the utmost importance. To encounter any human being is to encounter God, not metaphorically, but structurally. Matthew 25 — “I was a stranger and you welcomed me”; “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” — ceases to be a moral hyperbole and becomes a literal ontological statement.

The face of the other is the actual place of divine presence, not its distant reflection.

If the creature is constitutively a symbol of the Word, if the Word identifies with every human being, and if the Incarnation is not an exceptional event but the explicit manifestation of an original structure, then we need to reconsider the very concept of God. God is not God without the human.

A word of caution: this does not mean that God depends on human beings or that creation is necessary to God because something is lacking in him.

It means that the relationship between God and creation belongs to the definition of what God is: not as an extrinsic addition, but as an expression of a structure internal to divine life.

This is a relational ontology that does not eliminate the distinction between God and the creature, but reinterprets it: not as distance, but as a difference internal to theological identity.

If we call God x and the creature y, we could write: x = x + y. Creation adds nothing to God, but it is within what God is.

4. Creaturely mediation: being-with-and-for-others

This shifts the foundation of mediation. If Jesus mediated by virtue of his identity with the Word, mediation would be a privilege descending from above, one that others do not possess.

I propose the opposite: mediation belongs to the structure of the creature. Jesus mediates not because he is God, but because he is fully human. “For there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human” (1 Tim. 2:5).

Being-for-others is the original structure of the creature. We are not, first, individuals who subsequently enter into relationships: we are relationships that become individualized with others.

Identity emerges from a network of connections; it does not precede them. Every human being who fully lives this structure is a mediator. Jesus is the unique mediator not because the Word identified itself only with him, but because he is the epiphany of what every creature is called to be.

This model recalls the reflections of Carlo Molari, who invited us to interpret Jesus not through the distinction between divine nature and human nature, but through his concrete experience of relationship with the Father, as it emerges in the Gospels.

Jesus reveals God not because his humanity has received an additional divine element, but because he lives a humanity fully open to the Word and faithful to it.

“Jesus answered them, ‘Is it not written in your law, “I said, you are gods”? If those to whom the word of God came were called “gods” — and the scripture cannot be annulled” (John 10:34-35).

The Incarnation is not the descent of a divine being to Earth, but the revelation of God in Jesus’ human life. This is a Christology of the Spirit.

Someone might object that this is merely a functional model, not an ontological one. The answer is that God’s action does not simply guide human beings: it constitutes them. The more a person is united with God, the more fully they realize their own humanity.

Rahner expresses this in a sentence I particularly like: the more a person is united with God in their creaturely being, the more intensely and deeply they return to themselves; and the more capable they are of experiencing their own creaturely reality, the more united they are with God.

Jesus is therefore the perfect human being and, precisely for that reason, the full revelation of God.

5. Post non propter hoc

The theology of redemption has long worked with a causal framework: Jesus “causes” salvation. Through his death and resurrection, he produces an effect that extends to human beings.

Those who come after receive grace by virtue of what he accomplished; those who came before receive it in anticipation, in view of his merits.

I propose that we not reducepost hoc and ante hoc to propter hoc: after or before does not mean “because of.” It is not the identification of the Word with this Jesus, and not with others, that constitutes the cause of salvation.

It is the identification of the Word with every creature that constitutes the possibility of salvation for all. Jesus is its epiphany and its realization.

Think of an airport windsock: it does not produce the wind, but makes visible the direction from which it blows and its intensity. The Spirit is already present; Jesus, a person of the Spirit, makes visible the salvation already at work without being its cause.

The distinction is crucial. To cause means to produce something that would not have existed without you. To make visible means to enable the recognition of something that already existed but had not yet been brought into conscious understanding.

“[God] created all things so that they might exist; the creatures of the world are wholesome [σωτήριοι αἱ γενέσειςτοῦκόσμου], and there is no destructive poison in them, and the dominion of Hades is not on earth” (Wis. 1:14).

Salvation takes place by virtue of what each creature already lives through the Word. Jesus made it visible and realized it, but did not cause it.

There is, therefore, a dynamic continuum between Jesus and the others, one that is not static but leads toward the eschaton. “God will be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28) indicates the goal: the moment when every creature becomes fully transparent to what constitutes it from within, and the identity between the Word and creation is fully realized.

This identity is not produced by history: it is unveiled by history. Time does not create what did not exist before; it brings to full manifestation what was already real in the original structure of creation. The eschaton is not a radically new future, but the fulfillment of a structure present from the beginning.

Jesus is the anticipation of this fulfillment. At a particular moment in history, the continuum touched its goal for an instant: the full transparency of the creature to the Word that inhabits it. It is like a curve that touches its asymptote for an instant without yet coinciding with it.

This anticipation, however, does not causally produce the fulfillment: it is its recognizable prefiguration. The eschaton does not happen because Jesus made it possible, but because the original structure of creation unfolds until it reaches its full realization.

6. One, singular, unique

Allow me a brief etymological parenthesis, because words help us. “Singular” and “unique” seem synonymous, but they express two opposing movements.

The Latin singulus comes from an Indo-European root, sem-, which carries two opposing but complementary meanings: “one” and “together.”

Sanskrit developed the collective aspect: the prefix sam- indicates unity, connection and elements that come together to form a whole. Latin took the opposite direction: singulus means “one by one,” each considered individually. The “one” as the starting point of a distinction.

This is not a contradiction: they are two sides of a single intuition. The “one” can be the unity that gathers a multiplicity or the element that distinguishes itself from a whole.

The same occurs in Italian: singolo is the distinct “one,” always understood in relation to a whole from which it separates, one among many.

The unique, from unicum, is the one that exhausts its own category. And if we break it down into uni-cum, it suggests, as an interpretive intuition, the “one” that carries everything within itself, leaving nothing outside.

So here is the question: Is Jesus singular or unique? My answer is: unique, in the sense of uni-cum.

The Word, the absolute, becomes concrete at one particular point in history, the Verbum abbreviatum, but this does not make it ab-solutus, detached from the whole.

According to the relational logic of creaturely mediation, the whole is present in each fragment, and all fragments are present in the whole.

The event of Jesus is therefore inclusive and unifying, oriented toward that Omega Point toward which every creature moves in order to fulfill its vocation as a real symbol of the Word.

Andrés Torres Queiruga expresses this well: if God wants to give himself entirely to humanity, he “must” do so at a concrete point in history, so that this gift is real and not merely apparent; but precisely for that reason, this gift is misunderstood when it is not understood as a gift intended for everyone, offered to all as a possibility of fulfillment.¹

7. The fabric analogy

So far, the reasoning has been quite abstract. Let us summarize before proceeding.

We have seen that Jesus is the firstborn in the sense of the one who opens the way; that the universal does not stand above particulars but is realized in them; that the Word identifies with every human being; that every creature is a real symbol of God; and that salvation is made visible by Jesus, not caused by him.

One question remains: How can we think about all this while maintaining the Christian conviction that, in Jesus, and only in Him, the Word is the subject who acts and exists?

To answer, I would like to present an image that emerged from a dialogue and that, to me, illuminates the problem from an unexpected angle.

Imagine a piece of fabric spread out on a table. I lift a single point with two fingers. What happens? The immediate answer is: I lift that point. But if we look closely, we realize that much more happens.

The entire fabric is involved, although to varying degrees. The parts near the point of support rise considerably; those farther away rise only slightly or hardly at all. The fabric takes the shape of a tent, with folds radiating downward.

But the decisive element is not merely the intensity. The direction of the internal forces changes. When the fabric is flat, the tensions are minimal and horizontal.

When one point is lifted, each part must transmit upward the weight of what lies below it: the tensions become inclined and increasingly vertical as they approach the point of support. The geometry, the direction of the fibers and their contact with the table all change.

Everything changes simultaneously. This is not a variation in intensity within a structure that remains identical, but a complete reconfiguration.

The correspondence is simple. The fingers are the Logos. The point directly lifted is Jesus, in his assumed humanity. The rest of the fabric is all creation, intrinsically connected to the lifted point. The lifting represents assumption into God: the dynamic of the Incarnation and its universal reach.

The image brings together three aspects that abstract formulations struggle to hold together. First, the continuity of the fabric, which rules out clear-cut ontological ruptures.

Second, the gradual nature of the involvement, which preserves the real difference between Jesus and the other creatures.

Third, the universal reconfiguration, which prevents us from thinking of the Incarnation as an event concerning an isolated point.

8. The tradition that precedes us

If touching one point also lifts the rest, can we say that creation, too, is lifted in the Incarnation of Jesus?

The analogy suggests that it is, but with one qualification: not uniformly or indiscriminately, but gradually and in a particular direction.

This is not a new idea.

Irenaeus speaks of recapitulation: the Son made human gathers all humanity within himself, or rather, the entire history of the cosmos, and leads it to fullness.

Maximus the Confessor (a seventh-century Byzantine monk and theologian) teaches that the Logos, in becoming incarnate, assumes and unifies within himself all the logoi of creation: everything has its ontological root and purpose in him. In Romans 8, Paul describes creation as “groaning and suffering the pains of childbirth” as it awaits redemption: the entire cosmos is involved in the destiny of Christ and humanity.

Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955, a French Jesuit paleontologist and theologian whose evolutionary cosmology proposed that all creation converges toward a final unifying point he called “Omega”) sees the Incarnation as a cosmic event: Christ is the Omega Point toward which all evolution converges.

A further step is taken by John Scotus Eriugena (a ninth-century Irish philosopher and theologian), who, in Periphyseon (III, 604c), identifies the Word with the totality of created reasons.

The Son is the creative reason of the universe, simple in himself and infinitely multiple in his manifestations, “for the Word is all things”: ipsum omnia est.

He does not seek to dissolve the distinction between Creator and creatures, but to affirm that all things preexist in the Word as their causal and intelligible reasons.

A numerical example helps us understand this. The number 10 is the same in all its representations: 5 × 2, 8 + 2, 12 − 2, 30 ÷ 3. The representations are many and different, but they all correspond to the same number 10.

In the same way, the logoi are the Logos in its multiple representations. They do not constitute an original plurality alongside the Logos, but express the Logos itself in its infinite capacity to manifest itself without dividing.

The unity of the Logos is not opposed to the plurality of the logoi: it is what grounds and makes that plurality possible.

9. Ontological difference or modal difference?

Let us return to the fabric. When I lift one point, I do not “raise,” we might say, invoking the term anástasis, resurrection, only that point. Each fiber receives a new direction, not merely a different intensity.

Thus, in the Incarnation, each creature receives a new orientation, a new vector of its being: upward, toward God. Teilhard would add: forward, toward the Omega Point.

From this follows a theology of history. The history of the cosmos is not a horizontal plane across which things move indifferently, but a fabric structurally reconfigured from the point of the Incarnation onward.

This is not a future and external promise, but a transformation that has already taken place in the structure of reality.

Graduality concerns not only the difference between human beings, animals and matter. It also concerns humanity itself.

The Word identifies fully with Jesus; it is communicated to others gradually and in different ways. It follows that religions must be understood as intimately connected, as parts of the same fabric.

Here we recognize Rahner’s insight concerning “anonymous Christians”: anyone who lives authentically according to their conscience has already been reached by the Logos, even without knowing it.

Rahner’s has proposed that people outside the visible Christian Church who live a genuinely good and gracious life are, in a sense, already reached by Christ’s grace.

And graduality is not a deficiency in the Word, which remains whole and undivided: it is a property of the fabric.

Each point has its own configuration, its capacity to receive, and its proximity or distance from the point of contact. Quidquidrecipituradmodumrecipientisrecipitur (“whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver” — a classical scholastic axiom).

The analogy adds something that Rahner does not make explicit. The areas closest to the point of contact are not privileged in themselves, but insofar as they mediate and communicate the same and only grace.

Saints, prophets and people of great interiority are not “closer to God” in a quantitative sense: they are communicative functions within the fabric of creation. Holiness is not a possession, but a way of participating in the communication of the Logos to others.

And we arrive at the most delicate point. If applied without qualification, the analogy risks flattening a difference that tradition has always considered essential: the difference between the way the Logos is present in Jesus and the way it is present in others.

In the fabric, the difference between the point of support and the other points seems merely gradual.

Classical Christology asserts something more: in Jesus, the subject is the Word; in others, the Word acts, illuminates and communicates itself, but remains distinct from the being it inhabits through grace.

Dogma affirms that, at that precise point, the fingers do not touch the fabric as they would an external object. The fingers become fabric. Verbum caro factum est (“the Word became flesh”).

They do not merely approach one another: they identify with one another, to such an extent that the act of being of that point in the fabric is the same act of being as that of the fingers.

This is the paradox of the hypostatic union, which Chalcedon expresses through the formula of two natures in one person: the Word becomes flesh without ceasing to be the Word.

The humanity of Jesus subsists in the divine person. That point is not simply “the highest”: it is the point at which the one who lifts and that which is lifted are the same thing — that is, the one who lifts. This identification does not occur at any other point in the fabric.

So far, this is the tradition. But at this point, I would like to go further and propose something of my own.

The difference between Jesus and others does not necessarily imply two radically heterogeneous levels of being. It can be understood as a modal difference within the same kind of ontological relationship.

Why? Because creation is not external to the Word, but internal to it. In the equation we saw earlier, x = x + y, God’s identity encompasses humanity: creation is essential to God, without the world adding anything that God lacks.

The Incarnation, therefore, is not an enrichment of God, but the gradual manifestation of what God has always been.

The Word expresses itself and, in doing so, identifies itself as created. It is not merely present in creation: it communicates itself to creation and exists as creation (cf. Richard Bauckham and Niels Gregersen — two contemporary theologians associated with the “deep incarnation” movement).

The act of being of each creature is the same act of being as that of the Word. “All things hold together in him” (Col. 1:17). Every creature subsists in the person of the Word, by virtue of the identity between Logos and logoi. Verbum omnia est.

What, then, distinguishes Jesus? Not belonging to a different category of relationship with the Logos, but the fact that, in him, this relationship is manifested in its fullest and most explicit form.

In others, the same relationship is real, but it is communicated through the mediation that Jesus’ humanity brings about within creation. The act by which the Word identifies with Jesus is not exclusive — “only here and nowhere else.”

By its very nature, it extends through the interconnectedness of the fabric. In the logic of the interconnected fabric, identification with one point is an identification communicated to all points. Not equally or indiscriminately, but according to the same kind of ontological relationship.

10. Consequences

What consequences can we draw? I see five.

First: the Incarnation takes on a new meaning. It is not the irruption of the divine into a creation that had been deprived of it, but the explicit manifestation of a presence that creation already carried implicitly within itself.

“The mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to his saints” (Col. 1:26).

In the fabric, the lifted point does not create the connection between the fibers: the connection already existed, and it is thanks to that connection that the lifting spreads.

The Logos did not begin to be present at Christmas: the Incarnation is the moment when this presence becomes visible, nameable and historically situated. Jesus is not the place where God breaks in from outside: he is the place where history recognizes what has inhabited it from within all along.

This does not make the historical Incarnation superfluous or merely revelatory. It is the act in which the relationship between the Logos and creation reaches its greatest intensity and becomes irrevocably explicit.

The lifted point is not interchangeable with the others: it is the place where the force is applied, without which no other point would rise.

Jesus is the absolute, the concrete and singular Word of God, but his uniqueness is not ab-solute, that is, detached from the mediating structure of creaturely existence.

Second: mediation is everyone’s vocation. Every human being is a mediator insofar as they live their own being-with-and-for-others with fullness and transparency.

Mediation is not a Christological privilege, but the creaturely vocation of each person (σωτήριοι αἱ γενέσειςτοῦκόσμου). The uniqueness of Jesus is a uniqueness of realization and recognition (likeness), not of principle (the image of God).

A saint is someone through whom the Logos communicates itself more intensely to the rest of the fabric: encountering such a person means experiencing concretely the “Christ” that everyone is destined to become.

Third: the history of salvation has not a causal center, but a center of visibility. Jesus is the point at which the unfolding of the Word found its densest expression and most effective epiphany, not its causal foundation.

His mediation is creaturely — “the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5) — and divine not in an exclusive sense, but in an inclusive one, because “all things hold together in him.”

Fourth: encountering the other is encountering the Word. Not because the other is Jesus, but because the other is what Jesus made visible: a real symbol of God, a place where the Word manifests itself in its identification with every creature.

The ethics of encounter and the theology of the Incarnation converge at the same ontological point.

Fifth: creation is not a passive recipient. In the fabric, the fibers do not simply receive the force: they communicate it, reconfigure themselves and actively participate in the new form.

In the same way, creation is the place where the communication of the Logos unfolds through the connections among beings. Consummation does not consist in replacing creation with something else, but in fully expressing what creation already is.

The lifted fabric does not cease to be fabric: it becomes the fullest form of what it was capable of being from the beginning.

There is also an invitation to further work. If creation is a fabric, what are its structures of connection — biological, cognitive, spiritual and cultural — that mediate the communication of the Logos with greater or lesser effectiveness?

Within this framework, a theology of mediation could engage in a new dialogue with the sciences of complexity and the theologies of non-Christian religions.

Conclusion

I will summarize the thesis in a few lines. The Word, by identifying with Jesus of Nazareth, communicates itself to all creation gradually, but according to the same kind of ontological relationship.

The difference between Jesus and the other creatures does not consist in two heterogeneous modes of being, the uncreated and the created, but in a modal difference within a single structure of relationship.

This perspective does not annul the uniqueness of Christ, traditionally understood as the point at which the one who lifts and that which is lifted coincide, with no equivalent elsewhere in the fabric.

However, it affirms this uniqueness not as exclusivity, but as inclusivity. It is a uniqueness of uni-cum. The Incarnation does not take place alongside creation or above it: it takes place from within creation, sub specie temporis.

This is not a theology that takes something away from Jesus to give it to others. It is a theology that tears down a wall: the one separating Jesus, who “is” God, from us, who “are not.”

In its place, it establishes an ontological continuity in which Jesus (logos) remains the first, the most transparent, the guide; and in which each of us (logoi), in our own degree and manner, is called to become what we already are in our depths, namely, Logos.

And so I return to the image with which we began. Everything changes together. There are no regions of creation indifferent to the Incarnation, just as there are no fibers of the fabric indifferent to the lifted point. The force is communicated through connection. And connection is creation itself.

Note

[1] Andrés Torres Queiruga, Dialogo delle religioni e autocomprensionecristiana, EDB, Bologna, 2007, p. 75.

This is a translated and edited version of the column that first appeared on Instituto Humanitas Unisinos and is republished with permission. The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and does not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of Global Catholic.