In the Cosmic Christ: all things were created, hold together, and are reconciled.
Channel: UnitingEarth NSW/ACT
Date: 2017-11-09

This presentation begins with an overview of how widely the New Testament Scriptures affirm that there is a cosmic scope to the person and work of Jesus Christ. We know this well from the opening of John’s Gospel, but are less familiar with texts (for example) like 1 Corinthians 8:6, 2 Cor. 4:4, Romans 8:9 and 11:36, Hebrews 1: 2-3, or such texts as Col. 1:15-20, 26-27, 2:9-10, 3:11. This affirmation is not a late phenomenon, deriving from Christological speculation, but goes back to some of our earliest texts. Where did these ideas come from? What does it mean to claim that in Jesus Christ, the God of the whole cosmos is incarnate and that in Jesus Christ, all things came into being? The presentation explores this with a focus on Colossians.
The cosmic Christ has direct ecological implications. The Jesus of the Gospel traditions models a lifestyle of simplicity and respect for all creatures, but he does not directly give a framework for reconfiguring our relationship with the Earth based on mutuality rather than hierarchy. With a cosmic Christology, the fabric of the material world cannot be viewed as spiritually irrelevant, as ‘all things’ were created in him and for him. This cosmic Christology is largely foreign to western Christianity and to protestant theology most particularly. Jesus is proclaimed as ‘Lord’, ‘Saviour’, ‘Friend’, but not as the one through whom and for whom the world was created, nor as the reconciler of a broken and exploited cosmos.
Vicky Balabanski is Senior Lecturer in New Testament at Flinders University, South Australia, and Director of Biblical Studies at the Adelaide College of Divinity and the Uniting College of Leadership and Theology.
She is a writer and editor in the international Earth Bible Project, as well as writing for the British ‘Uses of the Bible in Environmental Ethics’ project. She is the Director of the Forum on Religion and Ecology (Australia and Pacific) and is now working on an ecological commentary on Colossians, reading it in dialogue with Stoic thought. She is also re vegetating a coastal property which is teaching her to live sustainably and glimpse the horizon from time to time.