Pope Benedict and Teilhard de Chardin want us to think big.

In Part I of our series on the orthodoxy of Teilhard de Chardin, we described how Pope Emeritus Benedict held Teilhard’s theological vision of Christ as a central feature of the Christian liturgical and Eucharistic experience

In Part II of our series, we discussed Pope Emeritus Benedict’s approval of statements made by St. Paul and Teilhard of the cosmos being a living host.

Today, we will begin to elaborate on the concept of the role of Christ in the creation of the cosmos.  Most of Christianity focus on the Christ as the incarnation of Jesus of Nazareth.  That is certain true and appropriate but there is also a cosmic dimension that is often overlooked.  Christ, as the second person of the Trinity, had a transcendent existence before Jesus of Nazareth and even before the Big Bang (to the extent that the concept of “before” has any meaning since time was not a construct until after the Big Bang).

In the words of Pope Emeritus Benedict:

“The Roman creed (and with it the Western creed in general) is more concerned with the history of salvation and with Christology. It lingers, so to speak, on the positivistic side of the Christian story; it simply accepts the fact that to save us God became man; it does not seek to penetrate beyond this story to its causes and to its connection with the totality of being. The East (Orthodox Christians), on the other hand, has always sought to see the Christian faith in a cosmic and metaphysical perspective, which is mirrored in professions of faith above all by the fact that Christology and belief in creation are related to each other, and thus the uniqueness of the Christian story and the everlasting, all-embracing nature of the creation come into close association. We shall return later to discuss how today this enlarged perspective is at last beginning to gain currency in the Western consciousness as well, especially as a result of stimuli from the work of Teilhard de Chardin.” (emphasis added).

Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal; Pope Benedict XVI; Benedict; J. R. Foster; Michael J. Miller (2010-06-04). Introduction To Christianity, 2nd Edition (Kindle Locations 953-959). Ignatius Press. Kindle Edition.

Tomorrow, we will discuss Pope Emeritus Benedict’ further elaboration on how Christ, represents the fulfillment of the hominization of humanity.