Anyone who has made a confession of faith in Jesus Christ should read this book to grasp more fully the vast and startling implications of this belief. This is Richard Rohr at his best, providing an overall summation of his theological insights that have been life-changing for so many.”

The Universal Christ permeates all creation including us. We are all the image and likeness of God. ( Thursday) In 2014 I went to a Michael Gungor concert at a small club in St. Louis. Standing in line for the club, I happened to be next to some of his Christian relatives, and in that conversation I sensed some discomfort on the topic of Michael’s faith. Building on Scripture such as Colossians 3:11 — "There is only Christ. He is everything and he is in everything" — and Colossians 1:19-20 — "Through him all things are reconciled, everything in heaven and everything on earth" — Rohr believes that "everything, without exception, is the outpouring of God."In the beginning was the Blueprint, and the Blueprint was with God, and the Blueprint was God. . . . And all things came to be through this inner plan. The inner reality of God became manifest in the outer world as the Cosmic or Eternal Christ. ( Tuesday) Like many heretics, Rohr wants to liberate Christianity from any narrow limitations for the purpose of making it more appealing to the ungodly (2 Timothy 4:3). Not so for Paul: “Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God? Or am I trying to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ” (Galatians 1:10). Rohr ends up liberating Christianity from the truth of the Bible and from the gospel itself. To counteract his counterfeit teaching, consider the real “universal Christ” and the atonement achieved by Jesus Christ. What if we’ve missed the point of who Christ is, what Christ is, and where Christ is? I believe that a Christian is simply one who has learned to see Christ everywhere. ( Sunday) So does everyone have to become Christian to know the Christ? Absolutely not; Christ is more than Jesus. Christ is the communion of divine personal love expressed in every created form of reality—every star, leaf, bird, fish, tree, rabbit and every human person. Everything is christified because everything expresses divine love incarnate. However, Jesus Christ is the “thisness” of God (“God is like this and this is God”) so what Jesus is by nature everything else is by grace (divine love). We are not God but every single person is born out of the love of God, expresses this love in [their] unique personal form and has the capacity to be united with God. . . . Because Jesus is the Christ, every human is already reconciled with every other human in the mystery of divine [love] so that Christ is more than Jesus alone; Christ is the whole reality bound in a union of love.

The Apostle Paul will speak the final word to Richard Rohr, who has turned the gospel itself upside down. Rohr wants you to meet this Christ who has always existed (eternal God), became incarnate in time (Jesus of Nazareth), and who is still being revealed (by the power of the Holy Spirit). This is deeply Trinitarian, to use a traditional Christian doctrinal word, but this is not a doctrinal book so much as it is a philosophical one.This may sound enticingly mystical and spiritual, but it is, rather, a recipe for disarming the rational mind for spiritual matters, which is, in fact, the essence of his understanding of contemplative prayer. Contrary to Rohr, it is right and healthy to assess truth claims by logic and Scripture. Remember the Bereans, who were “of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true” (Acts 17:11; see also Romans 12:1–2; 1 Corinthians 14:20). Moreover, we should be wary of being drawn into “a much Larger Field” (whatever that is). The Larger Field may be a lethal swamp filled with vipers (1 Peter 5:8–9). We can rightly assume that Jesus is very much involved in the sustaining and redemption of all of creation. Colossians 1:20 states that Christ will “reconcile to Himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.” And Romans 8:22 says that “the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.” Thus, we can agree that Christ is the Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer of the entire cosmos. Christ is deeply concerned with the entire creation. Against traditional teaching, Rohr claims that a “first incarnation” occurred when God created the world. There is an obvious problem: if God is personal Being, then how could God enter into “incarnation” with the physical universe without thereby becoming impersonal? As personal beings, you and I cannot become incarnate in inanimate things. How much less could God become incarnate in stone, ocean, or atmosphere? It demeans the Incarnate One to suggest otherwise. He stops near a narrow aqueduct that runs between the CAC properties to explain a bit of the history and function of these "acequias."