Christ: Lost and Found

recovering the therapeutic, incarnational and eschatological Way of Christ through Scripture & ‘ancient’ sources

A blog exploring the perceived crisis in contemporary Christianity, questioning whether it has lost its foundational essence. The blog argues that contemporary practices (and even modes of understanding Scripture) have come to prioritize superficial values over genuine faith. By revisiting ancient perspectives, theology, motifs and imagery, it seeks to rejuvenate Christian understanding of Who Christ is, and to foster authentic encounters with Him.

The Quest and Its Foundations

Is Christianity lost? Has it lost its way?

Some claim that such a question is ridiculous: Christ’s Church, His Body and His Bride, guided by the Holy Spirit, cannot fall away from Christ, the Son of God, the Anointed One, the Logos-Word through which All was made. For these believers, we are just passing through various phases: the patient’s condition is not critical, yet alone terminal. For these believers, we just lack the faith-vision to perceive what is of health within Her, to apprehend things aright.

But, some answer, Yes.

There is a felt sense that contemporary Christianity is lost — a House without a Foundation.

One hears the concern as a murmur, an undercurrent, upon the internet: people complain that the holy days of Easter and Christmas no longer feel momentous or significant.

The Universal Church does not speak or act or even worship with moral clarity. It seems mired down in an understanding of itself predicated upon do-goodism, good feelings & being nice, virtue-signaling, and reliance upon stock phrases of belief.

This state of affairs prompts many to ask: Is the LORD yet building Christianity’s house? For if the LORD does not build the house, then in vain do the builders labour (Psalm 127:1).

“What would Jesus do?” — once a question asked by those seeking to ardently walk the Way — has become a cliched rubber-stamp on one’s lifestyle choices. In North America, only-once affluent but still very much privileged, Christianity has become a bromide for the middle class, a happy adjunct to its prosperity-seeking. Caught up in culturally-sanctioned political causes, these well-off Christians often ignore the plight of their persecuted brothers and sisters in other parts of the world — or on their street-corners.

Is the Body of Christ yet a Body when its communitatis seems so degraded, when so much of its members’ pain goes unheeded by the voiced few?

We might look for cultural, social and even economic causes for our crisis. But this disconnection may well be symptomatic of the aeon in which we live: an age in which the incoherent and the fragmented have triumphed; an age in which Time has solely become about duration; a materialistic age in which “men are geometers only with respect to matter and energy” (Simone Weil). The operating myth of our times is the consuming destroying materialistic dialectic which claims ‘revolutionary’ Progress as its mantle, but which merely makes everything trite and obscene.

In such an age, could we even perceive Love, let alone receive it, as It comes to bid us welcome?
Could we even read Scripture aright? Could we accept the guidance of the Holy Spirit having been formed all along in a mode which denies spirit?

How do we find Christ — the Way, the Truth, and Life — in such an age, and not merely turn Him into a sound-bite, a bumper-sticker, an avatar, or a cool movie?

As Jacob Needleman wrote in 1975 in his meditative work, Lost Christianity, “If we would infuse new life into Christianity, it is necessary first and last , to occupy the body of old Christianity, just as Christ occupied the body of the old Adam.”

What is the Body of this old Christianity? — a Christianity which was a mystical fact, received by the spiritual world as well as all its earthly witnesses?

To recover/rehabilitate the mystical fact of Christianity, I suggest that we must dip into the world in which Christ incarnated: the ancient world. By ancient I do not merely mean Western Classical Antiquity — a period which, arguably, ended with the Roman Emperor Theodosius’ universal decree against paganism in 390 CE. No, by ‘ancient’ I mean all sources (up until the late Enlightenment) that partook and drew from a common ancient worldview.

What is this ‘ancient’ worldview? It is the Cosmos of the Perfect Circle and its re-volutions (i.e., a returning ever to the same point); a geometric order of stable and recurring cycles of Time. In this order, philosophers (lovers of Wisdom), sages and scholars yet sought and apprehended, with scientific precision, the Music of the Spheres. Time was rhythmic and cosmological, an expression of the dance of the stars which aided God in the birth of both Life and Harmony. This was a world of holographic visual thinking, through which both concept and percept could be held in human memory; a mode of thinking which facilitated interiority and the development of collective, and not just individual, soul. It is the worldview in and through which the first Christians, in the lingua franca of the ancient world (Koine Greek), wrote the testimonies of an Aramaic/Hebrew-speaking Jesus Christ which we now know as our Scriptures, the New Testament.

Christ came at the Turning-Point of Time. Christ undid this ancient worldview: He cut the bonds of the Fates; He silenced its riddling oracles. And now our Time is demarcated by the time Before (BCE) and After (CE/AD) His coming. But Christ also incarnated within this framework and, in its Hebrew and, surprisingly, in some other cultural, forms, used its imagery to convey His Purposes. Those who met Him there, either in vision or in the flesh, and understood His revolution as a primal recasting of Time, met Him also within that stable reasoned cosmology which had held sway in humanity’s heart and minds for millennia.

For both Jew and Gentile, Christ was the (could be) both the ordering of Space and the fulfillment of Time — an answer to existential and essential questions which had set humanity wandering over jagged mountains and deserts for thousands of years in a quest for Meaning, Purpose and an Encounter with the Face of God.

This blog is an excavation —

a dig to find the ancient motifs of and for Christ, embraced by the Early Church but marginalized — even forgotten — by Her younger manifestation;

an exhumation of relics, that yet breathe life, buried in a past which has Semitic roots, but which was also felt and apprehended in all corners of the Earth.

These relics, images and motifs point to something rich and strange; something which has lost its wonder and potential to amaze and compel toward the Kingdom of God through an assumption of familiarity.

This something is the unknown world-turned-inside-out that the Gospels reveal: the Truth (Mystical Fact) more profound than any truth being sold by the world of social media, AI, and ideologues today.

Jesus is not just a rebel rabbi. Christ is not only the Pantocrator in the Orthodox ceiling. He’s not just the wafer, become Body, and wine, become Blood. Nor is He merely the Man from Galilee — the Man of the People — who hangs out with His friends telling jokes, wearing groovy sandals (as pictured in The Chosen). These imaginations are not so much ‘wrong’ as they are impoverished.

May the blog invite you into an awareness of the truly Cosmic Christ Who was no accident of history, nor even dropped down by the High God as a compassionate holy erratum into a unscripted, unfeeling world. He is the Lord of All; the means of expression of All that Is, Seen and Unseen; prepared for through the Ages. The roots are deep and they echo into the (seeming) chaos of the universe creating cosmic patterns that are paths to the heart of the Holy — to the heart of Divine Love, the Underwriter, and Ground of Being of Every Created Thing.

With these ancient ‘visions’ of Christ, I pray that we might read Sacred Scripture afresh, with hearts open to the action of the Holy Spirit Who will guide us to find Him, knocking at the doors of our hearts, once again — with Transfigured Vision, to make Him the Lodestone, Head, Light and Unity of all our Church.

This is an interactive blog to find the ‘lost’ Magnificent Cosmic Christ, King of the Universe, Who speaks into our daily lives with the voice of a Burning Bush. Our vision of Him has not been lost! We are not lost! The Cosmic Shepherd calls us with His Voice.

Important Note:

This is not a blog on how to live as a Christian… one must encounter Christ first, as on a road of one’s own self-preoccupation and undoing. Through this encounter and the turning of one’s whole being to Christ, one is given the gift of the Holy Spirit Who instructs in all ways and allows us to continually re-member Christ (John 14:26). For that part of the journey, one must enter a community of Christian disciples.

This blog is to get you moving toward the tent of meeting; it is about facilitating the encounter with Christ, the Christ of the Ages, Who was never lost but was always waiting at the door of everyone’s heart — if we had but eyes to see and ears to hear. May eyes and ears be opened! In Jesus’ Name, I pray.

A Note On Method: Visio Divina — How to Engage with Sacred Images