David Cowles
Dec 1, 2024
“A bond exists between us that unites who Jesus is essentially with who I am existentially. I change with every breath; Jesus never changes.”
There is an ad running on TV these days that includes the tag line, “Jesus, he gets us!” And so he does; but how?
Jesus forms a perfect bond, a template, with each of us. Without undergoing any change himself, Jesus makes a unique version of himself available to every subject (e.g. you and me). Jesus templates us, and as we will see shortly, he is ‘template’ per se. Or, to paraphrase St. Francis, “It is in being for all that he is one.”
Jesus Christ is the second person of the Trinity, called the Son. Children do not choose their parents; they bond with them. With more or less fidelity (Jesus is 100% faithful) every child templates its parent(s). There is no better image of this than the ‘babe at breast’ and we see Jesus depicted as such in many Christian works of art.
Ontologically, Jesus templates his Father. The relationship between the Father and the Son, i.e. the Spirit, is the paradigmatic relationship. But because it is Jesus’ essential character (Sonship) to template, Jesus templates whatever he encounters, beginning with his Father but extending to each of us.
Christians see in Jesus Martin Buber’s eternal, universal Thou. Of course, every actual entity is specific and unique; but the template itself, to the extent that it is a faithful template, is the same in every case. So it is because Jesus forms a unique bond with everyone that he himself is unchanging. In Jesus, plasticity = identity. It is in being all that he is one.
Of course, templating with Jesus is not accidental; it is ontological and genealogical: “Through him all things were made.” (John 1: 3) It is only because Jesus is that you are; for you, Jesus is the divine other, the perfect template. Like Buber’s Thou, Christ is universal and eternal as well as intensely personal.
From our perch in spacetime, ‘relata’ precedes relationship; but from God’s perspective, outside of spacetime, relationship precedes relata. Actual entities are first and foremost relational. I am because you are: no you, no me, no He, no thee!
Dear reader, you and I have a relationship. We touch each other in a single region of spacetime, i.e. the time and space it takes for me to write and you to read this post. My spouse and I have known each other for more than 50 years. We are ‘tangent’ over a much larger region; but even that is a postage stamp compared to the extent of our relationship with Jesus, the one eternal Thou present in every You.
Jesus remakes himself for each of us. In that way Jesus never changes. He is the same in relation to me as he is in relation to you and yet he is unique to each of us. “And yet…”? No, “And so…”
We both encounter the exact same Jesus; but we encounter him in two different ways. Each of us knows Jesus differently, i.e. personally, even though he himself is exactly the same, i.e. universal, for everyone:
X : A :: X : B, C, D…
Jesus is ‘the one who templates all others’, Father first!
This resolves the so-called ‘Scandal of Particularity’ – “If God, the creator of heaven and earth, is incarnate in creation, why in first century Palestine on the 3rd rock from our Sun?”
The traditional ‘solution’ to this dilemma is simply “Why not?” Things have to happen ‘some where and some when’ but according to Einstein, every ‘where and when’ is just like every other ‘where and when’, so it doesn’t matter when or where something happens; it is as if it happened every where and every when:
Some where/when = any where/when = every where/when.
But this argument is as dissatisfying as it is incontrovertible. The formula presented here would elevate why not to of course. In fact, the Incarnation had to occur ‘somewhere, some when’ to be real but it could have been anywhere, any when.
Jesus templates me. A bond exists between us that unites who Jesus is essentially with who I am existentially. I change with every breath (Heraclitus) ; Jesus never changes (Parmenides). Is this the deeper meaning of the Musketeers’ “All for one and one for all”? Jesus is ‘all for my one’ and ‘one for us all’.
It’s not that there are 8 billion Jesus on Earth today. There is only one, now or ever, here or anywhere. Jesus does not come in parts. Unlike a shared pizza, there is no ‘my slice, your slice’; each of us gets a whole pie but…and it’s the same pie for everyone.
This is Loaves and Fishes on steroids. One pie feeds one, one pie feeds all! Once or twice a year, I get to enjoy the world’s greatest pizza, not in Napoli or Palermo, but in Randolph MA, at the Lynwood Café. On such occasions, ‘private property’ loses all meaning; the concept is unmentionable. Like Jesus’ disciples in the early Church, we enjoy all our goods in common.
Nor is there any risk of shortage. As soon as someone imagines a new flavor combo, it is ordered and on its way to our table. At $12.00 per pie, we are restricted only by the depth of our imaginations, and the size of our stomachs, and not thankfully by the size of our bank accounts. Surely, this is a foretaste of Heaven!
This relatively mundane theological speculation has transformative implications for cosmology and anthropology. The Second Person of the Trinity is a singularity. Jesus’ event horizon consists of ‘information’ that perfectly complements the information content of every tangent entity.
There is no ‘right Jesus’ or ‘wrong Jesus’, but there is ‘my Jesus’ and ‘your Jesus’; both of course, are the ‘same Jesus’. Objectively, there is one Jesus, but subjectively, Jesus manifests uniquely for everyone.
Our relationship with Jesus tips us off that there is more to reality than a 4 dimensional continuum. We are not just nodes in a social web. Each of us has a straight line connection to the singularity at the heart of Being itself (God). This gives new meaning to the 2nd half of the Great Commandment (“Love your neighbor as yourself”).
How is it that my neighbor is also myself? There are two approaches to this question, both rooted in models taken from Structuralism. The experience of being-in-the-world is the same for everyone (who is in the world).
Therefore, your being-in-the-world and my being-in-the-world are functionally and objectively equivalent, despite their accidental and subjective differences. Neither of our vantages deserves to be treated preferentially; therefore, our experiences are denotatively identical though connotatively unique. Everyone undergoes the same ‘childhood’, though no two childhoods are the same.
The second approach may be more satisfying. Jesus actually forms a perfect template with you and a perfect template with me. Therefore, you and I must potentially form a perfect template with each other. This is a more familiar mathematical relation:
If A = B and A = C, then A = C.
The standard model of cosmogenesis is incredibly complex and arcane. Every day we have to adjust it to account for new data. The Christian model is a bit simpler: “Through him (Jesus) all things were made.” (John 1: 3) Where is Occam when we need him?
David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at dtc@gc3incorporated.com.
