How might Whitehead describe Jesus?

In Whitehead’s process theology, God begins as unconscious—the primordial non-temporal accident of Creativity—yearning for relationship. At the outset, God is alone, holding the solitary envisagement of all possibilities, longing for their realization.

But the whole history of cosmic evolution is required before matter and energy can organize themselves into a species capable of conscious self-reflection: the human being. On this planet, there have been a few particular humans—Jesus being a primary example—who arise in the right conditions to become aware of that primordial yearning which gave rise to the entire cosmic process. This awakening discloses what Whitehead calls the consequent nature of God, God as “the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands.” In Jesus, God’s consequent nature is not only consciously recognized but embodied in the flesh, becoming self-luminous in a creaturely life.

Jesus is that breakthrough, the first organism on earth to awaken fully to the divine longing at the heart of cosmogenesis. Maybe this incarnational awakening has happened elsewhere, on other planets (as Giordano Bruno was the first to speculate). Jesus’ realization carries consequences for the further evolution of humanity. He sees that the true aim of the whole process is not a shallow happiness but unconditional love, love born of separative strife and healed through the free deed that overcomes it. Love presupposes distance and builds a bridge across that distance.

Jesus’s life and embodiment of the Christ becomes the glimmer of this healing, radiating outward. His vision of God’s consequent nature is of love’s consummation, not yet achieved by the human community but recognized as the goal, the Omega of evolution. Around this vision, a religion forms. Yet the insight, the evolutionary breakthrough, is not exclusive to Christianity—Buddha, Krishna, and others have glimpsed it, too.

As Christianity institutionalized, this all becomes encoded in mythic and increasingly legalistic language: Jesus as sacrificial lamb, dying for our sins. But the real point, often elided and made to seem blasphemous by official church doctrines, is that He is an example, not an exception. Jesus is not a metaphysical anomaly, but a living exemplification of God’s consequent nature. He shows the path we are to follow: not to dissolve our individuality into divine oneness, but to affirm it freely, offering ourselves in service.

The “Body of Christ” is not a formless blob, nor a collective mind like the Borg, but a union of distinct persons, each freely contributing to a greater harmony. Whitehead’s vision of ultimate beauty is increasing complexity and diversity held together in unity: “Peace is a Harmony of Harmonies… the removal of the stress of acquisitive feeling due to the clash of individual purposes.”

So Jesus the Christ is the exemplar of this process. Rather than holding Him up as uniquely divine, the challenge is to bear the cross ourselves, to see that individuality exists for the sake of living service. That is what the divine has always longed for, and we are only now becoming conscious of it.

It isn’t guaranteed we will fulfill this arc of evolution: we must choose it freely. Failure is possible. Yet the human life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as Christ expresses the truth that even the most tragic event—the death of God—can be woven into higher harmony.

For Whitehead, God does not cancel and cannot prevent suffering but enfolds it into the divine life. The “objective immortality” of each moment is preserved within God’s consequent nature. Thus resurrection is not reversal, not undoing the crucifixion, but transfiguration: the cross becomes part of a wider harmony in which love conquers the estrangement implied by death. Whitehead’s language of Peace captures this:

The Peace that is here meant is not the negative con­ception of anaesthesia. It is a positive feeling which crowns the ‘life and motion’ of the soul. It is hard to define and difficult to speak of. It is not a hope for the future, nor is it an interest in present details. It is a broadening of feeling due to the emergence of some deep metaphysical insight, unverbalized and yet momentous in its coordination of values. Its first effect is the removal of the stress of acquisitive feeling arising from the soul’s preoccupation with itself. Thus Peace carries with it a surpassing of personality. There is an inversion of relative values. It is primarily a trust in the efficacy of Beauty. It is a sense that fineness of achievement is as it were a key unlocking treasures that the narrow nature of things would keep remote. There is thus involved a grasp of infinitude, an appeal beyond boundaries. Its emotional effect is the subsidence of turbu­lence which inhibits. More accurately, it preserves the springs of energy, and at the same time masters them for the avoidance of paralyzing distractions. The trust in the self-justification of Beauty introduces faith, where reason fails to reveal the details. (Adventures of Ideas, 285)

Peace is resurrection without mythology, the transformation of suffering into beauty within the growing body of God. Jesus Christ reveals that this transformation is not a distant abstraction but a living possibility. His resurrection story is the symbol of what Whitehead articulates as a metaphysical truth: that the God-World relation advances through tragedy, and that tragedy itself can be woven into a higher order of beauty.

Humanity is only beginning to awaken to this message. The resurrection of Christ is less a past event than an ongoing call to trust that even our failures and sorrows can be transfigured into beauty if we align ourselves with the divine aim of love.

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