The Cosmic Christ and His Gospel

The Toledo Bible was created for the religious instruction of Louis IX of France. Such Bibles, known as Bibles Moralisées, used pictures accompanied by short descriptions to draw theological/allegorical and moral meanings from select Old and New Testament passages/events.

Theological/allegorical meanings suffuse the work: God the Son, Pantocrator, is the ruler and creator of the universe, but he is crowned by a cruciform nimbus; his blue cloak over his brown tunic symbolizes the Word becoming flesh; his throne and feet on a gold sphere indicate his divinity; the background gold leaf represents the heavens; the angelic figures at each corner, the heavenly host. He is enthroned in the act of creation; his left hand supporting the universe and the compass in his right inscribing the unformed, chaotic deep of Genesis 1:1 (below) with order.

The illumination also captures ancient and medieval teachings about God Pantocrator as both Son and nurturing, birthing Mother. English anchorite and mystic Julian of Norwich (c.1342–c.1430) presents a vivid expression of this tradition: ‘[O]ur Saviour is our very mother in whom we be endlessly born, and never shall come out of him’ (Revelations of Divine Love 14.52). 

The Toledo Bible image is similarly lively and dramatic. The orb held between the Son’s spread legs depicts the separated waters under the dome of Genesis 1:6–7. But as its position suggests, it is also a womb. This illumination offers a provocative aid for visualizing Colossians 1:16, that, ‘in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him’. Creation literally passes ‘through him’.

Both Colossians and the Pantocrator of the Toledo Bible express a God simultaneously transcendent and immanent; enthroned in heaven (Colossians 3:1) and incarnate (1:15, 19); a God in and for whom all creation exists; God the Son, ever present and always inscribing and birthing the always new and vital universe after his own youthful image. 

In his hands, on, from, and through his lap, ‘all things hold together’ (1:17) and find their origin and destination in ‘the first born of all creation’ (1:15).

References

Julian of Norwich. 1999. Revelations of Divine Love (New York: Penguin Classics)

The letter to the Colossians is a polemical writing addressed to Christians at Colossae, Laodicea, and Hierapolis in central Asia Minor (modern-day Türkiye), who are following what Paul calls ‘philosophy and empty deceit’ (2:8). But Paul quickly shifts his focus from his audience to the grace of God and the gospel that is the source of any commendation he can offer.

The Gemma Augustea proclaims another gospel spreading throughout the world. Indeed Paul’s word ‘gospel (euangellion)’ is an imperial term that was used to describe the ‘good news’ of the coming of Augustus Caesar and the peace he brought to his empire. This luxury object offers a snapshot of the ‘fruits’ of Augustus’s reign. 

It is divided into two registers. Above, Augustus, in the guise of the top Roman god, Jupiter, is seated alongside his wife Livia represented as the goddess Roma. Below are the fruits of this rule: Roman auxiliaries with helmets representing different corners of the Empire pull up a Roman trophy displaying despoiled enemy arms.

Two gospels: one of Jesus and the other of Augustus, both spreading through the world; there could not be a sharper contrast between them. One is centred in conquest and violence; the other is rooted in the grace and peace from God our Father (1:2), a grace and peace that Paul will go on to describe as won and proclaimed in the one vanquished and brutalized by Rome, Jesus Christ (v.20). 

In the Gemma Augustea there is a transfer—riffing verse 13—‘into the kingdom of his [Jupiter’s] beloved son [Augustus]’, as attested by the brutal absorption into the empire through military victory. In Colossians the transfer is through ‘redemption, the forgiveness of sins’ (v.14), through Jesus’s paradoxical victorious defeat on the cross (v.15).

For Paul’s listeners there could not have been a more striking contrast in ‘gospels’ and as the letter proceeds from affirmation to censure, they will need to choose what version of good news they will cling to and follow: the one that exercises dominion by way of slavery or the one rooted in the grace and peace that bears the fruit of ‘love in the Spirit’ (v.8).

The Berlin Wall came down on 9 November 1989 without a single gunshot, largely thanks to the Church’s role in organizing non-violent resistance to the East German regime. Every Monday night, prayers for peace were conducted across East Germany. One month before the fall of the wall, in and around St Nicholas Church and other churches in Leipzig, more than 70,000 people gathered to pray for peace.

This poster announces these prayerful demonstrations. The logo of a blacksmith hammering a sword into a ploughshare, illustrating Micah 4:3, is modelled after Yevgeny Vuchetich’s statue donated to the United Nations by the Soviet Union in 1959. In 1980, graphic artist Herbert Sander adapted the image for the East German Protestant church, which created 100,000 copies for distribution through its congregations. 

Through the eighties the image was widely reproduced on metal buttons, decals, posters, banners, and placards. When students started to wear it as a badge, the German regime prohibited its public display and expelled anyone who wore it to university, with the result that people began to appear in public with a hole cut out of the clothes where the logo had once been fastened.

Though Micah 4:3 sits alongside the image, an exegetical gloss might well be Colossians 1:19–20. Colossians celebrates peace and non-violent reconciliation in a provocative way. The words ‘to reconcile’ and ‘making peace’ are imperial terms celebrating the power of the emperor to pacify enemies through war. But in Colossians peace and reconciliation come through Jesus’s self-sacrifice. This is where the fullness of God is revealed, where swords are beaten into ploughshares, as the little one from Galilee dies in obedience to his own command to love one’s enemies and not to retaliate with violence.

In Leipzig, 70,000 little ones gathered to express Jesus’s way and, for a moment, the fullness of God was once again made flesh as the Son became incarnate amongst them. Such incarnation causes powers and principalities to quake as God moves the world towards justice and love. It happens in as small an act as praying with one another for reconciliation and peace, at 5pm every Monday.