History, Phenomenology, and Theology

Abstract

This chapter brings together the presentation of Michel Henry’s reading of John in Chapter Six with themes explored in the previous two parts of the work. In particular the connection is made in the concern of both theology and phenomenology with ‘apocalypse’, that is, ‘unveiling’, ‘revelation’, ‘appearance’. This unveiling results in a doubling: the way Scripture had been read before the Passion (as narratives about the past) and now in the light of the Passion (as speaking about Christ); and following this unveiling: the identity of Christ, no longer known as the son of Joseph and Mary, but the eternal Word of God; the Eucharist, which appears in the world to be bread and wine, but is consumed as the life-giving flesh of Christ; and ourselves, not simply as bodily children of our parents, but, as living flesh, sons and daughters of God, with a body not made by hands, eternal in the heavens. Sharing the Passion of Christ, recalled from absorption in the world to the pathos of life, is our entry, in and with Christ, into the divine reality of God, in which, while remaining what we are by nature, created beings, we share in the properties of God, uncreated and eternal, just as iron, when placed in a fire, remains what it is by nature but is now only known by the properties of the fire. And in turn, the divine fire, while remaining unchanged, is now embodied, but in a body no longer known by spatio-temporal properties as it appears in this world. The economy of God, understood in an apocalyptic key, brings together heaven and earth, the beginning and the end, in Christ, the first human being, the theanthropos.