Jesus Between: Bonhoeffer, Interbeing, and Co-Becoming in an Emergent Christian Spirituality

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christology describes Jesus Christ as the simultaneous boundary, mediator, and center of all human relations. I extend these images beyond the human realm to explore this “Jesus Between” as congruent with scientific descriptions of the inter-relationality of the cosmos, a perspective resonant also with Thich Nhat Hanh’s language of “interbeing” and with Maya Ward’s leadership, in dialogue with Gay’wu teachers and Country, of land-based processes of emergent “co-becoming.” Perceiving Jesus as between fosters a Christian practice of complex animate relations: a way to understand Colossians 1:17 proclaiming, in Thomas Berry’s words, “the universe [as] the ultimate sacred reality.”