ABSTRACT
For more than two decades the contemporary movement of religious naturalism has been growing. Naturalistic theism is part of a major shift in Western thought-from thinking of everything as individual substances to thinking of everything as events or processes. This is a shift into dynamic relational thinking, namely, that everything is constituted by relationships and in turn becomes part of constituting others. If one asks how earlier thinkers in Western thought have approached the idea of what a human being is, two things are apparent. First is the idea of substance. All things including humans are substances, which mean they are not composed of internal relations but are one kind of thing that is externally related to others. Through the centuries of Western thought there have been many ways of symbolizing the meaning of Jesus. Historian Jaroslav Pelikan presents many metaphors of Jesus that show his significance for the Christian community in the changing, wider cultural context.
