ABSTRACT
This chapter compares the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Sergii Bulgakov in so far as they understand creaturely being and its potential intersection with current debates on Christ’s presence in the world understood through deep incarnation. While Christ as the form of beauty in Balthasar and as Divine Wisdom incarnate in Bulgakov both have Platonic tones, my argument is that such notions should not be dispensed with too hastily in a search for a contemporary meaning of the Body of Christ in alignment with various forms of new materialism. In so far as Christ fully shared in our human nature with its entangled and evolutionary history, the emergent movement from our creaturely embedded nature is one pointing to transcendence. However, there is also, I argue, an equally important and complementary movement the other way around from the divine to creaturely being through divine-creaturely encounter. That encounter is, I suggest, the basis through which the Body of Christ understood in a cosmic sense can be properly understood, an eschatological understanding of the earth that is both becoming Christ’s body while not yet being fully transformed.
