The Christian Mutation: Reclaiming the Dynamic God of the Jesus

Ilia Delio traces a bold theological arc: the God revealed in Jesus marked a radical breakthrough―an intimate, dynamic relationship between God and creation that was unlike anything before it. But as the early Church confronted heresy, it reached for the stabilizing frameworks of Neoplatonic thought, gradually trading that living insight for philosophical abstraction. This move was eventually codified in Thomist metaphysics, where it became the dominant tradition. Yet another current ran beneath the surface. Through Francis of Assisi, Duns Scotus, and Bonaventure, a creation-centered, incarnational faith survived―one that kept God close to the world rather than remote from it. Delio argues the Church has remained too long in the grip of its older metaphysical inheritance, and that renewal is overdue. That renewal, she suggests, is already underway. Whitehead’s process theology breathes new life into this alternative tradition, and Teilhard de Chardin draws it into dialogue with Catholic thought. The thread comes together in Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’―a genuinely Franciscan theology of creation that recovers, at last, the intimacy between God and the world that Jesus first made visible, a living God at home in a dynamically relational universe.