For Duns Scotus, the Christ Mystery was the blueprint of reality from the very start (John 1:1). Teilhard de Chardin brought this insight into our modern world.
God’s first “idea” was to become manifest—to pour out divine, infinite love into finite, visible forms. Both are about love and beauty exploding outward in all directions. Creation is indeed the Body of God! What else could it be, when you think of it?
In Jesus, this eternal omnipresence had a
precise, concrete, and personal referent. God’s presence became more obvious and believable in the world. But this apparition only appeared in the last ten seconds of December 31, as it were—scaling the universe’s entire history to a single year. Was God saying nothing and doing nothing for 13.8 billion years? Our code word for that infinite saying and doing was the “Eternal Christ.” (See John 1:1-5, Colossians 1:15-20, Ephesians 1:9-12 if you think this is some new idea.)
Vague belief and spiritual intuition became specific and concrete and personal in Jesus—with a “face” that we could “hear, see, and touch” (1 John 1:1). The formless now had a personal form, according to Christian belief.
But it seems we so fell in love with this personal interface with Jesus that we forgot about the Eternal Christ, the Body of God, which is all of creation, which is really the “First Bible.” Jesus and Christ are not exactly the same. In the early Christian era, only a few Eastern Fathers (such as Origen of Alexandria and Maximus the Confessor) cared to notice that the Christ was clearly historically older, larger, and different than Jesus himself. They mystically saw that
Jesus is the union of human and divine in space and time, and the Christ is the eternal union of matter and Spirit from the beginning of time.
When we believe in Jesus Christ, we’re believing in something much bigger than just the historical incarnation that we call Jesus.
Jesus is just the visible map. The entire sweep of the meaning of the Anointed One, the Christ, includes us and includes all of creation since the beginning of time. Revelation was geological, physical, and nature-based before it was ever personal and fully relational (see Romans 1:20).~
https://cac.org/god-in-all-things-2016-10-23/