Panikkar & Conditioned baggage that prevents the Christophanic Experience...

Conditioned baggage that prevents the Christophanic Experience...

Intellectually, I find it hard at times to wrap my mind or heart around the shades of meaning in some of Panikkar's statements, such as, "I am not saying that Christ is the fullness of life but that this fullness, effective since the beginning, is one that the Christian tradition calls Jesus the Christ," to a seeming contradictory quote, "“For in him the whole fullness of divinity dwells bodily” (Colossians 2:9);" and his note: "[3] It is sadly significant that the phrase “the body of Christ” (Col 2:17) has disappeared in numerous translations", etc. There are these tensions in Panikkar between not rejecting traditional christology to what seems to be a rejection of it.

Perhaps, its incorrect to say it's an intellectual struggle. It's more of an emotional twinge, pain or knot stemming from the challenge "against" my own rootedness in traditional Christianity; and the stretching I feel as Panikkar is trying to tease, coax, or even at times aggressively expand my boundaries and vision. His challenge is:

"it is the task of the third Christian millennium to transcend abrahamic monotheism without damaging the legitimacy and validity of monotheistic religions. This task, initiated at the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15:1:22), entails not a denial of the divine but an opening to the great intuition of the Trinity—the meeting point of human traditions."

Perhaps if we, if I, can separate the cultural, ecclesiastical or otherwise conditioned baggage by which I philosophically interpret "Christ" from the "desire for fullness and life, for happiness and the infinite, for truth and beauty that goes beyond religious and cultural contingencies,' then can discover that more important christophanic experience of Christ. As Panikkar says,

"What remains is Christ: real symbol of divinization—that is the Fullness of Man. (Some would prefer that I say “symbol of human Fullness,” but this would not be correct; the fullness of Man is more than a human fullness. The complete Man is Man divinized; that unique being, athirst for the infinite, is not himself until he reaches his destiny.) Man is more than his “human” nature."

As St Paul Prays in Ephesians:

that we may be filled with the "utter fullness of God" (3.19) and

that we may "all reach the unity in faith...and form the perfect man, fully mature with the fullness of Christ himself" (4.13).