Can we be too or insufficiently Christocentric?
Gamma Gamaliel
Shipmate
in Purgatory
An Orthodox priest once asked me whether the independent charismatic evangelical church I'd been involved with was overly 'Christocentric'.
My response was along the following lines, 'Kind of. I know what you mean, I think but also I tend to think that this tendency can be exaggerated by those who don't operate within those particular settings. In essence, they are pretty much straight down the line Trinitarian even if the language needs tightening up a bit.'
I don't want to go over old ground or start yet another 'worship wars' thread about gushy 'Jesus is my boyfriend' style worship songs.
No, my aim is to explore what we mean by being 'Christocentric'. How does this express itself in word and deed? How is it reflected in worship and in action?
Can we be too Christocentric?
Can we be insufficiently Christocentric?
Are some churches or movements more Christocentric than others?
My response was along the following lines, 'Kind of. I know what you mean, I think but also I tend to think that this tendency can be exaggerated by those who don't operate within those particular settings. In essence, they are pretty much straight down the line Trinitarian even if the language needs tightening up a bit.'
I don't want to go over old ground or start yet another 'worship wars' thread about gushy 'Jesus is my boyfriend' style worship songs.
No, my aim is to explore what we mean by being 'Christocentric'. How does this express itself in word and deed? How is it reflected in worship and in action?
Can we be too Christocentric?
Can we be insufficiently Christocentric?
Are some churches or movements more Christocentric than others?
Comments
The Parables?
The Sermon on The Mount?
Are those who stress the social and humanitarian aspects of the Gospel being Christocentric in a different way to those who focus on the Cross and the Atonement to the virtual exclusion of anything else?
Within Pentecostalism the unitarian 'Jesus-Only' groups outwith the mainstream Trinitarian ones could be taken as an example of a focus on Christ taken to an extreme.
FWIW I think we can foster a healthy Christocentricism within a Trinitarian framework.
Otherwise, I think it's hard to go overboard. I mean, "no one comes to the Father except through me." Since we can't do an end run around Jesus to get to the Father on our own (and who would want to?), he's inevitably involved in any approach to the Father. And the Spirit, too, is tangled up with him, as "He will take what is mine and glorify me"--and that is explained as "All that belongs to the Father is mine; that is why I said He would take what is mine" etc. So I really don't think you can get one person of the Trinity in isolation from the rest, they / he comes as a whole.
But there's no denying that under normal circumstances, Jesus is a great deal easier to approach, consider, think of, etc. because he is the Son of Man and we have records of his life. There are certainly individuals who may have trouble with him for personal reasons, just as I did so long with the Father (given family abuse in the background); but by and large, I think most people would start with Christ.
In classic Oneness Pentecostalism the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are all manifestations of one God. That they often call God Jesus isn't necessarily an indication of an overly Christocentric approach but rather a result of reading the NT through a sub-Trinitarian lens, in practice it's Monarchianism rather than a focus on 'Christ'.
And he is the only one of all 3 who, according to the faith of our fathers, and our fathers' fathers, and our fathers' fathers' fathers, shares our nature.
Amen!
Consider, for example, the (Nicene/Niceno-Constantinopolitan) Creed. It is clearly Trinitarian, but the Father and the Spirit each get four lines, while Jesus gets 20 lines. (Yeah, I know how “lines” are counted depends on formatting; I’m looking at the formats published by the English Language Liturgical Consultation and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.)
Baptism and Eucharist involve all three Persons of Trinity, but Christ is at the forefront of both. In baptism, we speak of joining in Christ’s baptism, in his death abs resurrection, and to being made part of the Body of Christ. In the Eucharist, we follow Christ’s direction to “do this as my memorial,” and we are nourished by his Body and Blood.
So I’m not sure we can be too Christocentric unless we truly elevate the Second Person of the Trinity over the First and Third Persons, or effectively ignore the First and Third Persons altogether.
But if the Christ-event, to use Karl Barth’s term, is the definitive self-revelation of God to humanity that stands at the center of God’s relationship with humanity, then Christocentrism would seem to be inevitable. Christ is, as it were, the key to the whole shebang.
This part of your post "Are those who stress the social and humanitarian aspects of the Gospel being Christocentric in a different way to those who focus on the Cross and the Atonement to the virtual exclusion of anything else?"
I think they are different. I have had to drop the cross and atonement totally. They can take of themselves if there is an afterlife in heaven. Which I don't believe in anymore so it does not matter. The only things that matter is the kindness part. This is misread as "love as a feeling" in my opinion.
On this--well, I might be misunderstanding, but I don't think it's easy to pry apart the various things Jesus said and did without winding up with an impaired view of him--and consequently an impaired Christocentrism.
Essentially, I'm probably on the same page as them on this one - and much else besides.
It's Ascension Day today, on most if not all calendars as far as I'm aware.
According to scripture and Tradition, Christ's resurrected human body was taken up into heaven. Our humanity is represented in heaven.
Today's sermon was about that at the Orthodox Liturgy I attended this morning and I later read some Anglican reflections that said the self-same thing.
I'm happy to accept the whole kit and caboodle but can't pretend that's easy at times and I certainly don't want to detract from the kindness and 'horizontal' humanitarian concern angle that you've rightly highlighted.
I'm coming back to the both/and mantra I'm notorious for on these boards.
Sure. I get that, @chrisstiles and once again, as so often, your meticulous and thoughtful approach has elucidated something for me. However ...
I could be pedantic though and suggest that it's Modalism rather than Monarchicism.
But I still take your point.
If I wanted to be controversial, I'd suggest that there's a lot more Modalism around in contemporary charismatic evangelicalism than is healthy for it but generally that's more down to a certain liturgical sloppiness than anything else.
I think the One-ness Pentecostals are further off beam.
I listened into a conversation on a railway platform recently where an earnest clearly One-ness Pentecostal was sharing his faith with a guy who was rather the worse for drink.
My heresy-detector monitor went into overdrive ... riddit-dit-dit-riddit-dit-dit-riddit-dit-dit eurggh ...errrghh ... eeeeeeegh! Kaboom!
It was way, way off by any small o orthodox standards, whether Reformed, Wesleyan, Anglican, Lutheran ...
He is simultaneously the God who reveals himself to humanity, and the human to whom God is fully revealed.
He is simultaneously the God who elects/predestines, and the human who is elected/predestined.
He is simultaneously the redeemer and the redeemed.
In the covenant between God and humanity, Jesus Christ stands on both sides of the covenant.
Classically Monarchianism came in modal and adoptionist forms, in practice Oneness theology is another variant of it because the way they describe 'manifestations' is different to classical modalism (and they are quite clear that they don't believe in any form of patripassionism). This is not merely to quibble, but to point out that you don't get to where they do theologically just by 'being too Christocentric' (they are actually trying get to the nature of God from a different place to orthodox christianity).
*shakes head* "Come on now, Patrick..."
So you are saying it's 'Barth/and' ... 😉
I'll get me coat ...
I've not thought what the 24 represents here but yes, clearly 2 X 12.
Then there's the line in the Western hymn Alleluia, Sing To Jesus by William Chatterton Dix:
'Thou on earth both priest and victim in the Eucharistic feast.'
I've known people baulk at that one on the grounds that it's 'too Catholic.'
But yes ...
Orthodox hymnody is full of such paradoxes, particularly at Christmas and Easter.
I only know Barth by reputation @Nick Tamen and haven't read any of his works but yes, I like that.
She takes a 'Christocentric' approach but not to the detriment of God the Father or God the Holy Spirit.
The issue I was exploring through the OP was whether certain Christian traditions can become out of synch or out of whack, as it were in terms of emphasising one or another of the divine Persons in the Holy and Undivided Trinity over against the others.
As I mentioned, an Orthodox priest seemed to think that certain Protestant evangelical groups tended to be overly Christological rather than Trinitarian in a more rounded (or triangular) sense.
My answer was it may look like that at times - or sound like it if you listened to the prayers and worship songs - but the reality is more complex than that.
I certainly don't believe I was less Trinitarian as a Protestant evangelical Christian than I am now as an Orthodox one, but I would say that my grasp - such as it is - of some nuances may be more 'developed' now. I put it no stronger than that and it's impossible to prove should we even want to do so.
I'm not sure that asking whether the Sermon on The Mount is more 'Christocentric' than anything else in the Gospels or NT is the right question to ask - although I think I can see where @Hugal is coming from.
It seems to me that the Sermon on The Mount is thoroughly holistic from every angle - both vertically in the Godward sense and horizontally in terms of our relationship with one another as human beings.
FWIW another Orthodox priest once observed to me that he felt that 'Western' Christians were certainly Trinitarian in terms of experience, even if the way they articulated these things differed from how the Orthodox might.
I'm thinking aloud here. Thinking allowed.
I'm not proffering any hard and fast clear-cut answers.
The bottom line for me is that all Trinitarian believers are my brothers and sisters in Christ.
Yes, this is my great comfort.
I wouldn't go as far as "terror," but yes -- imposing some kind of super-belief about Jesus of Nazareth has been a convenient substitute for emulating the example of Jesus of Nazareth for some time, now.
He said predictably ...
Which is easier said than done of course.
I don't see why we have to put the Synoptics and the Gospel of John in opposition to each other.
I'd certainly accept a 'development' in Christological concepts and thinking. The Gospels and epistles didn't drop down from heaven ready made on tablets of stone.
Nor do I see that we have to put the vertical or Godward dimension in opposition to the horizontal or humanward dimension. Put them together and you have a cross.
Nor do I see the need for any dichotomy between worshipping Christ and following Christ. To follow him is to worship him.
I'm always wary of subdividing or categorising these things in any dualistic kind of way. The person who cares for an infirm or housebound relative rather than attending church services is serving Christ just as much if not more than those who are able to attend.
When I became Orthodox I could only attend the Liturgy on occasional Sundays due to caring commitments for my aged mother-in-law.
My parish priest told me that in Orthodox terms that was better than attending the Liturgy as I was serving Christ by serving my mother-in-law.
I doubt if Orthodoxy is unique in that. I'm sure other Christian traditions would say the same.
I can see what @ThunderBunk is getting at and I imagine all of us struggle to achieve some kind of balance. We all fall short.
But he gives more grace.
It's not about us and our own egos or point-scoring. Nor is it all about our own frailty.
It's about Christ.
We can none of us say we have 'arrived'.
This.
God knows we’ve spent our lives on refugee service for his sake, and I’m embarrassingly Christo-centric, having had issues with the Father lifelong. More to the point, I can’t think of anyone I know who worships Christ and ignores what he commands. The two correlate in my experience— the more they love and worship him, the more obedience means to them. Trying to carry it out, I mean. God knows we are all still very imperfect.
We don't have CCTV cameras on them 24/7. We don’t know what they do or don’t do when we aren't looking.
Besides, whatever our theology, Christology, pneumatology, eschatology or any other ology, we all fail to do what Jesus said.
The only person who ever fully did what Jesus said was Christ himself.
There's the story of the Desert Father who cried out to God for mercy from his death bed to the consternation of his fellow monks.
'But Abba, we hsve have always known you to be a godly man and an example of moral rectitude ...'
'My brothers, I have not even begun to repent!'
I can certainly envisage circumstances where individuals or entire congregations or denominations might consider a 'sound' or orthodox theology is meritorious in and of itself or even an end in itself without a great deal of reference to any practical outworking.
But even there we don't know what they are doing every waking hour. They might be caring for an elderly relative or someone with a longterm health condition.
They might be secretly giving to charity or helping their neighbours or ...
That's not to say we aren't to call out or seek to redress obvious abuses, imbalances or conduct unbecoming as it were.
But surely the question should be, 'what am I doing to fulfil the law of Christ?' rather than pointing 👉 the finger at this, that or the other group or individual?
We can all of us do more.
Having faith in Jesus means believing in his ability to save. Salvation is the means to an end, not the end in itself.
I think we've heard that before somewhere.
'Show me your faith by your works.'
I do think we set up false dichotomies on these things, understandably due to the debates and divisions in Western Christianity since the 16th century.
But somehow we have to get through all that and become more holistic.
An 'enquirer' in our parish asked me whether repentance was a 'work' or an issue of faith.
I told him it was both (no surprise there) as if we repent (something we do) then it's because we have faith (something we believe) that God will forgive us.
But the bottom line is that whoever we are and whatever Christian tradition we operate within there's a need for greater levels of discipleship both individually and corporately.
No question about that.
I'm with @ThunderBunk to that extent. But I don't think we could do any objective study or measure as to whether people with a 'high' Christology are more or less advanced in this respect than those with a 'low' Christology as it were.
People who believe that Christ was simply a moral teacher rather than God Incarnate can do very Christlike things. They can also do very bad or indifferent things.
Equally, people who are thoroughly orthodox in their Christology or Trinitarianism are capable of acting in ways that are completely at variance with the faith they profess.
I can do something that accords however lightly with the Sermon on The Mount one morning and something completely the opposite during the afternoon.
'Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?'
What I can't do is act as judge or jury on anyone else.
I still think it’s a fallacy to say, as was said above, that I’d say it’s more that the actions of such people speak more loudly than their words do.
As someone who has once been in a similar situation to that monk, the only answer I could give was the deeper I have swam out towards God the bigger I have known the ocean to be. I am still a beginner and much closer to the shore than I would like.
Yes, @Nick Tamen that is my take on the sheep & goats passage from Matthew 25. And previously, I did say "for some time," as you've noted. There's a lot of scholarship out there that details the idea that the teachings of Jesus and Paul represent two fundamentally different religions. Bart Ehrman has talked at length about this, and it's a very easy phenomenon to observe. Believing in Jesus as the Messiah for all of the reasons Paul describes can be seen as the beginning, middle, and end for a lot of Christians. There's no "least of these" to be found anywhere in their lives. Or their churches. But the judgments re: the sheep and goats isn't about what they believed, it was about how they lived in regard to the downtrodden.
There's a church near my in-laws' neighborhood that has a longstanding sign in its front yard that says "Faith Alone in Christ Alone" and it always gives me pause, because the Christ they claim never taught that. Paul did, though, essentially, and it's a hell of a lot easier just to say you believe 'in Jesus' than emulate him.
This may be a cultural thing from different parts of the world, but I’ve come across very few UK churches where thee isn’t an expectation that belief in Christ should lead to transformed behaviour.
There are differences of opinion and emphasis about how that should be worked out, but very few IME which don’t include concern for the poor, the marginalised, and those in need.
There are then, of course, ‘political’ differences about how they should be responded to. And in church life different communities have different views about the balance between Christian concern and action, and the proclamation of the Gospel.
I'd say that's the expectation all over the world. There's an expectation that Catholics eschew birth control, and yet here we are. Maybe that's too on the nose, or too specific an apple among oranges, but the larger point is that churches, ISTM, regardless of whether that means whole denominations or individual communities are having their 'expectations' rebuffed consistently and strongly. My inkling is that this is true, at least in part, because Belief In Jesus has risen to be The Thing that's most important to people. It supercedes everything else. Few if any are the least bit concerned about being revealed to be a goat. It's why there's a growing phenomenon of right wing men calling the Beatitudes "woke." Pejoratively.
This is an increasingly unimpressive refuge. Absolute agreement on the need for concern. Persistent quagmire re: execution.
Another unimpressive refuge, ISTM. If the appropriate balance between the sacred and secular is never reached, concern is left all alone. And oddly, the communities on the far end of the action spectrum never seem to rise to the top.
We just got yelled at for forgetting to tell our host congregation we had launched a new online ministry. We didn’t mean to leave them out, we’re just far too much in the habit of doing the thing and telling people about it afterward, if ever. But the chief elder who buttonholed me was right to feel hurt—they wanted to be involved too. So we are looking at what we can do jointly in the future.
It doesn't let us off the hook.
'Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees ...'
'I thank God I'm not like that wicked Joel Osteen over there, or that church down the road with its distortedly Pauline slogan ...'
How many refugees have I put up in my home recently?
I don't think it's a cop-out to state, as @BroJames has that very few churches make the kind of dichotomy between belief and action that @The_Riv suggests.
Of course there's room for improvement. Nobody is saying otherwise.
Perhaps there should be another thread on whether we can be too 'Pauline'?
FWIW I think many of us struggle with aspects of the Pauline corpus but his isn't the only NT voice, of course.
Besides, I think he's a lot more nuanced in places than he is sometimes portrayed.
It’ll be fun! We can have frozen custard after the tour.
I note also that what is being called "the religion of Paul" in this thread is big on Hell. Paul never mentions Hell. I submit that the "religion of Paul" is not in fact the religion of Paul.
There is a hyper-Protestant interpretation of Paul according to which faith is the only thing that matters - although in practice faith seems to involve largely being nasty to sexual minorities. I submit that this is in fact a caricature of what Paul believed, and that it has little to do with Jesus tells us nothing about Paul.
Sorry for your chief elder. Maybe tell him you inadvertently saved him from being praised by his neighbors mistakenly?
Paul’s writings, by contrast, are letters written to communities of Jesus’s followers—people who are presumably already familiar with what Jesus said and did. Paul’s letters appear to be written to address specific issues, problems or situations. While they certainly reflect how Paul, and presumably others in the early Church, understood Jesus, they have a different focus from the Gospels; they’re not intended to be “orderly accounts” of Jesus’s life, ministry, death and resurrection. So it’s not surprising they don’t simply repeat the Gospels.
On top of which, even Peter said Paul could be hard to understand, which could lead to his words being twisted.
Off the hook of what?
This is not at all what I was alluding to when sharing those examples. You're steering things in a log/speck direction.
In many respects, "following" doesn't require a lot of thought about what you believe, beyond believing in someone sufficiently to want to follow them. In this regard, "following Jesus" has been transformed from active discipleship into a set of beliefs about the One being followed.
I'm not sure about it being an expectation, as there don't appear to be significant consequences - psychological or otherwise - experienced by those whose behaviour isn't transformed. It appears that the thing that matters is having the concern - believing that one should be concerned.
Institutionally, the Church seems to have been designed to produce worshippers rather than followers. It's clearly possible to do both, but for much of the past 2000 years, it appears that the Church has focused its resources on creating and running places of worship.
By some people. That is my problem with this argument; it may be accurate in some cases, but it’s a massive overgeneralization to state it as a given. It’s confusing correlation with causation. That many focus on belief that Jesus is God Incarnate and ignore following Jesus and living in the way he taught doesn’t mean that believing in Jesus as God Incarnate results in ignoring following him and living as he taught.
The “worshippers” vs “followers” categorizations is, in my opinion and my experience, a false dichotomy.
I don't see how you can be a worshipper without being a follower (if those are the terms we're going to use to designate those who hold to his deity and those who try to do what he tells us to to). It doesn't even make sense for someone to say "I worship Jesus" and then ignore his commands. How is that worship?
If you mean that simple assent to a set of doctrines has replaced obedience to his commands, I think you'd have a hard time proving this. I mean, can you bring studies or citations or statistics or something? Mere assertion can be done by anybody. And the other side--that is, those who contend that you can be both a worshipper and a follower (and in fact, most people are both, not substituting one for the other)--well, we CAN bring that evidence. Because if you look at the major works of Christian humanitarianism, they are historically done and being done by people who overwhelmingly hold to the orthodox teachings AND put their faith into practice. Every Christian-founded clinic, hospital, school or university, refugee resettlement agency, etc. etc. etc. stands as a witness to this.
Is it possible for someone to merely assent to doctrines and do no more? Well, for a short while, I suppose so. But faith without works is dead, and someone in that position would doubtless lose what little faith they had left pretty quickly.
Is it possible to do the works without assent to doctrine? Well, for a short while there, too. But the corresponding danger here is that of being overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the need. My own experience suggests that, if Christ's Spirit isn't working through you (okay, me), you're likely to burn out quickly.
But I digress. Where is the proof that large numbers, or even a majority, of Christians have replaced obeying Jesus with mere belief in teachings about him? Give me something more than mere assertions.