A Note on “Christocentrism” And The Imprudent Use Of Such Terminology

By Richard A. Muller

[Richard A. Muller is the P. J. Zondervan Professor of Historical Theology at Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Mich.]

I. The Problem and the Proposal

There has been an enormous amount of discussion in recent years concerning the “christocentric” character of genuine Reformed theology, of the christocentrism of Calvin’s thought, particularly of the Institutes, and of the problematic character of less christocentric forms of Calvinist thought.[1] These theological discussions take several forms. Some attempt to drive a wedge between the thought of Calvin and Theodore Beza on the ground that the former is christocentric and the latter decretal, having posed predestination as the “central dogma.”[2] Alternatively, in the wake of recent reappraisal of Beza’s work and the potential description of Beza’s theology as christocentric, Beza’s thought might be portrayed as similar in its central emphasis on the work of Christ to Calvin’s own, and the blame for a post-Calvinian deviation from christocentrism laid at the door of some other successor-theologian, perhaps an advocate of covenant theology. After all, another form of the discussion has posed the potentially “legalistic” patterns of covenant theology against the christocentric theology of grace found in Calvin[3] —and still another pattern of argument has vindicated covenant theology and proclaimed it to stand in tension with Calvinistic predesti narianism.[4] Obviously, not all of these theories can be true at the same time, in the same place, and in the same way.

The terms “christocentrism” and “christocentric,” as used in such argumentation, float at the same level of mythological distance from the historical materials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the notion of central dogmas and whole theologies logically deduced from divine decrees—and such usage is far more subversive of genuine historical analysis than these other shibboleths, given its seemingly unimpeachable religious and theological value.[5] What Christian theologian, after all, would want to be anything other than christocentric?

It is the burden of this article not to pick and choose among these several approaches, but to note the problematic use of the term “christocentrism” in all of them and to plead—on the ground that most of the uses of the term evidence a neo-orthodox dogmatic interest (as distinct from a legitimate historiographical issue)—for a distinction of christocentrisms. Given, moreover, the recalcitrance of the dogmatic practitioners of Reformation studies, it is my intention to repent of earlier attempts of my own to offer a historiographical corrective to their usage. I no longer intend to propose a suitable statement of how and in what way the thought of the Reformers and the Reformed orthodoxy can be called christocentric. Rather, I will plead for the utter abolition of the term from discussions of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Protestant thought, much after the way we have gotten rid of notions of central dogmas and the “predestinarian metaphysic” of scholasticism.

II. On Defining and Distinguishing Christocentrisms

As an initial step toward arguing the case for abolition, I propose some definitions of the term. What has been lacking in much of the extant discussion of the existence and virtues of christocentric theologies is clear definition, indeed, definition and distinction of the various meanings and applications of “christocentrism” and associated terms as they have been applied to various documents and movements in the history of Christian thought. Given that such diverse figures as Irenaeus, Bonaventure, Duns Scotus, John Calvin, Theodore Beza, Jerome Zanchi, Jacob Arminius, Friedrich Schleiermacher, I. A. Dorner, Gottfried Thomasius, E. V. Gerhart, Henry B. Smith, William Adams Brown, and Karl Barth have been described as christocentric thinkers, some distinction is most surely necessary.

The doctrine of Christ, his person and his work, certainly stands at the center of Christian theology in general. No theological system, no matter how closely its contents resemble the other doctrines and dogmas of Christianity—whether it is “liberal” or “conservative”—can be called Christian if it fails to acknowledge the doctrine of Christ or fails to recognize it as the focus of theology toward which the relationship of God to the human race ultimately must be directed and in which it ultimately must be grounded. Once this basic premise has been stated, however, there are a great variety of ways in which its implications can be and have been developed in systems of Christian theology. Although I do not pretend to have found an exhaustive typology that includes perfectly every possible approach to the centrality of Christ to the system of Christian thought, I believe that the history of doctrine manifests three basic forms of christocentric teaching and that these three forms stand in a relationship to one another that is indicative of a development from a simple presentation of a doctrinal focus toward an increasingly elaborate and speculative structure resting upon that original doctrinal focus. The three forms can be denominated soteriological christocentrism, prototypical or teleological christocentrism, and principial christocentrism.

The first of these forms is a simple soteriological form that grounds both of the others. Soteriological christocentrism presents the theological affirmation of the absolute and necessary centrality of Christ to the work of salvation. This affirmation appears throughout the history of Christian doctrine as the essential tenet of the Christian faith and is perhaps most clearly stated in the Augustinian exclusion of the human will from the primary work of grace. In the Augustinian view, our salvation is, thus, founded on the work of God in Christ and not on any work of our own. Nonetheless, theologies that tend to a more synergistic view of the relationship between grace and the human will can also beunderstood as soteriologically christocentric, insofar as they assume that salvation is impossible apart from the saving work of Christ at the center of God’s redemptive plan. In this sense, all of the early fathers, the fully developed forms of Greek patristic theology, various forms of Augustinian, semi-Augustinian and semi-Pelagian theology (not to mention Thomism and Scotism) in the Middle Ages, the theologies of the Reformation, post-Reformation Reformed and Lutheran thought, and Arminian theology can all be identified as soteriologically christocentric.

The second, prototypical form is characterized by a systematizing emphasis on the Adam-Christ typology and the priority of Christ over Adam. This prototypical christocentrism includes the message of soteriological christocentrism, but also moves from the basic soteriological affirmation of the centrality of Christ to the more speculative, but nonetheless biblical and exegetical, argument that Christ, the new Adam and the “second man,” has a certain priority over the old Adam, the “first man,” in the ultimate plan of God. It is in this sense that the theology of Irenaeus of Lyons has been called christocentric, as also the theology of Duns Scotus and his followers in the Franciscan order.[6]

The third or principial form is characterized by the understanding of Christ (rather than Scripture and God) as both principium essendi and principium cognoscendi theologiae.[7] Thus, principial christocentrism includes and even presupposes the two preceding patterns, but it moves on to argue, still more speculatively, that the Christ-idea must be used as the interpretive key to understanding and elucidating all doctrinal topics. It is on these grounds that Schleiermacher and other nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century systematicians, like I. A. Dorner, Gottfried Thomasius, E. V. Gerhart, Henry B. Smith, and William Adams Brown, are regularly termed christocentric thinkers and are either praised for their emphasis on Christ as the central focus of Christian doctrine or blamed for developing a somewhat arbitrarily controlled and restricted structure of meaning within which to conceive the body of Christian doctrine.[8] Closer to our time, Karl Barth has been viewed in much the same way, either as the theologian who finally identified and correctly used the central christological motif of Christian theology, or as a systematician who produced a monistic theology resting on an artificially constructed Christ-principle.[9]

Granting the numerous differences between these theologies, “christocentrism” is certainly not a term that can be applied univocally to systems of Christian doctrine; nor can the centrality of the doctrine of the person of Christ to any individual theological system be viewed as a sign of the orthodoxy of that system or of its fundamentally positive relationship to other theological systems loosely called christocentric. This obvious historical and theological difficulty in the characterization of a theological system as christocentric, set into the context of our recognition that the doctrine of Christ must be central to Christian theology, indicates a need for more careful definition and for some distinction between the various forms, patterns, and implications of “christocentric” theology. Once these distinctions have been made, moreover, the ways in which various theological understandings of “christocentrism” have impinged on scholarly understandings of the theology of Calvin and his successors becomes somewhat more obvious.

III. The Confusion of Christocentrisms

The problem that underlies much of the historiography in which the notion of christocentricity has been applied to past eras, perhaps most notably, to the understanding of the Reformation, is the interpretive use of an exclusively twentieth-century notion of christocentrism as a means for evaluating the theology of the past. As such, the problem has been ably identified and debated in theological terms by such writers as Paul Althaus and Eugene TeSelle—the former providing the convenient and quite accurate label, “christomonism,” for the Barthian form of the problem, the latter offering a broader description of the historical roots and of the varieties of christocentrism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.[10] TeSelle noted several different forms of this modern christocentrism—first, a primarily epistemological form that understood “Jesus of Nazareth as the ‘paradigmatic event’ in relation to which all events in human history are interpreted”; second, an anthropological perspective on Christ as “the center of the history of the human race”; and, third, an ontological model that understood Christ as “the raison d’etre of the entire cosmos insofar as theology is permitted to talk about it.”[11] TeSelle identified these views as belonging to the Niebuhrs, Schleiermacher, and Barth, respectively, and set forth the rather sobering point that these perspectives on the place of Christ in theology and Christian consciousness do not reflect the views of “nearly all the fathers, the scholastics, and the theologians of the Reformation and Tridentine era.”[12]

It was never argued by any of the older Reformed theologians that direct encounter with Christ somehow mediated knowledge of God: their assumption was that the knowledge of God as Redeemer, grounded in and focused on Christ, was to be found in Scripture. Scripture, not Christ, was understood as the source or principium of the knowledge of God. Nor did this older Reformed theology even pretend that all of its doctrines—such as the divine attributes, providence, or reprobation—needed somehow to be understood in and through the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth. This means, in turn, that the critique of Beza’s theology by Kickel, namely, Kickel’s explicit identification of Christ as Realgrund (principium essendi) and Erkenntnisgrund (principium cognoscendi theologiae) in what is characterized as sound theology over against the presumed Bezan predestinarian system, is a rather gross anachronism.[13] Note the similarity between the neo-orthodox theological Tendenz of Kickel’s argument and Barth’s remark that “Christ. .. stands between the contradictions [of Calvin’s theology] or rather above them, as the principle of knowledge.”[14] No one in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries ever thought to identify Christ as the principium cognoscendi theologiae.

Reformed theology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries assumed that the pre-incarnate Word, the logos asarkos, together with the Holy Spirit, was responsible for the revelation of the divine plan of redemption throughout Scripture, and that also not the infinite Word but the revealed Word in Scripture accommodated to our capacity was the basis for right knowledge of God.[15] How different this traditional Reformed view is from the Barthian theology that denies the logos asarkos and therefore must seek only in the incarnate logos as manifest in Christ for the content of revelation!

At the wellspring of twentieth-century christomonism, Karl Barth argued that, in Calvin’s theology,

Christ is that unspoken original presupposition in terms of which we see God a priori as the ground and goal, the one who judges us and shows us mercy.... Looking from Christ to God, we have knowledge of God, or, as it is put later, knowledge of God the Creator.[16]

Here Christ becomes the focus of all knowledge of God, including knowledge of God as Creator. Redemption is somehow prior to creation, just as, in the Barthian perspective, grace is prior to law, despite the clearly different order and arrangement of Calvin’s Institutes, and (despite some neo-orthodox argumentation to the contrary) the very clear statements of Calvin to his theological intentions on the issue.[17] Klooster wisely remarked that “while Calvin is indeed christocentric—christologically theocentric is more accurate—his christocentrism is certainly not that of neo-orthodoxy.”[18] But even here, in this fundamentally accurate observation, we are confronted with a problem of definition: Calvin’s “christocentrism” is not the “christocentrism” of Barth and to identify both of these theologians as “christocentric” is either to create a demand that various christocentrisms be distinguished or to lapse into a muddled equivocation.

If we take “christocentrism” as a term descriptive of the premises of the neoorthodox forms of modern theology, neither the thought of the Reformers nor of the Reformed and Lutheran orthodox theologians of the late sixteenth and the seventeenth century ought to be identified as “christocentric.” It is a rather sorry imposition of modern categories on Calvin that claims “Calvin’s thought is thoroughly Christocentric, not merely in that it centres upon God’s revelation in Jesus Christ, but also in that this revelation discloses a paradigm which governs other key areas of Christian thought.”[19] It is mistaken to insist that Calvin’s thought as a whole took Christ as its central focus and utterly foreign to the mind of the Reformer to hold that “revelation in Jesus Christ” is somehow paradigmatic for the content of theology as distinct not only from the revelation found in the natural order but also from the non-incarnational teaching of the biblical Word. Certainly, in Calvin’s mind, one can discuss providence quite adequately without engaging in christological argumentation.

Characterization of the thought of Zwingli and Calvin as christocentric has been a primary tendency of various historians and theologians who have located and analyzed the christological focus of their thought in order to rescue it from an older view of their theologies as a metaphysically controlled predestinarianism.[20] As a way of refocusing the attention of intellectual historians and theologians on a salient element of the thought of the Reformers and removing the rather distorted view of their theologies as predestinarian systems revolving around the divine decree as a central principle, this historiography has a certain limited merit. Similarly, sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Reformed theology written after Calvin’s generation also assumed that saving knowledge of God is knowledge of God in Christ. This assumption appeared as a major structural principle of Calvin’s Institutes,[21] and its significance was not ignored by Calvin’s contemporaries and successors.[22] So, too, has Arminius’s theology been identified as christocentric despite its fundamental differences with Reformed theology on the issue of grace, free choice, and predestination, given that Arminian theology also focuses its attention on the redemptive work of Christ, albeit with a significant un-Calvinian (and most would say, un-Reformed) emphasis on the role of the individual believer in bringing about his own salvation.[23] Neither of these theological models is christocentric in the second or third senses noted above: Christ is not viewed either in the Reformed or in the Arminian theologies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries either as the cognitive or as the essential principium of theology.

Of course, salvation and the training of clergy to preach salvation rightly was a major focus of Calvin’s thought, and Calvin’s understanding of salvation was certainly Christ-centered; but this most basic description of his theology places it only into the category I have denominated as “soteriological christocentrism,” the category into which virtually all Christian theologians since the Apostle Paul can be placed. One might as well just say that Calvin was Christian: likewise for Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Anselm, Aquinas, Bonaventure, Duns Scotus, Balthasar Hübmaier, Theodore Beza, Jacob Arminius, Cornelis Elleboogius, Francis Turretin, John Wesley, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Karl Barth, and any other theologian of one’s choice. But in saying this, one has said next to nothing.

On the other hand, if by “christocentrism” one means either the prototypical christocentrism of thinkers like Irenaeus and various Franciscans who held to the logical priority of Christ over Adam, or the principial christocentrism of various twentieth-century neo-orthodox writers who have argued rather reductionistically over against the perspective of the larger theological tradition that the event of Jesus Christ is the revelation of God and therefore the ground through which all points of doctrine must be understood, one has identified a highly specified sense of the term that (in either case) applies only to a small number of writers. Such a usage is largely inapplicable to the vast majority of thinkers in the tradition, unless one wishes to indicate, by claiming they were not “christocentric,” that they were neither Irenaean, nor Franciscan, nor neo-orthodox. And in that case, one might more plainly state that they were neither Irenaean, nor Franciscan, nor neo-orthodox.

We return to the point that various “christocentrisms” need to be distinguished and that the term is sorely in need of more careful and discriminating usage. Beyond that, given the highly restricted application of the more meaningful usages of the term, it simply ought not to be used as a point of reference or of analysis with regard to the Christian theological tradition in general. In the case of Reformation studies, the term “christocentrism” ought simply to be avoided, indeed, its use abolished. In the past, particularly in the neo-orthodox historiography of the twentieth century, the term has caused nothing but confusion.

Notes

1. For a few references to these issues, see Paul L. Lehmann, “The Reformers’ Use of the Bible,” Theology Today 3 (October 1946): 330, 336–38; Edward A. Dowey, The Knowledge of God in Calvin’s Theology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952; repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 163; Wilhelm Niesel, The Theology of Calvin (trans. Harold Knight; London: Lutterworth, 1956), 246–54; Alister McGrath, A Life of John Calvin: A Study in the Shaping of Western Culture (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1990), 149.
2. Thus, e.g., Walter Kickel, Vernunft und Offenbarung bei Theodor Beza (Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 1967).
3. E.g., Holmes Rolston III, John Calvin versus the Westminster Confession (Richmond: John Knox, 1972); Rolston, “Responsible Man in Reformed Theology: Calvin versus the Westminster Confession,” SJT 23 (1970): 129-56; James B. Torrance, “Strengths and Weaknesses of the Westminster Theology,” in The Westminster Confession in the Church Today (ed. Alisdair Heron; Edinburgh: Saint Andrews Press, 1982), 40–53; Torrance, “Calvin and Puritanism in England and Scotland: Some Basic Concepts in the Development of ‘Federal Theology,”‘ in Calvinus Reformator (Potchefstroom: Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education, 1982), 264–77.
4. E.g., Cornelis Graafland, Van Calvijn tot Barth: oorsprong en ontwikkeling van de leer der verkiezing in het Gereformeerd Protestantisme (‘s-Gravenhage: Boekencentrum, 1987).
5. A seminal discussion of anachronism and “mythological” use of terms and categories in intellectual history can be found in Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8 (1969): 3-53; cf. Richard A. Muller, “The Myth of ‘Decretal Theology,”‘ CTJ 30 (1995): 159-67.
6. Especially to be noted are a series of essays by Dominic Unger, “Christ Jesus the Secure Foundation According to St. Cyril of Alexandria,” Franciscan Studies, n.s. 7 (1947): 1-25, 324–43, 399–414; “Christ’s Role in the Universe According to St. Irenaeus,” Franciscan Studies, n.s. 5 (1945): 3-20, 11437; “Franciscan Christology: Absolute and Universal Primacy of Christ,” Franciscan Studies, n.s. 2 (1942): 428-75; “The Incarnation: A Supreme Exaltation for Christ According to St. John Damascene,” Franciscan Studies, n.s. 8 (1948): 237-49; “A Special Aspect of Athanasian Soteriology,” Franciscan Studies, n.s. 6 (1946): 30-53, 171–94. Also see J. Bissen, “La tradition sur la pre´destination absolue de Je´sus-Christ du VIIe au IXe sie`cles,” La France Franciscaine, Recherches de the´ologie, philosophie, histoire 22 (1939): 9-34; J. McEvoy, “The Absolute Predestination of Christ in the Theology of Robert Grosseteste,” in Sapientiae doctrinae: Me´langes de the´ologie et de litte´rature me´diaevales offerts a` Dom Hildebert Bascour,O.S.B. (Louvain:CatholicUniversityof Louvain,1980),212–30;andW.Dettloff, “Diechristozentrische Konzeption des Johannes Duns Scotus als Ansatz für eine Theologie der Welt,” Wissenschaft und Weisheit 48 (1985): 182-96.
7. See the discussion in Richard A. Muller, “The Barth Legacy: New Athanasius or Origen Redivivus? A Response to T. F. Torrance,” The Thomist 54 (1990): 689-90, 692.
8. For further bibliography and discussion, see Richard A. Muller, “Emanuel V. Gerhart on the ‘Christ-idea’ as Fundamental Principle: A Study of Late Nineteenth-Century Christocentrism,” WTJ 48 (1986): 97-117; and Muller, “Henry Boynton Smith: Christocentric Theologian,” Journal of Presbyterian History 61 (1983): 429-44.
9. Cf. the critique in Paul Althaus, Die christliche Wahrheit (2 vols.; 3d ed.; Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1952), 1:68–73; with Althaus, Grundriss der Dogmatik (2 vols.; 3d ed.; Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1947–1949), 1:14–18.
10. Althaus, Grundriss der Dogmatik, 1:14–18; Eugene TeSelle, Christ in Context: Divine Purpose and Human Possibility (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975).
11. TeSelle, Christ in Context, 1.
12. Ibid., 2.
13. Kickel, Vernunft und Offenbarung bei Theodor Beza, 167–69; cf. my comments in After Calvin: Studies in the Development of a Theological Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 97–98.
14. Karl Barth, The Theology of John Calvin (trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 165.
15. See further, Richard A. Muller, “Christ: The Revelation or the Revealer? Brunner and Reformed Orthodoxy on the Doctrine of the Word of God,” in JETS 26 (1983): 307-19.
16. Barth, Theology of Calvin, 164.
17. Cf. Torrance, “Calvin and Puritanism in England and Scotland,” 272; with Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (ed. John T. McNeill; trans. Ford Lewis Battles; 2 vols.; LCC; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 1:427 (2.9.4); and Calvin’s comments on Jer 31:31 in Commentary on Jeremiah and Lamentations (ed. and trans. John Owen; 5 vols.; Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1846; repr., Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979), 4:127: note Torrance’s utter reversal of the meaning of both of the texts that he himself cites.
18. Fred H. Klooster, Calvin’s Doctrine of Predestination (2d ed.; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1977), 14 n. 10.
19. McGrath, Life of John Calvin, 149.
20. Cf. Paul Jacobs, Pra¨destination und Verantwortlichkeit bei Calvin (Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 1937); Jacques Courvoisier, Zwingli: A Reformed Theologian (Richmond: John Knox, 1963).
21. See Edward Dowey, The Knowledge of God in Calvin’s Theology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952; repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995).
22. Richard A. Muller, “Duplex cognitio dei in the Theology of Early Reformed Orthodoxy,” Sixteenth Century Journal 10 (1979): 51-61.
23. F. Stuart Clarke, “Christocentric Developments in the Reformed Doctrine of Predestination,” Chm 98 (1984): 229-45; cf. the favorable comparison of Arminius with Barth on the centrality of Christ in predestination in Carl Bangs, Arminius: A Study in the Dutch Reformation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1971), 350–51.