Dovetailing with the last post, I wanted to pick up further with Bruce McCormack as he offers what it means to be Christ concentrated or Christocentric in Barth’s hermeneutical and theological deployment. What will be noticed, as McCormack develops this, is that for Barth his arrival at a Christ concentrated focus took time of maturation; viz., it wasn’t an immediate thing in his theological formation. For me, this is why I have so resonated with Barth over the years: to have a Christ concentrated focus, in my eyes, is to have the focus of the Holy Spirit (see Jn 14—16). The Holy Spirit’s ministry is to magnify the work and words of Jesus in the lives of His bride. When the Christian is genuinely of the Spirit, they only see the world, and everything else, through the eyes of Jesus Christ; indeed, as this ultimately magnifies the Father. For me, this is what it means to be a genuinely Christian theologian, or Christian proper: i.e., to think everything from the foundation that always already has been laid for us in Jesus Christ (see I Cor 3.11). This is why when I have come up against other theological approaches, no matter what their periodized pedigree, I have always found most of them wanting. Sure, yes, Jesus’ name is always bandied about among any theologian worth their salt, who in fact professes to be a Christian. But typically, the way Jesus functions for these theologians is as an abstract principle, not as the person that He is for us in the God-world encounter. For many so-called Christian theologies out there, Jesus is appealed to more as an instrument of a theology founded somewhere else (by way of speculative means), rather than from a center in God’s life for us in Jesus Christ (and thus impersonally).

Barth, according to McCormack’s reading and referencing, offers the way I am persuaded towards; in regard, to theological methodology and Christian living. I don’t think these two things should ever be thought apart, only as apiece, mutually implicating and conditioning each other: i.e., our Christian lives, in the vicarious life of Christ for us, as the basis for the way that ‘our theology’ is carried out—whether that be considered as intellection, practically, affectively, or what have you (and these are never really that partitive, as daily life, and all of its components, are a complex). Here is McCormack on Barth’s Christocentrism:

In his 1939 contribution to the ‘How my Mind Has Changed’ series, Barth provided the answer to the first half of our question ‘in these years I had to learn that Christian doctrine, if it is to merit its name and if it is to build up the Christian Church in the world as she must needs be built up, has to be exclusively and conclusively the doctrine of Jesus Christ—of Jesus Christ as the living Word of God spoken to us men and women. . .. I should like to call it a Christological concentration . . .’. “Christocentrism”, in Barth’s case then, refers to the attempt (which characterized his mature theology) to understand every doctrine from a centre in God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ; i.e. from a centre in God’s act of veiling and unveiling in Christ (which Barth understood in terms of a highly actualistic, a posteriori Chalcedonianism). “Christocentrism”, for him, was a methodological rule—not an a priori principle, but a rule which is learned through encounter with the God who reveals Himself in Christ—in accordance with which one presupposes a particular understanding of God’s Self-revelation in reflecting upon each and every other doctrinal topic, and seeks to interpret those topics in the light of what is already known of Jesus Christ. Clearly, this methodological commitment marks an advance over the dogmatic method outlined in each of Barth’s prolegomena (including CD I/1 and I/2). It does not in the least set aside that method; but at the point where Barth would seek to correct critically Christian proclamation in the light of a fresh hearing of the Word of God, the “christocentrism” so described provides a further concretization of what Barth thought that criticism would most likely entail. The practical consequences of the employment of this rule—to give just two examples—is that there could be no independent doctrine of creation and providence (i.e. a doctrine of creation which is fleshed out without reference to the covenantal purposes of God which ground God’s creative activity); and no independent anthropology (independent, that is, of reflection upon the true, restored humanity disclosed in Christ). The questions which such an advance raises for a genetic study of Barth’s development are: when did this modification first occur? And what brought it about?

The answer to be given here is that this final adjustment came about in the summer of 1936, under the impress of a lecture given by a Parisian pastor, Pierre Maury, on the subject of election. More than any other influence in Barth’s life, it was Maury who deserves credit for opening the way to that form of “christocentrism” which became synonymous with the name of Karl Barth.[1]

If we don’t stop, slow down, and reflect upon these matters this way, the quick response might be: “of course, the Christian way of doing theology is Christ concentrated.” But in reality, as the above ought to help clarify, there are different ways to be Christocentric (which I have also written about here). In my view, after Barth et al., what it means to be ‘Christ concentrated’ in method really means: to be in a life-giving interchange that is constant, afresh anew, as we encounter our Savior moment-by-moment through the Spirit’s mediation, bringing our mutterings into a doxological and intelligible conversation, dialogue with our triune God. So, in this sense, to do theology is really to simply live coram Deo (before God), being constantly given over to the death of Jesus that His life might be known through the mortal members of our bodies (see II Cor. 4.10). In this type of Christological theology, there is a martyrological underpinning, wherein indeed, the death of Jesus, also becomes our life in Him, as He resurrects and ascends us with Him to the Right Hand of the Father. It is in this cruciformed life that the Christian theologian can genuinely come to start bearing witness to the Lord of life, insofar that this Lord of life is indeed the life of the Lord for us in Jesus Christ. amen amen

[1] Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 454–55.