God or Christ? The Excesses of Christocentricity by Jean Milet (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 628 God or Christ? The Excesses of Christocentricity. By JEAN MILET. New York: Crossroad, 1981. Pp. x + 261. $12.95 (Translated by John Bowden from Dieu ou le Christ? Paris: Editions de Trevise, 1980.) The fundamental putative insight on which this book is based is that Christianity is a religion with two polarities: belief in God and belief in Christ. Each polarity is typologically characterized at the beginning of the study. Belief in God, or theocentricity, involves a faith which concentrates on a transcendent Supreme Being, a morality which values obedience and the maintenance of order, a concept of authority which is strongly hierarchical, a liturgy which has a predilection for the magnificent and the "triumphal," a spirituality which favors contemplation, and a type of political action which supports paternalistic structures. Belief in Christ, or christocentricity, has opposing traits : a faith historically rooted in Jesus Christ, love-centered morality, charismatic authority, intimate liturgy , action-oriented spirituality, and critical, reform-minded political activity. After describing how the two polarities were kept in tension through the dominance of theocentricity from the 4th to the 17th centuries (the first three centuries are somewhat vague), Milet delineates the emergence of christocentricity from its beginning in Ignatius of Loyola's emphasis on the humanity of Christ to its triumph and extreme forms in the death of God and liberation theologies of our own day. His basic thesis throughout this historical review, which comprises the bulk of the book, is that christocentricity has been carried to unfortunate excess; the book ends with a call for a redress of the balance in favor of theocentricity. (In the imaginative last section, the symbol of renewed balance is the altar, .once again turned ' towards God ' rather than the congregation, with the sacred mystery veiled not by wrought iron grilles but by the more contemporary technology of laser beams). Of the myriad problems which this work presents, the gravest is that of its fundamental premise. To dichotomize God and Christ, to set ' them' up as two polarities, to call on believers to choose between faith in one and faith in the other endangers the heart of the Christian reality, of the Christian experience supported by Christian theory that God and Christ while distinct are yet one. To Milet's " For it is God who is to be sought for himself and in himself-and not Christ" (231) .must be counterposed the "God was in Christ" of Scripture, the "homoousios" of Nicaea, the " vere Deus/vere homo . . . in una persona" of Chalcedon, and the basic Christian conviction which has perdured through the centuries that in dealing with Jesus Christ one has to do with the God who is the one, true, and good God. Christian faith is not simply faith in God, but in 6~4 BOOK REVIEWS God who has shared our lot, our history, and thereby redeemed us. If Christian faith is bi-polar, the polarities are those of the divine and the human, or of transcendence and history, with the unity of both centered in Jesus Christ. It is nothing short of the destruction of the entire Christian message to separate-or worse, oppose-God and Christ. The methodology of the book is likewise problematic. The author, neither a sociologist nor a psychologist, uses a method of "social psychology " without ever delineating its principles or criteria. How can his claims be checked' His repeated assurances that he is an objective, impartial observer, assurances which this undefined method reputedly allows, are belied not only by the fact that there can be no presuppositionless observation but also by the explicit option which he has made for the cheocentric polarity. In effect, this is a book critical of certain characteristics of the contemporary Church but ingenuously cast in the guise of an impartial study. While not a theological work (ix), this study ventures into heavily theological territory. From this angle the project is marred throughout by the author's ignoring (unwittingly or not) virtually all recent biblical, patristric, and systematic christological scholarship. What is one to say of a work in which Old Testament exegesis is drawn from studies done in 1929 and 1931; in which New Testament exegesis...