Lots of folks have described me as an "odd" sort of theologian. I prefer to think of myself as an eccentric Christian.
I think it's a delightful way of describing those of us who follow Jesus. Because Jesus is that center, our lives find their meaning only in orbit around him -- and therefore find our egos thrown off the world's understanding of "the center".
We become, as the NT puts it, "a peculiar people".
It was Barth's 1922 Der Romerbrief ("Commentary on Romans") that first issued this challenge. It landed on the theologians' playground "like a bombshell" for a reason. Because this book dared to suggest that God is "wholly Other".
This "otherness" (often called "the transcendence") of God is the proclamation of the Good News of God as Trinity. The eccentric God is always experienced as "outside" the system and status quo. God approaches us from "the outside" of our current arrangements and understandings. Consequently, when it comes to God the community of faith has to adopt a receptive posture, waiting upon the initiative of God. And while all this is often described with the language of "transcendence" -- using a higher vs. lower metaphor -- it can also be described by the eccentric metaphor, an inside vs. outside distinction.
Jesus Christ is, as Bonhoeffer famously and rightly declared in his Christology lectures in 1933, the center of all human life ("menschliche Existenz"), the center of history, the center of all creation. Hence, Jesus is the middle or heart of all Christian being.
I think this geographical image -- this "eccentricity" -- is a fertile ground for tilling some ideas I'm thinking today.
The word eccentric comes from the Greek combination of ek (out of) and kentron (center), with ekkentros meaning "out of center". In the late Middle Ages this term -- eccentric -- was mainly an astronomical term describing orbital systems where the earth was not placed at the center. Thus, Copernicus' theory was "eccentric", the earth was displaced from the center of the solar system. It's an astrological term by nature, but it's geometrical idea is plain.
And I think its central idea -- that the focal point is the center, and everything else takes its cue from that center -- is its own Copernican Revolution for Christian faith.
Let's be honest: The story of the modern Western world is only and best told as the story of the self (Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity by Charles Taylor). This self is, at least as most of us envision, the Center of the Universe.
Christian faith dares to challenge that.
As we all know, people can be eccentric, a bit "off center", with the "center" being some cultural or behavioral norm. Thus the definitions of eccentric as "tending to act in strange or unusual ways", "deviating from an established or usual pattern or style", and "deviating from conventional or accepted usage or conduct".
Specifically, God is Other but the eccentric metaphor sees God as less "above" us than "outside" us, less "over" us than unable to be "captured" by us. The eccentric God cannot be "bounded", "encircled" or "delimited" by human experience, social arrangements, systems, or dogmas. Thus, I think eccentricity is a helpful metaphor for those who want to speak of the transcendence of God but who also want to locate that Otherness immanently rather than hierarchically.
This Otherness, then, is at once incarnational. Rather than "high above", God cannot be captured or reduced. The mystery of God is the mystery of genuine Personhood. God as known in Jesus is just as mysterious, with real depth, as we are all mysterious to one another.
The reason why Barth's commentary on Romans was a "bombshell" was that it attacked an impulse within German Liberal theology that was locating and even reducing God to human experience. Identifying God with human concerns and affairs assumes that human experience and social life will tend toward the virtuous, that people are naturally good and loving. When Liberal theologians deconstruct the transcendent God to identify God with love the assumption at work is that human "love" will naturally and inevitably -- two huge, huge assumptions! -- tend toward the light.
The problem, as Barth rightly saw, was the lie of modern "progress". Simplistically, the vision behind liberal theology is a sort of moral optimism and utopianism: Identify God with what humans think is loving and good and trust people to get those things right because people are awesome.
Thing is, we humans are a rather dark lot. All of us! As Alexander put it, in The Gulag of Archipeligo: "If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being". The problem of German Liberal theology was that it lacked a strong theology of sin and death. Consequently, when humans are left to define for themselves what is right, just or loving things can get twisted pretty quickly. When God is defined immanently God just is whatever humans say God is. And if humans are pulled into darkness "God" is also pulled into darkness. God is used, in fact, to justify the darkness.
If all theology is anthropology (think Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity), there's no voice to confront with prophetic power who we are and what we do.
That was Barth's criticism of Nazism. It was Bonhoeffer's stinging criticism of the "Fuhrer Principle" that ultimately got him executed.
The trouble with Liberal theology, generally, is that it lacks a prophetic imagination. The relationship between human experience and the divine griws too intimate, chummy and cozy.
But Liberals aren't alone in this score. Conservatives do this, in the way they so comfortably wed God and the Anerican flag, or God and the free market.
No, if we're honest, Liberal theology and Conservative theology are just flip sides of the same coin. They both hold too closely to the modern notion that all theology is really just anthropology in disguise.
Everyone is too prone to align our image of self with a false image of God. As Barth realized, the real sin of the modern world isn't pride. It's idolatry -- it's a question of who's at the center of all life, of all history.
The only thing that properly aligns the world is the Cross. This opulent self-giving for friends and enemies alike. This is why I think Jesus' call wasn't one of thinking the right ideas. Jesus' call is one to die. "When Christ calls us, he bids is come and die", Bonhoeffer noted in his lectures on the Sermon on the Mount that became The Cost of Discipleship.
The problem with Liberal and Conservative theology alike is this problem of geography. They want to see God as aligned and identified with our group, our interests, our values, our nation, our way of life, our choices, our worldview, our economy, our church, our theology and our PhD dissertation.
Not so with this God. The Christian God cannot be bounded, encircled or delimited to our group, our interests, our values, our nation, our way of life, our choices, our worldview, our economy, our church, or our theology. God is "outside" all these mental, social, economic and political containers. Because God is the center and everything else -- the world, history and even our selves -- find meaning around that center.
To put this another way, God is free. The wholly Other -- this God at the center in Jesus Christ -- cannot be captured, contained, circumscribed, co-opted, cordoned off, chained up, corralled or cooped up.
There is room between us and God because God has the freedom to love and breathe.
Our living and breathing are only made possible because this God lives and breathes in freedom.
God is free to speak a Nein! ("No!") to all that destroys the living and breathing that God does. This Nein! is the cross. The cross is God's rejection of the cancerous sin, evil and death that destroy the world, that destroys death.
God is also free to speak a Ja! ("Yes!") to the divine graces of life and the breathe of Spirit that breathes into all creation in Jesus Christ. This Ja! is the resurrection. The resurrection is God's act of re-creation. "Christ was raised as the first fruits of the harvest" (1 Corinthians 15.23).
Because Jesus is God's words of rejection and affirmation, Christians have the imaginative and creative ministries of living from this new center. The Church's ministry is a derived ministry, because it is a continued ministry of God's ministry in Jesus. We have, as Walter Brueggemann calls it, this "Prophetic Imagination".
Or as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it: "There must be a counterpoint to the immense power of man to destroy, there must be a Voice that says no to man, a voice not vague, faint and inward, like qualms of conscience, but equal in spiritual might to man's power to destroy" (The Prophets).
There must be a Voice that says No to humanity, a Voice equal in spiritual might to our power to destroy.
That the reason we need this new center in Christ. And it's the reason we need to see our lives in orbit to his.