"Saturated": The Inadequacy of the term "Christ-Centered"

Religion accommodates to culture in subtle but sweeping ways. This is often reflected in the “church talk” that we uncritically accept as “normal”. 

A good example of this is the popular Christian terminology of a “Christ-Centered Church” or a “Christ-Centered Life”. Usually the term is elaborated by referring to Christ as the “foundation”, “role model”, or “reference point” for human behavior. What would Jesus do? What would Jesus say? 

This description of the relationship of Christ to the world, however, is a peculiarly modern one, rooted in the subject/object dualism that emerged in the “enlightened” 18th century, developed in the mechanical world-view Newtonian physics, assumed in the philosophy of public education of John Dewey, and assimilated into the supposed “objectivity” of secular culture today. The spatiality implied in the “Christ-Centered” church or life separate the human being as subject from the experience of God as object.

In the “Christ-Centered” church or life, the institution or human being and Jesus Christ are separate entities. They interact much like Newtonian billiard balls, impacting each other in linear cause/effect relationships. The “Christ-Centered” church or life assumes that religious experience is a kind of confrontation between two wills. There is our will and God’s will. We choose to place Christ at the center or not; or, in more prophetic understandings of grace, God’s chooses to place Christ at the center whether we like it or not.  

Yet regardless of how these entities interact, the language of “Christ-centeredness” preserves the subject/object dualism that is so familiar (and comforting) to modern culture. The ego always remains intact. It may place Christ at the center or at the fringe of our existence, but the ego endures. The dichotomy encourages odd metaphysical debates about pre- and after-life. Christ is present in the womb, so to speak, as a  kind of additive that makes the fetus particularly holy; the individual ego survives after death, so to speak, in a kind of heavenly democracy in which  the individual is fully with God, and the God is fully present to the individual, but the two remain entirely distinct.  

Pre-modern people, however, did not think that way. Indeed, non-western cultures today don’t think that way. The subject/object dualism, and the cause-effect universe, assumed from the 17th – 20th centuries does not reflect their understanding of how Christ participates in life, or how life participates in Christ. This is why, for example, Dante’s description of hell, purgatory, and paradise is so difficult for modern people to accept, and why it celebrates what medieval people so desired.  

In ancient and post-modern contexts, it would be more accurate to talk about the “Christ-Saturated” church or the “Christ- Saturated” life. The institution or the human being is like a dry sponge removed from the ocean, in which dead cells surround empty vacuums, rendering it useless or irrelevant to all that is going on around it. The Christ-Saturated life is like a sponge that has been immersed in water, drenched in liquid Jesus, so that God permeates every the institution or individual at the cellular level.  

The mystical participation of the church or the individual with Christ is a merging of finite and infinite that erases any subject/object dualism. Christ, as St Paul said, becomes “all in all”. Christ is the “true vine”. I am in my father, and you in me, and I in you; or I am the vine and you are the branches. So it seems that in this the Pentecostals re more in sync with ancient Christianity. One of the Pentecostal movements concentrates on “drenching love”, and experience of God’s immediacy that literally takes over and permeates the entire person. It essentially erases ego and replaces self-awareness with radical compassion for others.  

Why is this important? I think it is important because the “Christ-Centered” church or life that was originally intended to set the faithful apart from the world, has instead made the church and individual Christian just one more judgmental, competitive, component of the world. It is just one more billiard ball on the table of life trying to influence, crash into, manipulate, and rearrange all the other billiard balls. It makes the church a corporation among corporations, and the individual Christian an ego among egos, each vying for power over all the others. 

The Christ-Saturated life, however, is truly “other-worldly” in the sense that subject and object have merged to become something entirely different from the world. The ego is caught up in incarnation. The individual or institution is “transfigured” to become something glorious … an intimation of paradise and a revelation of unconditional love.