Another special delivery from HRN:
A second frequent form of the deformation of radical monotheism in Christianity occurs when Jesus Christ is made the absolute center of confidence and loyalty.
The significance of Jesus Christ for the Christian church is so great that high expressions about his centrality to faith are the rule rather than the exception in the language of preaching and of worship.
Yet it is one thing for Christians to look forward to the day when "every tongue [will] confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father" -- to use the words of an ancient liturgical hymn (Phil. 2.11) -- and another thing for theology as well as popular piety to substitute the Lordship of Christ for the Lordship of God.
At various times in history and in many areas of piety and theology Christianity has been transformed not only into a Christ-cult or a Jesus-cult but into a Christ- or Jesus-faith.
The person through whom Christians have received access to God, the one who so reconciled them to the source of being that they are bold to say "Our father who art in heaven," the one who in unique obedience, trust, and loyalty lived, died, and rose again as Son of God, is now invested with such absolute significance that his relation to the One beyond himself is so slurred over that he becomes the center of value and the object of loyalty.
The confidence that is expected of Christians is confidence in him; the formulation of the confidence in creed and theology becomes a set of assertions about Jesus Christ; theology is turned into Christology.
And with this turn there is also a frequent turn to ecclesiasticism insofar as the community that centers in Jesus Christ is set forth both as the object of his loyalty and of the Christian's loyalty.
To be a Christian now means not so much that through the mediation and the pioneering faith of Jesus Christ a man has become wholly human, has been called into membership in the society of universal being, and has accepted the fact that amidst the totality of existence he is not exempt from the human lot; it means rather that he has become a member of a special group, with a special god, a special destiny, and a separate existence.
-- H. R. Niebuhr
Radical Monotheism and Western Culture, p-59.
