The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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On Isaiah 65:17-25

Clearly, the eschatological salvation promised in this passage can be rightly understood by a Christian only as (1) a symbol of the salvation decisively re-presented through Jesus Christ; and (2) a prototype of the kind of innerworldly fulfillment that is willed by God and that is the objective of Christian witness insofar as it is "emancipative" as well as "redemptive."

To what extent, then, the salvation decisively re-presented through Jesus Christ and attested by Christian witness insofar as it is "redemptive" is itself but a symbol depends on whether, or to what extent, such salvation is understood to consist exhaustively in the reality of God's prevenient love and in the obedient response of "faith working through love" that answers to God's love with unreserved trust and unqualified loyalty. Anything other than this—such as, e.g., subjective immortality—is either itself symbolic of it or a way of adulterating it.

15 November 1998 (reflecting on the OT lesson for the Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost)

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