By Schubert Ogden
...
1. Any instance of Christian witness expresses or implies a content
even as it consists in the act of expressing or implying this content in and for a situation.
2.
Just as any instance of Christian witness makes or implies the claim to be adequate to the content that it expresses or implies, so it also makes or implies the claim to be fitting to the situation in and for which it expresses or implies this content.
3.
The content of any instance of Christian witness is explicitly formulated in some terms or other in the constitutive christological assertion, by which normative Christian witness is constituted explicitly as such and whose classical formulation is "Jesus is the Christ."
4.
In the nature of the case, the claim made or implied by any instance of Christian witness to be adequate to its content, and thus to the constitutive christological assertion, is a twofold claim: on the one hand, it is the claim to be appropriate to Jesus Christ because the witness in question is in agreement with formally normative Christian witness; on the other hand, it is the claim to be credible to human existence because the witness in question is in agreement with common human experience.
September 1987