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If Jesus who is said to be Christ means love – first of all, God's prevenient love for us and then, and on that basis, our returning love for God and for all whom God loves – then it must be equally appropriate to say that Jesus means freedom. Provided, at any rate, that what one means by "freedom" is the existence in and for freedom established through faith in God's boundless love, then there is no question that the christology even of the earliest Jesus-kerygma is at least an implicit christology of liberation. The Jesus to whom it bears witness is the one through whom the possibility of just such an existence in and for freedom is decisively re-presented.

As for the further question of the appropriateness of Paul's christology of freedom, which, in its very essence, is christology of the cross, the significant considerations are the following. Despite the fact that the Jesuskerygma Jesus-kerygma makes no reference whatever to the saving significance of the cross, it certainly does represent Jesus, implicitly if not explicitly, as the decisive representation of God, and thus as the one through whom God has reconciled the world to himself. By thinking and speaking of the cross, then, as the means of reconciliation, and thus as the liberating judgment of God, Paul may be said to do nothing more than make explicit the very claim already made at least implicitly in the earliest stratum of Christian witness – the claim, namely, that the Jesus who is said to be Christ is the gift and demand of God's own love become decisively explicit. But if this is a correct interpretation, even Paul's christology of liberation is far from being an instance of inappropriate "modernism" lacking all support in the apostolic witness. In fact, it is an entirely appropriate formulation, given the concepts
and terms available in his situation, of the witness of the apostles to Jesus as the decisive event of God's love.
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The constitutive christological assertion is a posteriori, because it is an assertion about a historical fact – Jesus – on the basis of particular historical experience, mediate if not immediate, of this fact. But the constitutive christological assertion is also "an assertion of faith," or, better, an existential assertion. Although it could arise only after the historical fact of Jesus' appearance and on the basis of particular experience of this fact, it also expresses a certain valuation of Jesus in relation to the existential question about the meaning of ultimate reality for us – namely, the valuation that he himself decisively answers this question and therefore is the explicit primal ontic source authorizing the authentic understanding of ourselves and others in relation to the strictly ultimate reality of the whole.

This valuation, however, is not merely a subjective preference, but rather necessarily implies an objective claim – to the effect that Jesus fulfills all the conditions necessary to anyone's decisively answering the existential question and therefore being of decisive significance for human existence. Consequently, it also necessarily implies some understanding of these necessary conditions, and this "a priori christology" can and should be made explicit.

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That someone, in fact, represents a certain possibility of selfunderstandingself-understanding, together with the claim, implicit or explicit, that it is our authentic possibility can be verified readily enough simply by appeal to particular empirical-historical experience such as anyone might possibly have. But that this claim is valid, that the possibility of self-understanding represented is, indeed, our authentic possibility, cannot be validated by appeal to any particular empirical-historical experience. It can be validated, if at all, only by appeal to existential-historical experience and thus to the existential experience of our own existence with others in relation to the whole; and this means only by following properly metaphysical and moral procedures of verification that go beyond all of the procedures required to verify strictly empirical-historical assertions.

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The deeper difficulty with the typically liberal answer to the question of the norm of appropriateness (i.e., deeper than the difficulty that the empirical-historical Jesus as such cannot be operationally identified) is that it assigns to Jesus, contrary to the intention of the apostolic witness, the role that rightly belongs rather to the apostles themselves, thereby tacitly denying the claim that the Christian witness makes about Jesus by its christological assertion.

The claim made for Jesus, in one way or another, by all the New Testament christologies, right from the beginning, is that he is the decisive representation of God, in the sense of the one through whom the meaning of God for us is made decisively explicit. But if this is so, it clearly will not do to exaggerate their differences from the christology of the later church councils. However "low" some of their formulations may seem to be when compared with the "high" christology of Nicaea and Chakedon, it is quite misleading to suppose that the history of christology is anything like a development whereby one who begins by being thought and spoken about simply as a man eventually comes to be represented as God. Although the earliest explicit christology may indeed have thought and spoken about Jesus in terms drawn from Jewish religious tradition, and thus as in every way human and in no way divine, the point of such thinking and speaking was nevertheless to place Jesus on the divine side of the relationship between God and human beings generally, not on the human side.
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The point of the original myth of Jesus' resurrection from the dead, no less than of "the full-grown myth" of Jesus' deity as formulated at Nicaea and Chakedon (Mackey), is to assert that the man Jesus is infinitely more than a mere man, indeed, is on the same level as God, even though also distinct from God as the one through whom God is decisively encountered. Although the earliest form of the myth is indeed cast in terms taken over from Jewish religious tradition, and thus represents Jesus as in every way human, in no way divine, its point nevertheless is to place him on God's side of the relation between God and human beings generally, not on the side of human beings who more or less fully believe in God. As he whom God has made Messiah
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by raising him from the dead, Jesus is not merely a believer in God, not even the "original and originating" believer, but is rather the one through whom God has spoken and acted in a final decisive way to re-present the possibility of faith to all who would believe.

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The primal source of Christian faith was no more the kerygma than the historical Jesus, in the sense of a personality of the past endowed with a messianic consciousness, heroically living the life of faith, and so on. Rather, the source of Christian faith was – and is – the person of Jesus, the "that" of whose proclamation is understood to be the decisive saving act of God by all who make the decision to follow him.

But even for us today, for whom the kerygma is the primary authority for Christian faith, the explicit primal ontic source of faith is nothing other than Jesus himself. It is precisely Jesus himself as a genuinely historical event by which the kerygma today is legitimated or authorized. The kerygma today acquires its legitimation, not merely from the original and originating kerygma, but, through it, from the past event of Jesus Christ. Therefore, present preaching as well as systematic theology has need of a critical control that secures its identity in substance with the apostolic preaching – that control being New Testament theology. What must be secured if the kerygma today is to be legitimated or authorized is its identity in substance with "the apostolic preaching," not with the preaching or faith of the historical Jesus. But even the apostolic preaching is not the primal source from which present preaching acquires its legitimation or authorization, but rather the primary authority by which it is authorized insofar as it is substantially identical with the apostolic preaching. The only primal source of its legitimation or authorization is the past event of Jesus Christ, by which all preaching, including the original and originating and therefore constitutive preaching of the apostles, is legitimated and authorized.

Rightly understood, the present proclamation of the kerygma is not some other source of Christian faith to be taken in itself independently of the Jesus of history, but rather the very means by which he himself can be
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exprienced experienced here and now as Christian faith's only explicit primal ontic source. Not only is the apostles' immediate experience of Jesus' person the explicit primal noetic source of their original and originating and therefore constitutive Christian faith and preaching, but even our own Christian faith and preaching today, in response to preaching authorized by theirs, has its only explicit primal source in the same kind of experience of Jesus himself. Of course, our experience of Jesus, being mediated by theirs, can only be a mediate, not an immediate, experience of him. But provided that the proclamation to which we respond is indeed authorized by the apostles' preaching, which itself arose out of their immediate experience of Jesus' person, the explicit primal ontic source of our experience, no less than of
theirs, is not the kerygma, but precisely and only the Jesus of history.
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The whole meaning of the event of Jesus, so far as the New Testament writers are concerned, is expressed by formulations that, in one conceptuality and symbolism or another, represent it as the existential-historical event that is the decisive revelation of the meaning of ultimate reality for us and as such the explicit primal ontic source authorizing all that is appropriately Christian. Thus the referent of the name "Jesus" in any such formulation as "Jesus is the Christ" is not someone whom we first come to know, if at all, only more or less probably by empirical-historical inquiry back behind the original witness of the apostles as well as the later witnesses of the New Testament. Rather, "Jesus" refers to the one whom we already know most certainly through the same apostolic witness as well as all other witnesses of faith insofar as they are conformed in substance to the primary witness of the apostles.
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The essential or substantial foundation of faith is the twofold reality of God as the One who decisively becomes event for us through Jesus, and of Jesus as the one through whom God decisively becomes event for us. The truth that faith knows about this twofold reality, however, is an existential truth, and the assertions in which it formulates this truth are existential
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assertions. But while the truth of faith and its assertions is thus distinct from any kind of merely intellectual or objectifying truth, there is one kind of such truth – namely, metaphysical – on which that of faith and its assertions is logically dependent, however independent it may be of such other kinds as those of the special sciences and empirical history. Were this not the case, it would be quite impossible consistently to uphold the extra nos of faith, in the sense precisely of its essential or substantial foundation in a twofold reality beyond ourselves.

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Christian faith in the sense in which the Christian witness understands it may be characterized formally as an existential self-understanding. But it is the only self-understanding explicitly authorized by Jesus, whom Christians assert to be the Christ, the point of their assertion being that it is also the very self-understanding always already implicitly authorized as the authentic understanding of our existence by the utterly mysterious whole of ultimate reality that they call "God." If we ask, then, for the material content of this self-understanding, the only adequate answer is that it is an understanding of oneself and others as all alike objects of the unconditional love of God, which is to say, of the all-inclusive whole of reality of which both the self and others are all parts. It is precisely the gift and demand of God's unconditional love that are decisively re-presented through Jesus, and to understand oneself as one is thereby given and called to do is to actualize the one possibility of selfunderstanding that is properly called Christian faith.

It is the essence of this self-understanding to be an act of obedience having a distinctive double structure: it is both trust in God's unconditional love alone for the ultimate meaning of our lives and loyalty to this same love and to all to whom it is loyal as the only final cause that our lives are to serve. Although in both aspects, the obedience of faith is a human response to God's prevenient love, its first aspect of trust is relatively passive, while its second aspect of loyalty is relatively active. Moreover, the priority of the first and more passive aspect of trust to the second and more active aspect of loyalty is absolute. It is precisely out of our acceptance of God's unconditional love in trust that we alone become sufficiently free from ourselves and all others to
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be truly loyal to God's cause. It is no less truef howeverf true, however, that if we truly trust in God's lovef love, we cannot fail to live in loyalty to it. Thusf Thus, while the second aspect of the obedience of faith is and must be strictly posterior to the first, there is nevertheless but one such obedience with two aspects, each of which necessarily implies the other.