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But whether Jesus is somehow a divine as well as a human being is as irrelevant to the constitutive christological assertion of Christian faith and witness as whether he lived a sinless life of perfect faith working through love. For, as Bultmann rightly observes, although the earliest community did indeed think and speak about Jesus as the Messiah of God, it did not thereby attribute to him a special metaphysical nature because of which his words are authoritative, but, on the contrary, thereby confessed on the authority of his words that God had made him the king of the community (Jesus: 180). In other words, aside from the fact that, in the ordo cognoscendi, it is the experience not merely of the authority of Jesus' words, but of him himself being the explicit primal ontic source of all authority that is the reason for thinking and speaking about him as the Messiah – -- aside from this, there remains the difference between attributing to him a divine metaphysical nature, as classical christology does, and asserting, as the earliest community asserted, that, although he is a human being and in no sense divine, he has been appointed by God as Messiah. If, given the assumptions of some world views, Jesus could be the explicit primal ontic source of all that is divinely authorized only by being divine, this is not the case, given the assumptions of all world views, even though they may very well have their own ways of thinking and speaking about a primal source of all authority.

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But if Jesus' being thought and spoken about as a divine person who does divine things humanly is in no sense necessarily implied by his being the explicit primal ontic source of all that is divinely authorized – -- there being contrary, but comparably adequate (or inadequate) ways of thinking and saying that this is who he is – -- his being thought and spoken about as a human person who does human things divinely is equally unnecessary. To be sure, there may be religious and philosophical assumptions according to which the explicit primal ontic source of all that is divinely authorized is itself "sent," "commissioned," and so authorized by the strictly ultimate reality called "God." But it is clear that, even then, the concept of being authorized is not being used univocally, but analogically. Consequently, the typical revisionary christology is, at best, only another way, more or less adequate, of formulating the constitutive christological assertion.

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