By Schubert Ogden
What Is "Incarnation"?
1. For Christians, Jesus is understood to be the act of God, and so the event through which God's salvation is decisively revealed. Thus the significance of Jesus for Christians is that it is by reason of their encounter with him through the church's witness that they have become certain of the grace of God. Conversely, the only thing that Christians mean by "Jesus" when they assert that he is the Christ – -- in this or any other functionally equivalent formulation – -- is the event that thus authorizes their certainty of God's grace.
2. Thus Jesus is not "the founder of the Christian religion," in the sense of the one with whom Christians believe in God – -- that being, rather, the proper role of the apostles as the first Christians, upon whose faith and witness those of all other Christians necessarily depend; rather, Jesus is the one decisively through whom Christians believe in God, the one who is the decisive re-presentation of God's own gift and demand to us.
...