By Schubert Ogden
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Although I would still defend my criticism – -- especially given the concession that introduced my reasoning: "To be sure, the first half of the assertion does not need to be understood in the mistaken manner of myth or of most of Bultmann's critics on the 'right"' – -- I also allow that I could and should have done a better job at catching what Bultmann means and does not mean by what he says. In this connection, I've come to think that the following passage from Jesus: 180 indicates what he means more clearly.
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There can be no question that Jesus did not refer to anything generally perceivable wherein one could become certain of God's forgiveness. He simply proclaimed it. The event of forgiveness is nothing other than his word as it confronts the hearer. For the truth of this word he offers no guarantees whatever, either in his miracles, whose significance is not to verify his word – -- on the contrary, he expressly rejects any legitimation by miracles (Mk 8:11 f.) – -- or in his personal qualities, which in any event seem rather to have offended his contemporaries than to have recommended him to them. . . . Nor is anything said about his metaphysical being, either in his own words as they have come down to us or in the report of the earliest community. To be sure, the earliest community did hold him to be the Messiah. But in doing so, it did not ascribe to him some special metaphysical being that gave his words authority, but, rather, confessed thereby, on the authority of his words, that God had made him the King of the community. |
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In any case, the first passage makes as clear as the second that Bultmann in no way intends to deny the "objectivity" of christological assertions in the sense – -- the only sense – -- in which I should wish to affirm it. All he wants to deny is that there is anything objective, in the usual empirical, pseudo-empirical (i.e., mythological or "metaphysical") senses of the term embraced by his terms "objectifying," "objectifyingly," and so on. But, then, this leaves open the possibility that christological assertions are indeed "objective" (or '''objective'''!) in the sense that they can be interpreted and explicated in terms of a science – -- an "ontological," as distinct from an "ontic," science – -- "that is nothing other than the clear and methodical development of the understanding of existence that is given with existence itself," and therefore "talks about existence without objectifying it into being within the world" (NTM: 101, 102 ff.).
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