By Schubert Ogden
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I have two questions about this:
1. Why is what faith accepts on authority "something unbelievable"? – -- On my understanding, it is because what faith accepts on authority is neither a matter of fact nor a matter of principle (in Leibniz's terms, neither a "truth of fact" nor a "truth of reason"), but an existential truth, and therefore is "unbelievable," which is to say, unbelievable in the ways in which (or on the grounds on which) either truths of fact or truths of reason are rightly taken to be believable. And this leads to my second question:
2. Why is what faith accepts on authority not "something unintelligible"? – -- On my interpretation, it is because what faith accepts on authority, being an existential truth, is in its own way (or on its own ground) intelligible, which is to say, intelligible because acceptance of it is at one and the same time acceptance of our own possibility of understanding ourselves – -- by which, I take it, Bultmann can only mean, the possibility of understanding ourselves in the eulogistic sense of "understanding ourselves authentically."
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In support of this interpretation, I would appeal to another closely related passage, where Bultmann says, "\[T\]he possibility of the word's being understood coincides with the possibility of one's understanding oneself. What one is asked is whether one is _willing_ to understand oneself as the word instructs one to do. In the fact that one _can_ thus understand oneself lies the sole criterion of the word's truth \-\- or better expressed, perhaps, it is to this alone that anybody who asks for a criterion is to be referred" (_Glauben und Verstehen_ 1: 284; cf. also, _Christ without Myth_: 86). |
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