By Schubert Ogden
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Either way, however, Marxsen's essential insight seems sound. Christology began with the experience of Jesus in action -– or, if you will, of the event ("that") of Jesus -– as of decisive significance for human existence, because it decisively re-presented the gift and demand of God's rule of love. Whether or not this experience was expressed, first by qualifying Jesus' activity, and only later, by qualifying his person, the point of all such qualifications is the same: to confess the decisive significance of Jesus and his activity, or of Jesus' activity and Jesus himselt himself as the decisive re-presentation of the meaning of God for us, in such a way as thereby to offer others the same experience and to call them to make the same confession.
Marxsen's essential insight, in short is that, whether we speak of Jesus' "activity/' " or rather of his "person/' " as christologically decisive, we must take pains to understand that the proper referent of the one term as surely as the other is not the being of Jesus in himself, but the meaning of Jesus for us.
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