By Schubert Ogden
So far as the New Testament witnesses are concerned, Jesus is the Christ not because he actualized the possibility of faith and, unlike us, actualized it perfectly, but because he re-presents the possibility of faith andf for us re-presents it decisively.
Jesus is the Son of God, or any of the other things that faith appropriately asserts him to be, not to the extent that he believed God, but solely to the extent that decisively through him, as we encounter him through the Christian witness, we ourselves and others through us are or can be brought to faith in God.
But if these claims are to the point, then what any christology properly serves to explicate is not a past event that occurred between Jesus and God, but an ever-present event that occurs between believers and God through Jesus as he is attested by the Christian witness.
11 November 1996