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In Christ without Myth, I took a position in important respects different from the one I should now wish to defend. The crux of the difference is that there I simply identified Christian faith with authentic human existence, whereas now I would stress the distinction between them, while still seeking to avoid a monistic (i.e., either exclusivistic or inclusivistic) understanding of the other religious and cultural traditions in relation to Christianty. (It is no doubt arguable that, even in Christ without Myth, my position was more complex -- or, more exactly, more incoherent or self-contradictory -- insofar as I, too, in my way, distinguished Christian faith from authentic self-understanding, even while saying other things that asserted or implied their identity.)

Wiki MarkupThus, in _Christ without Myth_, I asserted that the implication of my position was that "Christian existence is always a 'possibility in fact' as well as a 'possibility in principle,'" and that this may also be expressed by saying that "the specific possibility of faith in Jesus Christ is one and the same with a general ontological possibility belonging to man simply as such .... \ [T\]he possibility of Christian existence is an original possibility of man before God" (140). I also asserted that, "so far from being something independently significant, the demand for faith in Jesus the Christ, rightly understood, is simply a transparent means for expressing this original claim always standing against our lives." Consequently, "Christian faith is to be interpreted exhaustively and without remainder as man's original possibility of authentic existence as this is clarified and conceptualized by an appropriate philosophical analysis" (143, 146). Or, again, "Christian faith is always a 'possibility in fact' because of the unconditioned gift and demand of God's love, which is the ever-present ground and end of all created things" (153).

Of course, what I meant by "Christian faith"(or "Christian existence") in such formulations was faith in Christ, understood to mean, not Jesus Christ, but "the hidden power, the inner meaning, the real substance of all human happenings," and, therefore, "not one historical event alongside others, but rather the eschatological event, or eternal word of God's unconditioned love, which is the ground and end of all historical events whatever" (156). But if this understanding of "Christ" as "the unconditioned gift and demand of God's love," etc. made it reasonable to identify Christian faith with "man's original possibility of authentic existence," it nevertheless failed to account for the fact that what makes, and always has made, one a Christian, properly so-called, is to assert or imply that Jesus is the Christ.

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