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3. But what I also see more clearly now than before is the point of both Wesley's "The Almost Christian" and many of Bultmann's essays, such as, for example, "Die Krisis des Glaubens" and "Formen menschlicher Gemeinschaft." In both cases, to be sure, the point seems to be a christological point; and in a sense, of course, it is. But, clearly, in both cases, it is not only a christological point, since what is also at issue for Wesley and Bultmann alike is whether faith is a human act or attitude, either in the sense of Schleiermacher, as Senft interprets him, with his conception of faith in terms of "formation" (= Bildung), or in the sense of Heidegger, Sartre, and other existentialists, for whom faith is a matter of taking one's existence upon oneself in face of nothing, in despair, in the boundary situation of being shattered, and so on; or whether, on the contrary, faith is the response of obedience evoked from a human being and made possible for her or him solely by God's prevenient love. As Bultmann says, Christian faith is distinctive because it speaks of an event that gives faith this right [sc. to address God], because it hears a word that even demands of it the acknowledgement of God as other. For Christianity, faith in God is not faith and trust in God in general, but faith in a specific word proclaimed to it. The event is Jesus Christ, in whom, as is said in the New Testament, God has spoken, whom the New Testament itself speaks of as 'the word.' This means that, in what has happened in and through Christ, God has decisively revealed Godself to women and men; and in this occurrence a proclamation is established and legitimated that encounters them as God's word, that does not teach a new concept of God but rather gives them the right to believe in the God in whom they would fain believe" (GV 2: 10). Or again, uIt It seems to me a question whether the statement of existentialism that a human being comes to her- or himself in that she or he now independently takes her or his being upon her- or himself in despair (Sartre), in face of the imminently threatening nothing (Heidegger), or in the boundary situation of being shattered (Jaspers) must be understood as the acme of human hybris hubris or as the expression of humility and radical openness. I mean that this is ambiguous and in the nature of the case has to be so. For here is the point of decision" (290). In Wesley's words, being "altogether a Christian" is,first, loving God, which means that one is "crucified to the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eye, and the pride of life.' Yea, [one] is dead to pride of every kind: for 'love is not puffed up'; but '[one] that dwelling in love, dwelleth in God, and God in [one],' is less than nothing in [her or] his own eyes." In other words, faith is the exclusion of all boasting, including that which would base itself on one's own righteousness and sincerity, instead of being "'a sure trust and confidence which [one] hath in God, that, by the merits of Christ, [one's] sins are forgiven, and [one] is reconciled to the favour of God; whereof doth follow a loving heart, to obey [God's] commandments."'

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