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1) ". . . it is one question whether an assertion is in some sense objectively true and quite another question whether anyone believes it to be true, either by reflectively assenting to it, or by affirming it existentially. Consequently, while I have no difficulty understanding that, unless an assertion is believed true, it cannot be believed true, I have the greatest difficulty in believing, if not in understanding, that, unless an assertion is believed true, it cannot be true . . . . I quite agree with Tillich that 'the Christian event' is not only the 'fact' of Jesus the Christ, but also the 'believing reception' of that fact, which is constitutive of the community of the church and its witness. What I wish to challenge, however, is his claim that 'the receptive side of the Christian event is as important as the factual side' (ST, II, 99). Even though there would be no Christian event at all, properly speaking, but for the coming into being of the church as the community of faith and witness, it is of the essence of
that very faith and witness to confess their entire dependence on the 'fact' to which they are but the response. To this extent, Tillich's claim and his talk of the 'necessary interdependence' of fact and reception obscures the profound assymetry asymmetry of the relation between them."

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3) ". . . what faith itself may be said to 'guarantee' is not the actualization of the New Being in one personal life, but, rather, the re-presentation of the New Being as faith's own possibility -- or, in other words, what faith guarantees is the witness of faith, to which faith itself is always the response; or, in still other words, what faith guarantees is Jesus the Christ himself, who is precisely the witness of faith, the noncompressible core of the church's continuing witness, which both constitutes that witness as the meaning the witness expresses and is constituted by it as that meaning actually expressed. This assumes, naturally, that by 'Jesus the Christ' something else is meant than 'the historical Jesus' . . . in the sense of the Jesus disclosed by historical-critical research. . . . It is not 'the historical Jesus' in this sense who either is or ever has been the foundation of Christian faith and theology. Their only foundation, rather, is close to what Tillich . calls 'the biblical picture of Jesus' (ST, II, 115), and closer still to what Van Harvey speaks of more discriminatingly as 'the perspectival image of Jesus' and 'the biblical Christ,' the latter understood as interpretive of the former on the basis of faith's affirmation of the claim to truth that the former implies . .  . what created the church and creates it still is no more 'the actual Jesus' . . . than it is 'the historical Jesus' but only the memory image of Jesus received and interpreted by faith, and thus also what Harvey means by 'the biblical Christ.' Of course, this image and this interpretation of the image by faith have presented themselves right from the beginning as the image and interpretation of the actual Jesus as received by faith in his own actual witness. And, as Bultmann has said in a very similar context, there is an 'overwhelming probability' that this is exactly what they are (Jesus, 16). But to what extent, if any, they really are so is a question that historical research alone is competent to answer. So far as faith itself is concerned, Tillich's judgment is entirely correct, that 'faith can guarantee only its own foundation' -- only that .  . . is not . . . the actualization of faith but, rather, its re-presentation, . . . not the actual Jesus or the historical Jesus but Jesus the Christ of memory and faith, who is encountered nowhere else than in the witness of faith for the very good reason that he not only constitutes that witness but is aIso constituted by it."

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5)". . . the legendary and mythological elements in the biblical witnesses all function to give expression to the mean meaning or significance of the historical elements as these are understood from the standpoint of the memory and faith that are at the bottom of the entire New Testament testimony . . . . Thus the few references to Jesus' obedience to God, to his surmount surmounting of temptations, and to his acceding to God's will even in the face of death are all capable of being explained in exactly the same way in which we must explain the narratives of his miraculous conception and birth, of his nature miracles, and of his empty tomb -- namely, as legends, expressive of the experienced and affirmed authority of his actual words and deeds . . . what even the Synoptic Gospels really intend to affirm is not so much that Jesus actualized something as that he re-presents something -- a possibility of self-understanding, which he ever continues to re-present in and through their own witness as man's authentic possibility."

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