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According to Bultmann, "theology does not 'teach' in the sense in which philosophy 'teaches' when philosophy seeks the truth and, to the extent that it thinks it has found the truth, 'teaches' it. Theology, on the contrary, in a certain sense already has the truth in the proclamation of the New Testament. In philosophy, science and teaching are identical, and the right philosophy itself would be right teaching. Theology, by contrast, 'teaches' what the New Testament 'teaches.' It 'teaches' what is 'right teaching;,' that is, it interprets the New Testament. . ." (NTM: 58 f., changing "what 'right teaching' is" to "what is 'right teaching"').

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Were I to make the point now, I might very well do so in yet another way, by saying that, whereas, for religion and therefore for theology, also, there has to be some explicit primal ontic source of authority – -- i.e., a historical as well as a transcendental source authorizing its their claim to decisive existential authority – -- for philosophy, there neither is nor can be any such explicit primal ontic source, its only primal source being strictly transcendental.

Whether or not Whitehead had this difference in mind in saying that "philosophy is mystical," I have no way of knowing. But putting it so is certainly a legitimate way of making the point, provided one observes Whitehead's own qualification and adds yet another, to the effect that the "verbal characterizations" that philosophy introduces are not so "novel" as not to be critically based on the "evidence" always already provided by all forms of human praxis and culture, and especially by "the utterances of religious aspiration."

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