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In sum: Bultmann's essential point is not caught simply by recognizing the "practical," or even the "existential," character of faith, but only by recognizing that faith is always and only an event in response to the always prior event of God's grace, of which faith as such is the obedient reception. In this sense, faith is, in Karl Barth's terms, an "impossible possibility," or a "possible impossibility." That this entails, as Bultmann infers, the kind of exclusivistic christocentrism that he more or less consistently defends may be just as questionable as I hold it to be. But from my side, the acknowledgment is certainly in order that Christian faith as authentic faith in God's grace, i.e., in the act, or event, of God's grace, is crucially other and more than "theistic religion," or "a religion," in the senses in which Tennant and Whitehead use the terms, or even what I speak of as "a possibility of self-understanding that requires of us a personal decision." (To what extent some such acknowledgment is at least implied by most, if not all, of the things I've written since Christ without Myth is certainly worth asking. I say, "at least implied," although there is one passage in Christ without Myth itself where I explicitly dissociate what I say from the mistaken suggestion that the possibility of faith "literally 'belongs' to man, in the sense of something he possesses independently of his relationship with God, and so is able to dispose of as and when he pleases." "The truth," on the contrary, "is that this possibility is not man's own inalienable possession, but rather is constantly being made possible for him by virtue of his inescapable relation to the ultimate source of his existence. To be human means to stand coram deo and, by reason of such standing, to be continually confronted with the gift and demand of authentic human existence" [140; italics in the original]. But I wonder whether I've explicitly acknowledged Bultmann's point as often and as emphatically as I could and should have done -- even in my most recent writings [e.g., "On Revelation"].)

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