By Schubert Ogden
According to the usual account emerging from historical-critical study, there was a development in christology whose traces can be more or less clearly discerned in the New Testament writings. Put very generally, the result of this development was such that the man Jesus, who either knew himself to be the promised king of the last days appointed by God or else was held to be such by the earliest Christian community, became a heavenly, divine being, to whom one ascribed preexistence, who was already active in the creation of the world, who became man, died, and rose again, ascended into heaven, and was there enthroned at the right hand of God. As such, he was worshipped worshiped as God by the church, was understood to hear prayers and to dispense miraculous powers, and was expected to come again, to hold judgment and to vanquish the cosmic powers, death and the devil, that are hostile to God. The course of this development, which is characterized by such concepts as, "Messiah" and "Son of David," "Son of God" and "Son of Man," "Kyrios" and "Logos," as well as by the stories of Jesus' miraculous birth, transfiguration, resurrection, ascension, and so on, is well known and need not be detailed here. Suffice it to say that its end was the injunction that "we ought so to think of Jesus Christ as of God" (2 Clem 1:1).
...
In the first place, whether Jesus is thought and spoken about as a human being whom God appointed or as a divine being who became man, he is in any case understood as the explicit primal ontic source of all that is divinely authorized. On the most probable reconstruction of Jesus' own ministry, he may be said to have had the same understanding of himself at least implicitly. Although he certainly appears as a man, as a prophet and teacher, and offers no explicit teaching concerning his own person, he nevertheless implies a christology insofar as he calls for a definitive decision in face of his own word and person. This he does by implicitly claiming to have been sent by God and thus to be the explicit primal ontic source of all that is divinely authorized. Thus, whether or not he knows himself to be the Messiah is of no consequence, because in either case he definitely implies a christology in this sense, and when the earliest community calls him the Messiah, it but expresses in its own way that it has understood him and has made the decision for which he calls. The proclaimer has to become the one proclaimed because he is experienced implicitly, if not explicitly, to be the explicit primal ontic source of all that is authorized by God. Whether Jesus did or did not so understand himself, implicitly or explicitly, he certainly is so understood throughout the whole course of christological development from the earliest community onwards, whether he is thought and spoken of as the man whom God has made Messiah
or rather as the God who assumed the nature of a man.
...