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1. It is very important to stress the purely formal character of explicit christology, such as that of the Gnostic myth of the redeemer, even as one must stress the purely formal character of eschatology, or, more exactly, the apocalyptic announcement of the end of the age. Whether Jesus is conceived (with the synoptic tradition) as proclaiming the imminent coming of God's reign in such a way as to imply the decisive significance of his own witness; or whether he is conceived (with the Fourth Gospel) as explicitly proclaiming the decisive significance of his own person -- in either case, one has a formal structure whose material meaning is determined solely by Jesus himself. Only he himself in his meaning for us -- in the possibility for understanding ourselves and leading our lives that he decisively re-presents and authorizes -- gives either the formal framework of apocalyptic or the formal framework of explicit christology its distinctive material meaning. This is why everything, in the last analysis, does indeed depend on coming to know who Jesus is (The Point of Christology: 42).

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