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                                                                                           Further                                                                                            Further Reflections on Christology

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This implies, among other things, that it is as inadequate to see Jesus simply as a human being decisively re-presenting the possibility of faith as to see him simply as a human being perfectly actualizing that possibility -- the former being as much as the latter more a "legendary" than a properly "mythological" way of expressing his decisive significance. To be sure, Jesus does decisively re-present the possibility of faith in and through all that he says and does, whether or not he does (or even could) perfectly actualize the possibility of faith. Accordingly, Jesus may be said to be the fulfillment of the law, in that he makes clear the universal gift and demand of God's love. But insofar as Jesus is the substance of the gospel, he is so because the agent doing the re-presenting -- to be sure, in and through his human life -- is none other than God. What all mythological, as distinct from legendaylegendary, talk is an attempt to express is God re-presenting God's own gift and demand through Jesus.

Of course, it is the insistence that it is God who is doing the representing that eventually comes to expression in the notion that the person of Jesus is divine. But what becomes an insolvable insoluble metaphysical puzzle when taken to refer to the being of Jesus in himself -- in terms that either qualify his humanity or else destroy the unity of his person -- raises no such difficulty when it is understood as a way of expressing Jesus' decisive significance: for human existence. To say of something that God has done it -- so far as that is intended to be in any way a differentiating statement -- can only mean that it is and by right ought to be significant for my self-understanding before God; that in it God confronts me with God's own gift and demand.

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