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                                                                                                                                                                                        More Obiter Dicta on Christology

The existential question is the question of how to understand the encompassing mystery of existence given an understanding of my authentic possibility and, conversely, how to understand my authentic possibility given an understanding of the encompassing mystery of existence.

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Does the "pragmatic test" of the meaning of assertions entail eliminating the difference between one christological assertion and another? -- What difference would there be in my life, in my being and acting, as distinct from my speaking, or, at least, as distinct from what I might say, if I believed this assertion, instead of another?

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Christology obviously expresses faith in Jesus as the Christ. But this is just as obviously not all it expresses, for it also expresses what has to be the case -- andcase—and, therefore, is the case -- if case—if faith in Jesus as the Christ is a warranted faith. Thus it not only expresses what Christians in fact do believe, but also what they by right -- and right—and every other human being by right -- ought —ought to believe, and, in the power of the Holy Spirit, also can believe. In sum: christology expresses what is worthy of being believed not only by Christians but by everyone else.

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Curiously, Marxsen expresses the content of the earliest apostolic testimony to Jesus in a very formal way -- making way—making God happen, anticipating the verdict of the last judgment, putting persons in the situation of faith, and so on. (Admittedly, anticipating the eschatological meal by table fellowship with the outcasts is an exception.)

I should want to stress its material, existential meaning, rather as Braun does in speaking of the I may and the I should. Thus I should speak of Jesus representing the gift and demand of God's boundless love, and hence the possibility of existence in the radical freedom of faith working through love.

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If Jesus is fully God, "of one substance with the Father," then wherever God is, God is and must be what God is decisively through Jesus Christ. But God is, by definition, everywhere, as the primal source and the final end of all things, both actual and possible, and so God must be everywhere what God is decisively through Jesus Christ. Moreover, God must be at least implicitly revealed everywhere, wherever there is understanding; and so God is not only present everywhere as God is decisively re-presented through Jesus Christ, but God must be originally presented everywhere -- revealed —revealed at least implicitly as that God.

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What is the style of the Christ-kerygma? It asserts that God has done what he has done in the human existence of Jesus and then infers to the understanding of human existence that is appropriate to that divine action -- so action—so that in the Fourth Gospel the point is reached where all that Jesus reveals is that he is the revealer -- the revealer—the nature of his revelation being inferable only from the understanding of existence appropriate to this revelation, not from what he reveals.

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What gives content to the titles or names attributed to Jesus is not just Jesus but the experiences had with Jesus by those who thus bear witness to him. These experiences are, on the one hand, the experience of something given -- a given—a challenge, a call, a gift-demand: technically, an asserted possibility of self-understanding, or understanding of oneself, vis-a-vis the experienced reality of others and the whole -- andwhole—and, on the other hand, the experience of positively accepting that which is experienced as given -- technically—technically: accepting the assertion of a possibility of self-understanding by thus understanding oneself. (What is properly understood by "Jesus," so far, at least as christology is concerned, is the something experienced as given.)

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One authority is related to another horizontally -- on —on the same level, vis-a-vis the primal source authorizing each of them alike.

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