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Not surprisingly, therefore, the christological outline I projected in Christ without Myth was not simply "filled out" in The Point of Christology, but significantly corrected there (although right up through the essay, "The Point of Christology," I was still, in effect, arguing for the kind of christology outlined in Christ without Myth). Whereas in Christ without Myth, I had indeed got beyond the kind of revisionary christology for which Jesus is the Christ because he actualized authentic existence in his own "person" (cf. 161), I was still very much caught up in the kind of revisionary christology for which it is his "office" (of re-presenting the God-man relationship) that accounts for his being the Christ. True, I also had got beyond the kind of revisionary christology for which Jesus is "the great 'teacher' of the human race" (161 f.). But, significantly, I defended the claim that he is "mankind's preacher," arguing that his ministry is "both the norm and the fulfilment" of "the office of preacher" -- or, in other words, that he is simply one more preacher alongside others, even if the first and foremost among them (162 £f.). (One cannot fail to be struck by the extent to which my whole discussion of Jesus in Christ without Myth (159 ff.), as well as, incidentally, in The Reality of God (cf., e.g., 185 ff.), is of a piece with, and shaped by, the so-called new quest of the historical Jesus.)

At least by the time of Faith and Freedom (cf., e.g., 54 f.), the christology of Christ without Myth and The Reality of God was being displaced by the kind of christology finally worked out more adequately in The Point of Christology. (The fifth lecture that I drafted to augment the other four even then in process of publication, when I taught at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond in the Summer of 1978, already deployed the key concept of Jesus Christ as primal Christian sacrament.) But only in the course of writing The Point of ChristoiogyChristology did I sharpen the distinction between "sacrament" and "example" and elaborate the philosophy of authority first worked out in "The Authority of Scripture for Theology" so as to yield, in effect, an a priori christology in which a crucial distinction is drawn between being the explicit primal (ontic) source of authority and being an, even the (=primary), authority authorized by this source. Given these developments, I could at last clearly distinguish -- and had to distinguish -- between Christian faith and authentic existence without losing what was most importantly at stake in my earlier mistaken identification of them.

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