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2. But, then, one must ask how it is possible for one human being to love another, or to be loved by another, in the absolutely basic matter of our optio fundamentalis as human beings, i.e., our fundamental choice between an authentic and an inauthentic existence. The answer, it would seem, can only be the one Bultmann gives in the conduding concluding pages of Jesus, when he argues that the only possibility of forgiveness being given and received is through the word. In other words, to love another in this absolutely basic matter of her or his own decision simply as a human being can be nothing other than to confront her or him with her or his own authentic possibility. Correspondingly, to be loved by another in this respect can only be to be thus confronted by the other.

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7. Still more certain, I think, is that this is what Marxsen very much has in mind when he says that, for the earliest community, Jesus not only taught a possibility but also actualized it (Das Neue Testament als Buch der Kirche: 109 f.). Jesus not only founded a religion that others could join him in practicing and teaching, according to which the general truth about being human is that one has the possibility of faith working through love, but Jesus' having done precisely this -- the "that" of his having done itconfronted it confronted and confronts his hearers with the love that frees them to actualize that very possibility.

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