The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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I find it interesting that, already in "Faith and Truth" (1965), I was employing the concept "anticipation" in my efforts to clarify the two tasks of theology.

There is, however, a significant difference between the way I employed it there and the way I have employed it in my more recent thinking and writing. On my earlier use, it is said to be the Christian theologian's "first duty"—"what is called his 'dogmatic duty'"— to anticipate the "judgment" of whether his theology is "appropriate to Christ as attested by Scripture," even as it is his "second or 'apologetic' duty" to anticipate an "appraisal" of the "understandability" of his own formulations or of "the truth of Christian faith." On my more recent use, by contrast, it is not the theologian who is assigned the duty of anticipating the validation of her or his claims; it is rather the Christian witness who is said to anticipate theology by making or implying claims for the validity of what she or he thinks, says, or does (cf., e.g., Doing Theology Today: 40).

Of course, I would still want to allow that the theologian also anticipates insofar as properly theological statements themselves are subject to the same criteria of validity—of adequacy and fittingness, appropriateness and credibility—as apply to the statements made or implied in bearing witness. In this case, however, what is anticipated is not on the different level of critical reflection and proper theory, as distinct from self-understanding and life-praxis, but on the same level.

19 November 1996

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