By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
If there is a distinction to be made between assertions, on the one hand, and formulations (of assertions), on the other, shouldn't one also make the following distinctions:
(1) between assertions, on the one hand, and their necessary presuppositions and implications, on the other; and, paralleling this distinction, another
(2) between formulations (of assertions), on the one hand, and their assumptions and consequences, on the other?
The new insight here is that, just as assertions have necessary presuppositions and implications, so formulations (of assertions) necessarily make assumptions and entail consequences. Thus, for example, the formulation of the constitutive christological assertion in terms of Jesus' being Son of God not only makes certain assumptions about God, and so on, but also entails certain consequences, such as being able to ask, and perhaps feeling a need to ask, when, exactly, Jesus became God's Son. This question, in turn, allows for just such alternative answers as we actually find in the New Testament—beginning, presumably, with the answer that Jesus became Son of God at his resurrection (Rom 1:4), and proceeding to answers identifying the time as his baptism (Mk 1:9-11) or his conception and birth (Mt 1:18-25; and especially, Lk 1:35). In the same way, once the christological assertion is formulated in terms of a virgin birth christology, one has to reckon with such further consequences as have been drawn in mariological doctrine right down to the Marian dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church.
The crucial point, of course, is to be able to distinguish the necessary implications of the christological assertion itself, in the form of genuine credenda and agenda, from what are merely the consequences for either belief or action of one or another of its formulations.
May 1989; rev. 8 October 2003
Overview
Content Tools