By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
If theology is witness, it is indirect and unintentional witness.
In being indirect witness, theology is like teaching, whether by precept or by example, in contrast to all forms of direct witness, whether the explicit witness of proclamation or the implicit witness of other forms of loving action (proclamation itself being a form of such action). But theology is also unlike teaching in that it does not even intend to be witness as teaching clearly does. On the contrary, it intends either to determine critically whether some instance of witness is valid by validating or invalidating the claims of the witness to be adequate or fitting or else to determine constructively what a witness would have to be in order to be thus adequate or fitting.
8 June 1990; rev. 18 September 2002
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