By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
You can't just say, as I have said, that "prophets, sages, and saints can never be constitutive of a faith or religion, but are always only representative of it."
You can't just say this, because it is clear beyond serious question that Moses is, in a way, constitutive of Judaism, even as Gautama Siddharta is, in his way, constitutive of Buddhism, Mohammad, constitutive of Islam, Confucius, constitutive of Confucianism, and so on.
True, all religions have prophets, sages, and saints that are not constitutive of them, in essentially the same way in which their believers or adherents generally do not constitute them as the religions they are. But there can be no doubt that some religions, at any rate, have one or more prophets, sages, or saints that are constitutive of them, because they are the constitutive believers or adherents of the religions in question. No religion can be constituted as such without some constitutive believer(s) or adherent(s). Commonly enough, however, the constitutive believer(s) or adherent(s) of a religion is (are) its constitutive prophet(s), sage(s), or saint(s).
In the case of the Christian religion, its constitutive believers or adherents are the apostles, who are also its only constitutive prophets, sages, and saints. But they, at least, are properly spoken of as constitutive and so not merely representative. For while they are indeed representative, in that they are constituted as apostles by Jesus Christ and derive their only authority from him, they are not merely representative because they derive their authority immediately from him rather than through the mediation of some still earlier representation. This means, in turn, that he himself is accessible as such, as Jesus Christ, finally, solely through their representation of him.
1 June 1990
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