The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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The confession of Jesus as the Christ, which (in this or some functionally equivalent and interchangeable formulation) is constitutive of bearing Christian witness explicitly as such, implies a twofold assertion: that Jesus is the one through whom God has acted decisively to judge and to save; and that God is the One who has acted decisively to judge and to save through Jesus.

Any Christian witness that is at all adequate to its content, then, will be both "theocentric" and "christocentric." It will be theocentric insofar as it asserts that the only saving faith is faith in the one true God in whom alone is salvation; and it will be christocentric insofar as it asserts that the only true God is the God who has acted decisively to judge and to save through Jesus Christ.

Nevertheless, there is a fundamental difference between traditional and revisionary ways of interpreting this twofold assertion and the theocentrism and christocentrism of which it is the basis. Whereas on traditional interpretations, whether exclusivist or inclusivist, the unique saving event of Jesus Christ not only represents the possibility of salvation but also in some way constitutes it, on revisionary interpretations, the event of Jesus Christ in no way constitutes the possibility of salvation but only represents it.

Beyond this difference, however, there is the further, hardly less important difference between an exemplarist type of representativist christology, for which Jesus is at most the primary example of saving faith, and a sacramentalist type of representativism, for which Jesus is not less than the primal sacrament of salvation (sacramentum salutis totius mundi).

3 February 1995

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