By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
For orthodoxy, the prophets and apostles, whose experience as the recipients of immediate revelation is the explicit primal noetic source of all Christian faith, witness, and theology, are the authors respectively of the Old and the New Testament writings. For me, on the other hand, they are the persons to whom we owe respectively the earliest stratum of Christian witness (in the case of the apostles) and the assumptions on the basis of which this earliest Christian witness was formulated (in the case of the prophets). Since neither this witness itself nor the assumptions on the basis of which it was formulated are available to us independently of the New Testament and the Old Testament writings, but must first be historically reconstructed using these writings as sources, we can know who the apostles and prophets are only after we have thus reconstructed the witness and assumptions of which they are respectively the authors.
This difference could also be put by saying that, just as the witness that I take to be apostolic is earlier than the witness of any of the New Testament writings, so what I understand to be the assumptions of the apostolic witness and therefore prophetic witness is later than the witness of any of the Old Testament writings.
n.d.; rev. 31 August 2003
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