By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
According to Bultmann, all christological concepts-terms and all christological titles are but means of expressing the historic significance of the person and destiny of Jesus as God's decisive act of salvation (GV 1: 267).
According to Marxsen, the names of Jesus, as well as all other christological concepts-terms, are predicates asserting God's becoming event through him (NTBK: 110).
According to Braun, all christological titles and all other christological interpretations of the course of Jesus' life are forms for expressing the authority that Jesus' words and deeds have acquired over those who make or imply christological claims (Jesus: 146 ff., espec. 154).
According to my own earlier formulations, all christological claims, whether made by ascribing honorific titles to Jesus or made by making mythological and/or legendary claims about his origin, career, and destiny are by way of expressing his decisive existential significance by asserting that he is the truth about human existence made fully explicit ("The Point of Christology").
Now, all these ways of explaining the point of christology are legitimate and important, and I could accept any of them as more or less compatible with what I have wished to say from The Point of Christology on. But each of them, as I have gradually realized is in certain respects inadequate. The formulations of Bultmann and Marxsen, being explicitly religious and theistic, need to be interpreted, lest they suggest that what are, after all, but forms of expression are somehow necessary in a way in which they actually are not. On the other hand, Braun's formulation, like my own, fails to distinguish sufficiently between Jesus's being merely an authority, even the primary authority, and his being the explicit primal source of authority,
n. d.; rev. 7 October 2004
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