By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
In what sense is "the point of christology" an existential point?
"The point of christology" is an existential point in the sense that the constitutive assertion of christology about who Jesus is, is, even more fundamentally, an assertion about who we are -- which is to say, about who we are given and called to be by the mysterious, strictly ultimate reality constituting our existence as human beings.
Because, however, the point of the christological assertion is in this sense fundamentally existential, the question as to the subject of the assertion is absolutely crucial. If the answer to my existential question about who I am authorized to be by ultimate reality in its meaning for us is the answer decisively re-presented through Jesus -- and it is just this that the christological assertion fundamentally asserts -- then obviously everything depends on determining just who Jesus is. For it is precisely and only Jesus who gives its distinctive material meaning to what is otherwise a purely formal claim about his decisive significance for human existence and, conversely, about the meaning of ultimate reality for us.
In sum: "Everything depends on determining just who Jesus is ... because he is the decisive re-presentation of the meaning of ultimate reality for us, and thus explicitly authorizes our authentic self-understanding as human beings" (The Point of Christology: 42, 149; as quoted on the dust jacket).
21 February 2000; rev. 9 October 2001
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