539. What is the "objective claim" ...

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What is the "objective claim" that makes the valuation expressed by the constitutive christological assertion more than merely a "subjective preference"?

It is the claim that Jesus fulfills all the conditions necessary to anyone's [sic!] decisively answering the existential question and therefore being of decisive significance for human existence.

But, then, it must be possible to stipulate these necessary conditions explicitly and a priori -- before the fact of Jesus, even as before the fact of anyone else of whom "the Christ" or any functionally equivalent and interchangeable christological predicate could be truly asserted.

By "a priori christology," then, is meant just such an explicit stipulation. Even as a posteriori christology, or christology simply as such, is the explicit assertion, in some formulation or other, of the decisive significance of Jesus, so a priori christology is the explicit stipulation, again, in some terms or other, of the conditions that need to be fulfilled in order to truly make or imply the same kind of assertion about anyone whomsoever.

11 April 2006