The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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The issues I have with Funk's "The Incredible Creed" are of three main types:

1. issues having to do with correctly understanding Rudolf Bultmann's project of demythologizing/existentialist interpretation;

2. issues having to do with the historical possibility of a so-called renewed quest of the historical Jesus; and

3. issues having to do with the theological necessity, or desirability, of such a quest.

As regards issues of the third type, the important question is not (as Funk represents it) whether Jesus is to be assigned "a formative role in the Christian movement," but rather what such formative role Jesus is to be assigned -- the role that Funk assigns him of being merely one Christian authority among others, even if the primary such authority, or rather the role that I, following Bultmann, assign him of being the explicit primal ontic source of authority for everything specifically Christian?

3 November 1997

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