The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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I have explained for years that to represent is to re-present, to make present again, a second time. But it suddenly came home to me that to make present again, or a second time is in either case to make present -- indeed, to make really present.

That I was already more or less aware of this seems clear from the way I regularly expounded the meaning of "real presence" in my lectures in systematic theology. Consider, for example, the following from my lectures for 1989-90:

Jesus Christ is really present in preaching and sacraments in the same way in which any person is really present in the words and deeds of direct address that re-present her or his meaning for us. Insofar, then, as preaching and sacraments are representative forms of the direct witness of faith, Jesus Christ himself is really present -- namely, re-present, present again, a second time -- in them, even as he himself, in turn, is the decisive re-presentation of God's own gift and demand of saving grace. The power of the word precisely as direct address is always to re-present him in this way. So wherever the word that Jesus Christ himself is, is itself re-presented-as it clearly is or should be, first of all, in the visible church as such and then, secondly, in both its preaching and its administering the sacraments -- he is not merely talked about, as he is in Christian teaching, but is himself really and personally present, as is the saving grace of God of which he is the decisive re-presentation.

5 May 2008

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