The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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I have pressed the question, whether Christians who recognize the significance of specifically Christian means of salvation -- primal as well as primary and secondary -- should not, "as a general rule, at least, avoid speaking of anyone as implicitly a Christian except in the first sense of the words [sc. clarified in Notebooks, 13 December 2002]." But, having continued to reflect on it, I've finally concluded that the question is not well formulated.

Why not? Because it fails to take account of the fact -- that I myself have long since noted and called attention to! -- that "to imply" may be understood not only in the one sense of "to presuppose," but also in the other sense of "to anticipate." Clearly, the first sense in which I've allowed that one may be said to be "implicitly Christian" is the sense in which "to imply" is tacitly understood to mean "to presuppose" -- to presuppose, namely, the Christian proprium. And if this were the only sense in which "to imply" could be understood, then, just as clearly, this is the only sense in which anyone could be said to be "implicitly Christian." But if "to imply" could also be understood to mean "to anticipate," then to say that someone is "implicitly Christian" could mean, that she or he anticipates the Christian proprium, as distinct from presupposing it.

That there are good reasons for Christians to say this, too, is clear not only from Karl Rahner's reflections on "anonymous Christianity," but also from my own attempts to clarify the senses in which the Old Testament properly belongs in the Christian canon, together with the New, or in which one may properly speak of "the Christian witness of the Bible." But, then, what Christians need to avoid doing is speaking of anyone or anything as "implicitly Christian" without making clear what they do and do not mean in so speaking.

I have two further reflections. The first is that the paradigm for rightly thinking about this question, and thus about the distinction between "to presuppose" and "to anticipate," is what Hartshorne has to say about the meaning of "the possibility of particular P":

[W]e mean, if we understand ourselves [, he says,] only that the previous phase of process defined itself as destined to be superseded somehow, within certain limits of variation, by a next phase of process. The 'somehow' is not, however, a wholly undifferentiated question mark, but involves some modes of contrast, of 'alternative possibilities,' none of which can coincide in character with the particular which later turns up, but some one of which, or some one region of the continuum of possible quality, will later be recognizable as the nearest alternative or region, the one which with the least further definition is equivalent to the particular. This relation between particular and its possibility is only a relation of reason for the possibility, but is a real relation for the particular. Process relates itself backwards to its potencies, not forward to particular actualizations of these potencies. It does relate itself forward to the general principle, there will be further actualization, some additional definiteness or other" (Reality as Social Process: 98 f.).

The second reflection is that, because it is always only later, after P has been actualized, that the possibility of P can be identified as such, so it is also only later, after X has been actualized, that what implies X in the sense of anticipating, as distinct from presupposing, X is identifiable as doing so. In other words, anticipations of X can be identified as such, as predictions or prophecies of X, only as vaticinia ex eventu.

11 December 2004

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