The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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My taking something to be revelation doesn't make it revelation, even though it makes it revelation for me. If it really is revelation, then, whether I take it to be so or not, it has to be such that it discloses things as they really are to anyone so taking it. In this sense, there is indeed an "objective" as well as a "subjective" component of the revelatory correlation.

But one must be very careful not to mislocate this "objective" component. There is a risk of mislocating it because the function of the "subjective" component may be understood only in part. Taking something to be revelation actually involves a double taking: first, taking something in a certain way, or as something; and only then, second, taking the something so taken to be revelation. More exactly, the subject of the revelation first takes something as re-presenting a certain possibility of self-understanding; and only then does (or can) the subject also take this possibility to be our authentic possibility as human beings. But, then, the "objective" component in the revelatory correlation is not simply the something taken, but the something taken in that particular way – namely, as re-presenting a certain possibility of self-understanding, which itself is then taken to be the possibility of understanding oneself authentically.  Accordingly, the relevant question in determining whether or not what is taken to be revelation really is so is not whether someone has re-presented our authentic possibility by what she or he has intended to say and do, or has, in fact, said and done, but whether the possibility that someone is taken to re-present is correctly taken as that authentic possibility.

It is at best misleading, then, to write, as I've written, that what it means to say that Jesus is the decisive act of God is that "in him, in his outer acts of symbolic word and deed, there is expressed that understanding of human existence which is, in fact, the ultimate truth of our life before God" (The Reality of God: 185 f.). What should be said instead is that the possibility that Jesus is taken to re-present by those who take him to be God's decisive act is that possibility of understanding human existence which is, in fact, our authentic possibility before God.

I recognize this, in effect, when I go on to write that "the entire reality of Jesus' history—at any rate, as it is presented to us in the Gospels—is simply a transparent means of representing a certain possibility for understanding human existence" (186; italics added). Clearly, the qualification, "as it is presented to us in the Gospels," can only mean, in the first instance, as it is taken by those who re-present it to us in the gospels.

15 November 1999 (in connection with re-reading "What Sense Does It Make to Say, 'God Acts in History'?"); rev. 7 December 2008

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