The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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If the truth about human existence that I as a Christian take to be decisively re-presented through Jesus is substantially the same as the existential truth that philosophy, for its part, has the task of formulating, then the claim that I make for Christianity -- that it is the formally true religion -- is as justified as it could possibly be. The same is true, of course, of the corresponding claim of any other specific religion whose understanding of human existence satisfies the same condition of re-presenting -- and, for its adherents, decisively re-presenting -- substantially the same existential truth that philosophy is supposed to formulate.

Because this is so, however, it seems clear that my primary task as a Christian witness, or evangelist, is not to proclaim and teach the decisive significance of Jesus, or the (formal) truth of Christianity, but rather to proclaim and teach the truth about human existence that I as a Christian take Jesus decisively to re-present. In other words, for me as a Christian as much as for Jesus himself, the first christology is properly an implicit, not an explicit, christology. Only so, indeed, can the assertion constitutive of explicit theology either make sense or commend itself as true.

2 June 2001

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