By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
The traditional revisionary insistence that what is normative for Christianity is "the religion of Jesus," as distinct from "the religion about Jesus," has the effect of removing Jesus from the object to the subject side of the religious correlation.
But this, arguably, flies flat in the face of the Christian witness right from the beginning. The whole point of christology, from the earliest merely implicit christology on, is to place Jesus emphatically on the object side of the religious correlation, as distinct from the subject side, where all the rest of us find ourselves. And this, of course, explains why what we find from the earliest beginnings of the Christian witness is a witness expressing, in one way or another, "the religion about Jesus," as distinct from "the religion of Jesus." For even the earliest Christian witness accessible to us by way of historical reconstruction is not Jesus' kerygma but Jesus-kerygma, i.e., not (a restatement of) Jesus' own kerygma, but (a statement of) the earliest community's kerygma about him in his decisive significance for human existence.
The question, however, is how the object side of the religious correlation is to be understood. Essential to an answer is the insight that religion generically and therefore each religion specifically is the explicit re-presentation of the meaning of ultimate reality for us. In some contexts, I have formulated this insight by saying that religion "never exists in general, any more than art or science does, but always exists as a religion which has its origin in some particular occasion of insight or special revelation" (On Theology: 85). In yet other contexts, I have spoken about "the decisive authority that each religion claims for its own thinking and speaking over against all other specific religions," and, in this connection, I have distinguished between the implicit and the explicit primal source of a particular religion's authority (125 f.). But, however the point is formulated, whether in terms of the notion of "some particular occasion of insight or special revelation," or in terms of the notion of an "explicit primal source of authority," the point is that the object side of the religious correlation is itself duplex, having a historical, as well as a transhistorical—indeed, transcendental—aspect, each dialectically related to the other. Otherwise put: the object side of the religious correlation itself involves a correlation—in Boff's terms—between an "order of manifestation" and an "order of constitution," relative to the subject side of the correlation.
The critical issue for religions generally, however, is whether, or to what extent, they are prepared to acknowledge that everything distinctive about them, including their explicit primal source of authority and the understanding of the implicit primal source of authority that it makes explicit, belong to the order of manifestation, not to the order of constitution. What makes my theology, including my christology, revisionary in a revised, nontraditional, sense is my insistence that, although—assuming the perspective of faith from which Christians think and talk about him—Jesus very definitely belongs on the object, not the subject, side of the Christian religious correlation, he also belongs to the historical, as distinct from the transhistorical, transcendental, aspect of the object side, and thus to its order of manifestation, as distinct from its order of constitution.
10 June 1989; rev. 5 January 2001; 6 November 2009
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