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Schubert M. Ogden

Författare till The Reality of God and Other Essays

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Schubert M. Ogden is University Distinguished Professor of Theology Emeritus at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. His books include The Understanding of Christian Faith (Cascade, 2010), Doing Theology Today (Wipf Stock, 2006), and Faith and Freedom (Wipf Stock, 2005).

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Existence and faith; shorter writings of Rudolf Bultmann (1960) — Redaktör, vissa utgåvor166 exemplar

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To Be Done...revising.

One of the joys of reading Schubert Ogden's "Christ without Myth" is that it is not ONLY a study of the constructive theology of Rudolf Bultmann. It is also a ventilation of both the "contemporary" --1961!-- collapse of theology, and the self-annihilating sham of Biblical Criticism.

Not all theologians are Believers in a God. Ogden is a Believer without a God, and we see his formulation of something to believe in, self-exposed, with his careful development of method and process. This work is useful not only for studying Bultmann's solution to the "the theological problem". [110-111] It is also a robust exercise in explicatory theology. And the bulk of the volume consists of detailed introductory sentences. This is great work:

Ogden begins by explaining the "the fundamental problem" which faced Bultmann--and as he confesses, and which I describe at the end, all contemporary theologians. Form Criticism is advanced and used as a tool which remains familiar to many modern theologians. I was reminded of the Creation Myth -- "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." This is how theologians face the faces. The "face of the deep" is not anthropomorphic, or even anthropology. It is the mirror of all contemporary theologians who realize that theology is not about God; it is about fiction, the myth, of Self. Faith itself is only possible as a "self-understanding". In Ogden's formulation of Christian Faith, theology "is the self-explication

As for those for whom theologians claim to speak, the audience has already left the barn: Christianity is proclaimed as if it is Myth. "The proclamation of the church in the conceptual form in which it encounters **** "

In limning the theological problemmatik, Ogden draws from Bultmann's constructions and solutions, sketches the immanent criticism of his proposal, and then outlines in detail the reasons for accepting Bultmann's demand. In this way, he tells us, he makes the acceptance "complete". [146]

The method in this position is Bultmann's demand for demythologization. Ogden addresses two questions which arise from this demand. Does the demand require elimination of all "symbolic" or "analogical" language in speaking of the divine? Ogden grants that part of Western tradition holds that "God and his activity can be spoken about only in such analogical language." [146] To preserve that conviction while using the demand, Ogden suggests that it is more accurate to describe Bultmann's demand as "transmythologization". Bultmann's concept was "wider" than supposed by some critics, and in no way was demythologization intended to rule out restatement of the kerygma using existential "analogies", which are distinguishable from myth. [147] Charles Hartshorne correctly understood and ventilated this distinction. Ogden takes Hartshorne's "Man's Vision of God" as a fulfillment of Bultmann's expansive postulate. [147, note 27].

Ogden fully addresses the noted criticisms. Some evangelicals have noted that the demand for existential interpretation inevitably leads to a dissolution of theology into anthropology, and the existentialist turn of faith into reductive "subjective" interpretation. [148] Bultmann, for example, "illicitly concludes" that in the case of Paul, "every assertion about God is simultaneously an assertion about man and vice versa", such that Paul's theology "is most appropriately presented as the doctrine of man". Similarly, Bultmann's statement that "the cross is not the salvation-event because it is the cross of Christ; it is the cross of Christ because it is the salvation-event." Critics are correct to claim that this exposes unwarranted "subjectivism", but Ogden goes on to show that this subjectivism is entirely unnecessary. After all, the question is whether the "cross of Christ" is a myth. Ogden brings forward Bultmann's emphasis that faith has its "object", its Woran, and because of the kind of object it is, "radical existential interpretation becomes imperative". [149] Again citing Bultmann, "if one wants to speak of God, it is clear he must speak of himself". Those are nice irreducible points.

Ogden embraces the passages of Bultmann's work which are "confused and unclear", usually as a result of inconsistency of thought, but draws down acceptable outcomes by showing how Bultmann used the method in practice. In practice and theory, Bultmann actually drew the same "analogies" as Heidegger's existentialism where God-talk is "figurative" or "symbolic", and arriving at "objective sense" by means of such analogies. [150] Ogden acknowledges the role of "Process Philosophy" (Process Theology of Hartshorne) in achieving an adequate solution to the theological problem.

So what exactly is the theological problem? Bultmann characterizes and confronts the present situation, theologically, in terms of understanding human existence implicit in the decision of Christian faith. Ogden seeks to refine Bultmann's definitions. Properly pursued, the task is to understand oneself as a person. This assumes that faith itself is much more than "piety", or beliefs and feelings. Interpretive work is involved -- Ogden uses the word "perfected" to describe an obedient and realized faith. [23]
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