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Ontological Thresholds and Christological Method

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Yandall Woodfin
Yandall Woodfin
Affiliation:
Professor of Systematic Theology, Baptist Theological Seminary, Zürich
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Extract

The Christian faith, according to Alfred North Whitehead's familiar premise, ‘has always been a religion seeking a metaphysic’. Although it is debatable whether one should accept this thesis in a constructive sense, it does not appear that Christian belief from either an offensive or defensive position has the option of escaping from its philosophical implications. If, for example, a meeting with Christ occurs—either in an initial New Testament sense or through secondary channels in a contemporary moment—which functionally produces an existential consciousness of liberation that one may even dare to call ‘forgiveness of sins’, what confidence may he have that the experience is real and not only apparent, enduring and not just exuberance of mood, an encounter with life that touches the whole of his concern and not merely one atomistic fragment? These are surely questions which admit varying degrees of solution; yet they are genuine experiential issues which call for a recognition of ontological depth if they are to retain their functional effectiveness. This necessity which theology has of fulfilling its task within the comprehensive context of ontology is portrayed convincingly by Gerhard Ebeling in his essay entitled ‘Theology and Reality’ when he affirms:

‘Theology has to do with reality as a totality—not with the sum of all the realms of reality and all the ways in which reality encounters us…. However much theology is based upon the testimony of Christian faith, it has yet to make good faith's claim by bringing to expression what unconditionally concerns every man in his totality.’

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , June 1972 , pp. 137 - 146
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1972

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References

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page 137 note 2 Ebeling, Gerhard, ‘Theology and Reality’, inaugural lecture at the University of Zürich, 10 November, 1956, in his Word and Faith (London: SCM Press, 1960), p. 199.Google Scholar

page 138 note 1 The reader wi11 find an informative historical treatment of the relationship between ontology and theology as interpreted particularly from the contemporary continental theological perspective in Diem, Hermann, ‘Dogmatik zwischen Personalismus und Ontologie,’ Evangelische Theologie, 15 (1955), 408–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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page 139 note 4 An illustration of this principle on the scientific level is provided by Max Black when, in dealing with the relationship between scientific models and their subjects, he confesses, ‘we pin our hopes upon the existence of a common structure in both fields.’ Max, Black, Models and Metaphors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962), p. 238.Google Scholar

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