gurugeorge

Your point is irrelevant to the OP because the OP is talking about the majority opinion, or average opinion. It's also irrelevant (though less so) wrt the other few times you've brought this up in other threads in recent living memory, IIRC, for the same reason (though sometimes it has been more apt, again IIRC).

Wanna fight?

No Robots

Your postion is like saying that because we have the Ninth Symphony, it is not important whether or not Beethoven actually existed.

Postmodernists habitually represent thought as derivative of language. Brunner attacks this outlook in the conclusion of Die Lehre in a section entitled, "Contra the modern scholasticism of language." He writes:

Language does not exude thinking. What actually happens is always that, assisted by received words, the complete otherness of thinking is being thought.

The Gospels are words that lead us to the thought of Christ. It is this thought which is the essence of Christianity. Thought without a thinker is unthinkable, thus we need to affirm the person of Christ in order to fully attain to his thought.

Chris Weimer

No, I don't "wanna fight" you. I want to know where you saw "majority" in the OP?

Gamera

Well, it's not exactly like that.

Beethoven is irrelevant to the 9th Symphony since we don't need to know anything about him to experience it. If we learned tomorrow that Brahm's wrote it, not Beethoven, it wouldn't change the meaning of one note.

In contrast, Jesus is a character in the narrative that is the gospel. We have to know about him for it to do what it does (for a Christian, to liberate us from our ego through the acceptance of the power of God's love, enacted in the gospel narrative).

Does Jesus have to be "historical" for that meaning to occur. Some say yes, some say no. I say no because, being a Christian, if I accept that God can rescue me from my existential condition through the narrative about an historical Jesus, why shouldn't he be able to do so through a narrative about a nonhistorical Jesus. The one is just as miraculous/implausible as the other.

Brunner would fail a modern course in semiotics. We discovered a long time ago that language IS thinking, and thinking cannot exist without language. Words have histories, and hence so do thoughts. They do not arise in our heads like Athena, born of Zeus. They come to us with a background we didn't make and can't control.

And to go even deeper and to blow Brunner's mind, the subject that accepts Christianity with its "thoughts" -- why that subject to is constructed. It is us, and not us.

As Heidegger put it so wonderfully: "We are thrown into a history not of our making."

So if the gospel works at all (and I beleive it does) it works on a far deeper level than the usual naive "thinking subject" that Brunner uncritically assumes.

No Robots

This is all just masturbatory language worship. You would do well to read Hannah Arendt's parable, Heidegger the Fox.

No Robots

The difference between Beethoven and Christ is that the former creates music, whereas the latter creates himself. His real existence is crucial because that itself is his creative self-expression. This act of self-creation is of enduring importance for all thinkers. As Brunner puts it:

Christ said "I", the great "I", the absolute "I", before Fichte did.—Our Christ, p.148