Re-reading Williams on Wiles after dipping into Bultmann is interesting of course: you get to see what is running in the background of both. Williams asks of Wiles:
...is the historically primary sense, the foundational experience, demonstrably one with the central insight afforded, in a modern theologian's eyes, by the life and death of Christ, the fundamental, distinctive contribution of the Christian vision? The New Testament falls some way short of saying that the life and death of Jesus provide a manifestation of the character of God's love in the sense of giving us a supremely full human analogue, in death as well as life, of that love: if they manifest God's love, it is because they are the action of God, moving towards the restoration and the universalising of God's people, or the adoption of human beings as children of the Father.
Yes, I think this is a helpful corrective. YOu can't just say, Jesus is merely illustrative of how God works with human beings. You have to say that in him something has already been begun between God and man - there is in fact in him a real act of God. The NT writers did not make deductions from Jesus and say 'hmm, this is what God is like'. They said rather 'in Jesus we have met God and God has acted!'.
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