The happendedness of the Christ Event

All the world religions have been developed through history in a continuing tradition of rational argument. No religion exists apart from such a historical tradition. And all religions appeal to the authority of great teachers in the past. Nevertheless the distiction is real. The truths which Buddhism teaches would (as Buddhists understand them) be true whether or not Gautama had discovered and promulgated them. But the whole of Christian teaching would fall to the ground if it were the case that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus were not events in real history but stories told to illustrate truths which are a valid apart from these happening....

... The issue is this: Is this relationship with God seperate from your involvement in the ongoing life of the world, your family, your neighbourhood, your nation in the family of nations. Or is your relationship with God necessary bound up with your acceptance of the part God assigns for you in his purpose for his world? If the latter is the case, then your relationship with God cannot be seperated from those acts in which God has revealed and effected his purpose for for the world. Your devotion to God will be expressed in and through your involvement with history as you are now part of it. You will understand your own life as part of a story which is not a story made up by you, not just the story of your decisions and actions, but the story which is being enacted under God's creative and providential control in the events of contemporary history.

Lesslie Newbigan - The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society