Tillich on the Historical Jesus

and Christian Faith

Robert M. Price

One day the Pope received a phone call from an archaeologist in Palestine. "Holy
Father," the voice said, "I don't quite know how to tell you this, but we have
discovered what prove beyond doubt to be the very bones of Jesus!" Hanging up,
the Pope convened his closest advisors. Explaining the situation, he asked the
stunned clerics for suggestions. One stammered, "Holy Father, I believe there is a
theologian in America who might be able to help us. His name is Paul Tillich."
Wasting no time, the Pope called Tillich's office in New York. "Herr Tillich, I'm
afraid we have quite a problem here, and we hope perhaps you can advise us.
Archaeologists in the Holy Land have discovered the bones of our Lord Jesus!"
Silent seconds passed, followed by Tillich's heavy German accent: "Ach...
he lived?"

This joke took its rise from the fact that Paul Tillich, when questioned, is said to
have admitted that his faith would survive intact even if it could be proven that Jesus
never existed. This hadith purports to present us with a piece of radical theology, and it
leads us to consider in somewhat greater detail Tillich's published views on the
historical Jesus.

Tillich is unambiguous in his admission that the "quest for the historical Jesus"
was a failure. The sources at the historian's disposal are not such as to make a biography
of Jesus possible. Nor is this any accident. The reason is the very nature of the
documents. The gospels are not attempts at biographies. They betray no such interest.
Rather, they are testimonies of faith made by people who have become believers in
Jesus Christ, receivers of the New Being made manifest in him. The quest for the
historical Jesus sought to get back behind these faith-testimonies to a Jesus whose
image would not be obscured by dogma and pious legend. But such an attempt not only
refuses to take seriously the kerygmatic witness of these documents ("Yes, yes,
whatever you say, but..."), but also goes on to assume a fundamental incongruity
between Jesus as he actually lived and the portrait of Jesus given in the gospel
proclamation ("... no more nonsense, now: what was he really like?").

"Raiders of the historical Jesus" often made their hypothetical Jesus into a
founder-teacher rather than a savior as traditionally understood by faith. But even when
it became clear that the quest was doomed, that there was no hope of reconstructing
Jesus as he was, this trend continued insofar as scholars still sought to make
the teaching attributed to Jesus the basis for Christian theology. This way it should not
matter whether this or that saying could be connected with Jesus himself with any
confidence. A particular teaching might have been borrowed from contemporary
Judaism, what of it? It was the content that mattered. This approach Tillich dubs
"legalistic liberalism." This way, the teaching of (or ascribed to) Jesus functions as a
Christian equivalent to Old Testament law (as, one ought to point out, it always has
among the Anabaptists). This understanding must result, Tillich reckoned, in the
forfeiting of grace. (It is clear Tillich is viewing the matter through the lens of his
inherited Lutheranism with its law/grace dichotomy.)

Bultmann's approach, Tillich says, is but slightly different. Tillich calls it

"existentialist legalism." Jesus' message is seen not as a group of discrete teachings,
universal in their application as a guide for life, but as a concrete eschatological
demand: Jesus' hearers must decide for the kingdom of God! But again, says Tillich,
there is no word of grace to tell the potential believer how he is to respond, or to make
such a response possible. But is this a fair representation of Bultmann? Tillich seems to
have taken Bultmann's reconstruction of Jesus' message (cf. Jesus and the Word) and
assumed that Bultmann made this the foundation of Christian theology or of the gospel
message. He did not. Actually, Bultmann took his departure from the kerygma about
Christ, not the preaching done by Jesus himself. This is why, for Bultmann, Jesus is not
one of the voices, but only one of the presuppositions, of New Testament theology. The
New Questers (Robinson, Fuchs, Ebeling, Bornkamm, Ksemann, Braun, et. al.) might
be better targets for the charge of "existentialist legalism" since they do tie in Jesus'
proclamation with Christian theology in a way analogous to that suggested by Tillich for
Bultmann. In fact, Bultmann's own position is strikingly similar to Tillich's, as we will
soon see.

So these various attempts to substitute the historical reconstruction of Jesus or

his teaching for the gospels' picture of Jesus fall far short of the mark. But that is not the
end of the problem. Tillich contends that when we speak of "Jesus Christ" we are saying
two distinct (though inseparable) things. First, it is Jesus who is the Christ.
Through him, the concrete individual Jesus of Nazareth, the New Being was manifested.
Second, Jesus is the Christ only because he was recognized and received as the bearer
of the New Being. This recognition demonstrates the reality of his manifestation of the
new Being. The early witnesses attest it. Thus the reception is quite as important as the
manifestation. One could say it is the other side of the coin. As Tillich says elsewhere,
without the reception of revelation there has been no revelation. It is precisely here that
the "quest for the historical (i.e., non-gospels) Jesus" badly missed the point, as far as
Tillich is concerned. The gospels as testimonies enshrine for us the reception of the New
Being as manifested in Jesus Christ. Seen this way, to disregard and to bypass the
gospels' interpretation of Jesus Christ is to miss or even to deny the Christhood of Jesus.
The resulting reconstruction might be of antiquarian interest but would have not a thing
to do with the New Being. This view is directly parallel to that of Bultmann. Bultmann
holds that the only Christ we could possibly be interested in religiously is the Risen
Lord of the kerygma. To go behind this preaching of the Easter faith, asking, "What was
Jesus really like?" is surely a legitimate historical inquiry, not to be squelched in the
name of dogma. But we cannot but repudiate such a quest if its motive is a search for a
religious security (as with Ritschl and with the Jesus Seminar today).

Before considering Tillich's alternative in greater detail, it is important to focus

briefly on an important issue underlying the whole discussion. Tillich shows himself
very sensitive to the danger implied in both the fundamentalist repudiation of historical
criticism on the one hand and the liberal quest for the historical Jesus on the other. Both
approaches in the last analysis tend to make the believer's faith in Jesus dependent on
the probabilities of historical research. Fundamentalists find themselves defending the
most precarious and improbable apologetical arguments in order to safeguard the
gospel-portrait of Jesus as historically inerrant. Liberals' reconstructions of Jesus and his
teachings are so tenuous and arbitrary that no two liberals come up with the same
reconstruction! In both cases, not only is it true that faith is being trivialized to the level
of holding more or less probable opinions, but the believer is deprived of any real
security of faith. His confidence is either suspended on a thin apologetical thread ready
to snap at any moment, or it is blown about by every wind of changing historical theory.
Surely faith must rest on a more certain foundation, immune to the uncertainties of
historical scholarship.

In this concern, Tillich reflects his predecessors Wilhelm Herrmann and Martin
Khler: "it is a fatal drawback that no historical judgment, however certain it may
appear, ever attains anything more than probability. But what sort of a religion would
that be which accepted a basis for its convictions with the consciousness that it was only
probably safe?" "It is a fatal error to attempt to establish the basis of faith by means of
historical investigation. The basis of faith must be something fixed; the results of
historical study are continually changing."1 (Herrmann)

"The attachment of the certainty of Christian conviction to the unpredictable

results of historical research [is] a stumbling block... I have become increasingly certain
that my Christian faith cannot have a causal connection with the 'authenticity' of the
Gospels."2 (Khler)

Tillich is quick to point out the corollary of this reassurance. If faith cannot rest
on historical research, neither can it control historical research. Too often it tries to do
just that. The orthodox apologists sought to control the reading of the gospel data
according to prior, arbitrary dogma. Liberals created various "historical Jesuses" in their
own liberal Protestant images. No, says Tillich, though faith may indeed illuminate the
reading of a historical text, this is a religious experience, not a method of
historiography.

If faith cannot guarantee in advance certain historical conclusions, just what, if

anything, can it guarantee? Nothing but itself, but that is to say quite a lot. Faith is the
guarantee of the New Being in the concrete, finite life of the believer. This is a matter of
present experience, not of historical probability. And in a sort of chain reaction manner,
this certitude implies the historical existence of another concrete life in whom the New
Being was first made manifest. Where do we find a representation of this life? We find
it in the New Testament portrait of Jesus. Historical criticism cannot
guarantee any given facet of the picture, not even the sure attribution of the name
"Jesus" to the figure.3 Nonetheless, this picture in its general outline certainly enshrines
the impression the disciples had of this "Christ." And it is through this picture that men
and women now find New Being themselves, as they have for the past two thousand
years.

Here again one may observe a strong similarity between Tillich on the one hand
and Herrmann and Khler on the other, despite the real differences between the three.
Tillich notes appreciatively Herrmann's attempts to approach Christ by the avenue of
Christian experience. He objects that Herrmann "psychologized" rather than
"ontologized" Jesus as the New Testament itself does. Nonetheless, the basic similarity
is important. Herrmann also seems to work backward from the believer's experience of
Jesus Christ thanks to the gospel portrait of him to the substantial reliability of that
picture in portraying Jesus. "[W]hen we speak of the historical Christ we mean that life
of Jesus which speaks to us from the New Testament, as the disciples' testimony to their
faith, but which, when we perceive it, always comes home to us as a miraculous
revelation. That historical research cannot give us this we know. But neither will it ever
take this from us by any of its discoveries. This we believe, the more we experience the
influence that this picture of the glory of Jesus has upon us."4

Khler also disagrees with Herrmann in making a psychological sketch of Jesus

the basis for the origin and transmission of faith in Christ. Yet he joins him in talking in
terms of the effectiveness of the biblical picture of Christ as the catalyst for faith, as
well as its ultimate origin in Jesus himself. "[W]hat was the decisive influence that Jesus
had upon posterity? According to

the Bible and church history it consisted in nothing else but the faith of his disciples,
their conviction that in Jesus they had found the conqueror of guilt, sin, temptation, and
death." "If now, with the due recognition given to their differences, the first
eyewitnesses were nevertheless in agreement on the picture of Christ which they handed
down... then this picture must have been impressed upon their hearts and minds with an
incomparable and indelible preciseness rich in content."5

For Khler, like Tillich, this picture is that of the New Testament gospels, not
some "historical Jesus" reconstruction. Tillich said of Khler's work: "I do not believe
that Khler's answer to the question of the historical Jesus is sufficient for our situation
today."6 But despite his declaration of disagreement with Herrmann and Khler at some
points, Tillich's position is fundamentally similar. All three begin with the Christian's
experience of the New Being (freedom from sin, etc.) as mediated by the New
Testament picture of Jesus, which experience in turn guarantees the substance of that
picture as a portrayal of Jesus' effect on the original disciples and evangelists. All three
seem to feel they have paid adequate tribute to historical criticism by allowing that any
particular detail of the Jesus picture may be questioned. Yet have they paid the devil his
due? Or are they still in danger of having their faith undermined by historical delving?

Van A. Harvey contends that such schemas as these remain dependent on a

historical judgment that the New Testament picture of Jesus must represent a real person
and not, say, an abstract allegorical character or a wholly fictive protagonist. Khler
anticipates this criticism and contends that sinful men could not invent such a portrait of
a sinless Jesus.7 Herrmann is content to let the overpowering experience of Jesus' inner
life (as conveyed by the biblical picture of him) overrule any doubts that the believer is
dealing with a total abstraction instead of a real person. What artificial abstractions have
been added to the gospel portrait are of the same character as the reality itself and only
tend to reinforce it.8 That is, people would have been tempted to embroider the Jesus
tradition only with sayings or stories that rang true to the historical Jesus, even if some
of those things he didn't actually say or do.

Tillich certainly seems to leave himself open to Harvey's criticism. Tillich

admits that if the portrait of Jesus were a created fiction, or an abstraction, this would be
insufficient. "Without the concreteness of the New Being, its newness would be empty."
"A picture imagined by the same contemporaries of Jesus would have expressed this
untransformed existence and their quest for a New Being. But it would not have been
the New Being."9 In other words, even if his name turned out not to be "Jesus," the
existence of an individual corresponding to the New Testament portrait is necessary to
Christian faith. Tillich admits that even the barest theoretical possibility that the Jesus of
the biblical records did not exist would be "destructive for the Christian faith." 10 It
seems that Harvey is correct in charging that Tillich has not succeeded in bridging the
gap of uncertainty. The place of Jesus in Christian faith remains dependent on a
historical judgment, i.e., that the gospels' picture of Jesus actually represents a real
historical individual of whatever name.11 In addition, Harvey points out, the contours of
this picture of Jesus may well vary with the exegete who tries to present it (shades of the
quest for the historical Jesus!). "Even this 'picture of Christ' in the New Testament, of
which Khler and Tillich speak as though it were independent of criticism, can be
abstracted only by an act of historical imagination."12

Harvey proposes his own alternative, drawing on the thought of H. Richard

Niebuhr. He suggests that an image of Jesus may function as a revelatory paradigm, an
image "cast up" by the original event (whatever that may have been, and Harvey admits
we cannot know). This image "does illuminate our experience and our relationship to
that upon which we are absolutely dependent." "The power of the Christian message is
mediated through the image of Jesus. It is this image which the Christian finds to be a
reliable one for relating himself to the Beings around him and to the power acting in and
through all Beings."13 To be thus effective, the image need have no connection with
historical facts, though there may be reasons for thinking it does. 14 It seems to me that
Harvey's alternative is more consistent with Tillich's desire to deliver faith from the
threatening tentativeness of historical judgments than is Tillich's own answer. In fact,
Harvey's model naturally follows from Tillich's statement that all faith can guarantee is
its own experience of the New Being mediated by the picture of Jesus Christ. To go any
further, as Tillich tries to do, and to conclude that this picture must represent a historical
individual is to make faith responsible for a theoretically debatable historical judgment.
And as long as faith guarantees that its own experience is truly that of the New Being
under the conditions of human finitude, isn't this enough? Does faith somehow need to
believe that the effective catalytic picture also came from a factual experience of the
New Being in conditions of finitude, that of a historical Jesus? Tillich himself hints that
such a belief is not a necessary implication of the experience of the New Being. He
indicates this when he allows that the New Being is at work even where Jesus is not
known at all.

So does the joke with which we began accurately depict Tillich's opinion? In one
way, no, for he obviously believed in the historical existence of Jesus. In another way,
yes, since with Harvey's correction of Tillich, Tillich's thinking would be compatible
with a denial of a historical Jesus (which some aver that in private he admitted).

Finally, it may seem odd for Tillich to sound so concerned as if to find some way
of hermetically sealing off faith from tormenting doubt. Isn't he famous for claiming
that faith includes doubt and is by no means antithetical to doubt? Indeed. But
remember Tillich's typology of doubt. He has no respect for skeptical doubt, that
cynical ennui that cares not to commit itself to any belief or cause, whether because of
prior disillusionment or just laziness. He has great respect for methodological doubt, the
epistemological tool of both scientific and historical investigation. He believes, of
course, that faith neither faces a threat from such scrutiny nor has any right to suspend
such doubt (and in the former case, we would be dealing with the intellectualistic
distortion of faith, while in the latter we would be suffering from the voluntaristic
distortion of faith). The only kind of doubt relevant to faith is existential doubt, the
nagging uneasiness that one's commitment to a concern as one's ultimate concern may
possibly prove to have been idolatrous, as when an idealistic campaign worker for a
reformist candidate finds he has wasted his efforts on one more corrupt politician.

It seems to me that the sort of doubt relevant to the historical Jesus problem
would be existential doubt, and it would take this form: do our hearts condemn us as we
examine our own ostensible experience of the New Being? When we look to the
examples of our co-religionists and forbears in the New Being, in the Christian
community, do we really behold evidence of a New Being, or are we allowing slogans
to substitute for reality? The relevant (and perhaps terrifying) element of doubt occurs
not on the far end of the historical/experiential corridor, the long chain which stretches
between our experience and the gospel portrait of Jesus as the Christ, but rather on
the near end. Tillich took for granted that we have a transforming experience of the
New Being based on encounter with the Jesus-picture (Galatians 3:1); doubts began to
arise as to whether this portrait was historically sound. And the threat (which faith, by
its nature as ultimate concern, should not have to fear) was that of methodological
doubt. Tillich sought to quiet that doubt by reasoning backward from the supposedly
sure experience of the believer to the powerful efficacy, hence historical soundness, of
the first cause of our experience, the portrait of Jesus. He ought rather to have located
the threat of doubt in the eye of the beholder of the Jesus-portrait: are we sure we have
contracted the happy contagion of the New Being? Perhaps Christ is not our ultimate
concern, despite our protestations of devotion. Or perhaps the Christian confession is
not what it is cracked up to be, hence an idol. These would be appropriate existential
doubts.

1. Wilhelm Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with God (Philadelphia:

Fortress press, 1971), pp. 72, 76.

2. Martin Khler, The So-called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical
Christ (Philadelphia: Fortress press, 1970), p. 108.

3. Suppose it turned out that, as some have suggested, "Jesus" was at first a title and had
come to supplant the savior's birth name, now lost. Or suppose it was someone else who
first manifested the New Being, but Jesus got credit for it, as in Michael Moorcock's
novel Behold the Man. But there may be unintended consequences to Tillich's view.
Suppose it turned out it was not Jesus on the cross but someone else at the last moment,
like Simon of Cyrene, as Basilides thought? Would it matter? Some accused Bultmann,
with his talk of the "das" of Jesus, regardless of the "was" of Jesus, of embracing
docetism. Tillich might be ripe for the same accusation.

4. Herrmann, pp. 77-78.

5. Khler, pp. 63, 88.

6. Paul Tillich, Preface to Khler, p. xii.

7. Khler, p. 79. Cf. Descartes' insistence that, as an imperfect mind, he could never
have dreamed up the shape of a perfect circle, so it must have an independent existence
outside his mind, etc.

8. Herrmann, p. 75.

9. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology. Vol. II. Existence and the Christ (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 114, 115. One is reminded of Bultmann's
contention that one may know about love from reading romance novels, but one can
know love for oneself only by entering into a relationship with another, and so with
authentic existence. The secular existentialist may grasp the idea, but only the Christian
may experience it.

10. Ibid., p. 113.

11. As if the belief in a historical Jesus behind the miracles and legends of the gospels
were not already a mouth-full of a historical judgment! One suspects a dogmatic agenda
when Bultmann questions the sanity of anyone who would venture to doubt the
historical existence of Jesus. He wants, like Tillich, to seem to be starting at square one
when he isn't. The scholarly debate over the Christ Myth theory has only grown more
vigorous.

12. Van A. Harvey, The Historian and the Believer: An Essay in the Morality of
Historical Knowledge (NY: Macmillan, 1972), p. 249.

13. Ibid., pp. 282, 283.

14. Think for instance of the powerful portraits of Jesus rendered by modern fictive
gospels like Tim Rice's Jesus Christ Superstar, Nikos Kazantzakis's The Last
Temptation of Christ, and Dostoyevski's "The Grand Inquisitor" parable.

Tillich on Christian Faith

and the Plurality of World Religions

Robert M. Price

Years ago, Wilfred Cantwell Smith announced that we had arrived at yet
another in a continuing series of Copernican Revolutions in our theological
thinking. Having tried to settle its accounts with geology, historical criticism,
and evolutionary biology, Christian theology must begin to reckon with "the
faith of other men." In one way, this need is less urgent than when Smith
wrote, but in another it is more urgent than ever. On the one hand, there is
everywhere apparent a kind of post-ecumenical climate of individual
syncretism in which people are happy to buy other religions' scriptures off the
local paperback shelf and pluck from them whatever theological bits and
pieces appeal to them. On the other, the West faces a militant and mobilized
Islamic extremism that insists we are its mortal enemies. So it is both easier
and more difficult for theologians, as Smith urged they must, to abandon their
isolationism along with the notion that other religions are simply great
mistakes, their followers deluded. Smith wrote regretfully that he had to place
Paul Tillich in this category of outmoded "exclusivists." This is rather
surprising, and Smith himself seemed to see some hope of modifying this
judgment with the late appearance of Tillich's Christianity and the Encounter
of the World Religions.[i] In fact, there were already important elements in
Tillich's writings indicating a substantially broader perspective on the other
world religions than Smith was able to recognize.

In Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religions Tillich

outlines the history of Jewish and Christian attitudes toward other faiths. The
prophets of Israel not only polemicized against the idols of Canaan but also
condemned the narrow, partisan allegiance to Yahweh which made of him
little more than one more tribal totem. Jesus and Paul seem to have been more
concerned with self-criticism within their own communities of faith than with
denouncing the shortcomings of other faiths. Jesus even seems to have held
out the possibility that some outside the "right" religion might yet receive
salvation on the basis of having acted in love, a principle transcending and
judging all religions. Augustine and other early theologians carried this
dialectical approach farther by taking up the Logos concept of the Fourth
Gospel. This enabled them to say that the divine Word which had lately
appeared in Jesus had always been active in humanity, so that pre-Christian
religions were truly preparatory for the gospel, not just false starts or
"counterfeits."

The encounter with crusading Islam (beginning with Islamic ventures

in Palestine and Byzantium, before the Christian-initiated Crusades) led to a
hardening of attitudes toward other religions. Dialectical openness was
replaced with apologetical "nihilation"[ii] and defensiveness. Muhammad was
the False Prophet of the Apocalypse, the lackey of the Beast. The Christian-
Islamic rivalry began to affect relations between Christians and Jews, Judaism
coming to be regarded as one more false religion. This stance of stonewalling
rejection and vilification has continued, albeit sometimes with better manners,
on through Neo-Orthodoxy's denigration of other faiths as mere "religion,"
inferior to the "revelation" of God in Jesus Christ alone.

Given this gallery of options, it is clear where Tillich's sympathies lie.

In what seems to be a revival of the Logos doctrine, Tillich freely recognizes
that the "Spiritual Presence" is experienced in all religions. And yet this
experience seems merely to serve to prepare adherents of these religion for the
coming of the New Being in Jesus as the Christ. These other religions
constitute merely "the latent church" paving the way for Christianity, "the
manifest church,"which is the true form of the Spiritual Community.[iii] As we
shall see, there are other elements in Tillich's thinking that would seem to
transcend this understanding, but for now it is enough to note that Tillich, like
Smith, was willing to be drawn out of isolation by meeting adherents of other
faiths: "An existential contact with outstanding representatives of non-
Christian religions forces one into the acknowledgment that God is not far
from them, that there is a universal revelation." [iv]

Tillich outlines three possible avenues of approach to non-Christian

religions. First, one might totally reject the other faith as completely false.
Christian history and missiology are filled with examples of this attitude.
Second, one might be charitable enough to allow that some elements of the
religion are true (though, one suspects, nothing that is not already present in
one's own, Christian, faith). Third, one may engage in genuine dialectical give
and take. This is the option chosen by Tillich. Such dialogue, he says, assumes
that both partners really believe in their own religions, have respect for the
other religion as based on genuinely revelatory events, and be sincerely open
to criticism of their own religious basis. The first of these requirements may
appear absurdly obvious, but it is not. Ecumenical dialogue has frequently
witnessed one side (perhaps both) being more zealous for interfaith
compromise than for their own religion, with the result that the supposed
representatives of one religion are willing to "give away the store" to seal the
deal, despite the fact that they wind up representing no one but themselves.
One Roman Catholic was willing to retract the claim that Jesus is the Christ
and to make him instead merely the (anemic) "Son of Abraham." [v] The second
requirement set down by Tillich would eliminate those Christians who greet
interfaith dialogue merely as an opportunity for converting their partners,
[vi]
the way Christians have often approached dialogue with Jews. The third is
the willingness to see oneself as others see one, to renounce the bull-headed
invulnerability that sees one's own view as self-evidently true simply because
it is one's own view and cannot be transcended. In our day, liberal Protestant
Gnter Lling approaches Islam in the spirit Tillich recommends, defining
false steps in the evolution of both faiths and urging a sacrifice of parts of
both religions' doctrinal heritages.[vii]

But what is the common basis (if any) that makes inter-religious
dialogue possible in the first place? Tillich has already admitted that all
religions grow out of genuine revelatory experiences. But these revelations
have each and all been fragmentary (Hebrews 11:1). Recalling his colleague
Rudolf Otto,[viii] Tillich traces the genesis of all religions to an encounter with
the Holy: "All religions grow out of a sacramental basis, out of experience of
the holy as present here and now, in this thing, this person, this event." [ix] The
different occasions for these encounters lend their expressions an inevitable
particularity, an unavoidable conditionedness. Not that either is to be
lamented, but it sometimes seems that such particulars may be transcended by
seeking to rise to a more generalized, abstract plane through dialogue. But the
Holy itself is apparently too expansive to be captured in any one religious
expression, with the result that no one religion is an entirely adequate or
complete expression of the Holy. In other words, it is not merely that each
particular expression takes on a parochial character by virtue of its historical
and cultural conditionedness. No, there is more to the Holy itself than can be
expressed in any single religion. Thus religions have, for their own sakes, a
real need to engage each other in dialogue. Each has insights into the Holy
that the other needs.

At the same time, there will be at least some intimation in any religion
even of elements of the Holy that are not actually predominant in that religion:
"none of the various elements of the holy are ever completely lacking in any
genuine experience of the holy, and, therefore, in any religion." [x] This fact
provides a real basis for communication: "the nature of the holy has... forced
both sides [of the dialogue] to include, at least by implication, elements which
are predominant in the other side."[xi] Thus each religion will have some
inkling of what the other is talking about. A good concrete example would be
Thomas Merton's interest in Zen monasticism and meditation. [xii]

Where does one look for the starting point of such a dialogue? Tillich
points to a religion's understanding of thetelos or implied goal of history.
The telos reveals a religion's apprehension of the meaning of existence.
Accordingly, most of Tillich's comments on various world religions center on
this question. For instance, he observes that Buddhism, Vedanta Hinduism,
and Taoism all have a non-linear view of history, or a non-historical view of
existence. This is the antithesis between the Kingdom of God and Nirvana. "In
any case these religions contain no impulse to transform history in the
direction of universal humanity and justice. History has no aim, either in time
or in eternity. And... the consequence is that the ambiguities of life under all
dimensions are unconquerable. There is only one way to cope with them and
that is to transcend them and live within them as someone who has already
returned to the Ultimate One... There is no symbol analogous to the Kingdom
of God."[xiii] In fact, Tillich feels that such a difference can only be heightened
through dialogue. He thinks that it is precisely in inter-religious dialogue that
the symbol of the Kingdom of God will be "reinstated" to its proper
importance by Christians themselves, who have hitherto come to take it for
granted and to minimize its importance.

Implied in the difference between these worldviews is another

cleavage over ideas of the self. "Communication between the East and the
West is most difficult at this point, with the East affirming a 'formless self' as
the aim of all religious life, and the West (even in Christian mysticism) trying
to preserve in the ecstatic experience the subjects of faith and love: personality
and community." Linked with these are emphases on sin and forgiveness, also
absent from the East, according to Tillich.[xiv] (Here Tillich ceases to regard
"Hinduism," "Buddhism," and "Eastern Religions" as ideal types among
which there is a great range of actual variation, ignoring the fact that all have
evolved doctrines of sin, grace, and forgiveness, even if these seem
incompatible with what Tillich and others judge the most characteristic or
consistent theologies of those faiths. One thinks also of Tillich's Biblical
Religion and the Search for Ultimate Realityin which he shows how the Bible
implicitly raises a number of ontological questions, the answers to which it
leaves the reader to deduce, e.g., Romans 8:26-27 and 1 Corinthians 13:12;
15:28, which might be seen to imply an Eastern view of the nature of the self,
drawing no clear line between it and the divine. [xv] In fact, I would suggest that
in Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality Tillich has already
provided most of the necessary conceptuality for interreligious dialogue. The
seeming gaps between the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the abstract
deity of the philosphers may be applied just as well to the enterprise of East-
West religious dialogue, where many of the issues are almost exactly the
same.)

Tillich also objects to the Eastern evaluation of the present world of

experience. For Buddhists, the world of apparent reality is assessed negatively
because it is deemed to exist as a "result of an ontological Fall into
finitude."[xvi]For Christians, says Tillich, the world is given a negative
assessment because the essentially good creation has fallen into
an existentially evil state. But one must wonder if the difference at this point
between Christianity (at least Tillich's version) and the East is all that great.
Tillich's own view of the Fall also seems to imply that sin is an inevitable
tragedy resulting from the passing of the world from mere potentiality to
concrete actuality, at least in the case of humanity. This sounds rather close to
an "ontological Fall into finitude."[xvii]

Positively, what can Christians learn from a dialogue with Buddhism

and other Eastern religions? Tillich suggests that the Eastern understanding of
reality leads to "a profound compassion for the universality of suffering under
all dimensions of life."[xviii] Christianity with its historical-directedness often
misses such a sensitivity because of the "in spite of" character of agape.
However, others might argue that the Incarnation doctrine provides
Christianity with an ideal avenue to the kind of compassion (karuna) Tillich
describes. It is worth noting how in Mahayana Buddhism, despite the
explicitly docetic character of Buddhology (the Buddhas alike undergoing a
merely phantom birth in the Transformation Body), the Bodhisattva's path to
disinterested compassion for all beings comes from the same sort of ego-
transcendence Tillich ascribes to Jesus, that whereby he laid aside on the cross
all that was Jesus in him so that the Christ in him might shine forth unto
salvation.

Turning to the Western religions, Tillich notes that here the Christian
faces not non-historical religions but rather faiths that posit a different center
of history than that of the advent of the New Being in Jesus as the Christ.
These other centers include the arrivals of Zoroaster or Muhammad, or the
election of the community of Israel. But Tillich reasons that none of these
events can really serve as a center for history since none can reveal the
meaning of the whole. And this for two reasons: first, the appearance of
national prophets (like Muhammad) or the foundation of a chosen nation are
events pivotal only in the particular history of individual nations and thus lack
the universality needed for the center of a universal history. Only Jesus as the
Christ provides this.[xix] (One might object here that Judaism and Islam both
see their vocations as universal in intended scope. They view their particular
origins as the necessarily concrete initial appearances of revelation in history,
much as Tillich insists on the historical appearance of the Christ as the bearer
of the New Being under the conditions of human finitude.)

Second, these religions are by nature religions of law and can therefore
be but preparatory to the dawn of the new Being. Tillich even says that their
continued existence serves as a barrier preventing their adherents accepting
Jesus as the Christ. About all Christianity may learn from Islam is "the
solution of the racial problem and... its wisdom in dealing with the primitive
peoples."[xx] Again, it is easy to play apologist for Islam and Judaism and to
suggest that, if so inclined, one might easily regard the divine law as the
"ontological structures" of the New Being, which, minus the jargon, is pretty
much what Calvin said about the Mosaic Torah in its "third use." [xxi]

It may be surprising to hear so much in the way of objection and

disagreement coming from Tillich, whom one rather expects to be a good deal
more broad-minded. After what he said about the desirability of dialogue, is
this all he feels we can expect to gain from it? Remember that he warned us
from the beginning that "If a group... is convinced that it possesses a truth, it
implicitly denies those claims to truth which conflict with that truth." [xxii] The
New Being in Jesus as the Christ must criticize all religions (by all means
including Christianity!). "Consequently the encounter of Christianity with
other religions... implies the rejection of their claims insofar as they contradict
the Christian principle, implicitly or explicitly." [xxiii] Though he is no
missionary imperialist, Tillich feels that eventual religious unity is a desirable
goal. And Christianity, because of its recognition that its own symbols for the
Ultimate are not ultimate themselves, would be the best choice for that
universal religion.[xxiv] (Needless to say, it had better be a Tillichian self-
relativizing version of Christianity!)
 Yet there are seeds in Tillich's work of a broader view, recognizing and
affirming the validity of all religions on their own terms. First, in Christianity
and the Encounter of the World Religions he seems to pull back a bit from his
bias toward Christianity. He says it would be desirable to achieve neither a
unity of religions based on some lowest common denominator (since this must
be but a bloodless and abstract concept, what Schleiermacher called "natural
religion" as opposed to "positive religion")[xxv] nor the triumph of any one
religion over the others: "The victory of onereligion would impose a particular
religious answer on all other particular answers." [xxvi] Instead Tillich approves
"a vision of the spiritual presence in other expressions of the ultimate meaning
of man's existence."[xxvii] Evident here is a real tension with Tillich's previous
statements on the normativity of the Christian understanding. But at the same
time, there is real continuity with other elements of his theological schema.
First, the theological/apologetical method of correlation itself points in this
direction. Wilfred Cantwell Smith points out that "The pith of Tillich's
exposition has to do with its deliberate aptness to the intellectual context in
which it appears: the correlation technique, of question and answer. But that
context as he sees it is the mental climate of the Western
world."[xxviii] However, he goes on to say, "The Christian answers on man's
cosmic quality are not the only answers, but even... the Christian [or Western]
questions are not the only questions."[xxix] It is certainly in harmony with
Tillich's method of correlation to recognize that, e.g., an Easterner's existential
analysis of reality may be quite different from that of the Westerner's [Though
Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East and West, demonstrates an astonishing degree
of similarity].[xxx] And since "in respect to form [the revelatory answers] are
dependent on the structure of the questions they answer," [xxxi] it is natural that
the Buddha's existential diagnosis of human existence would meet the
response of the New Being in the form of the Four Noble Truths. Tillich
seems never to have gone this far, but he did lay the theoretical groundwork
for doing so.

Bultmann, using the hermeneutical circle approach of Heidegger, and

Barth, with his apodictic proclamation of the Reformed faith, would not have
been able to attain unto a positive assessment of the gospels of other religions,
since both lacked the method of correlation. For Bultmann, the Buddhist
would have to approach the New Testament seeking the answer to his question
of how suffering is to be overcome, and after a while, interaction with the text
would redound on his question and reshape it until he finally posed the New
Testament question (How can I be rightwised with God?) and was ready to
receive the New Testament answer.[xxxii] Barth would not even bother with
these preliminaries! He would expect that the thunderclap of preaching should
at once disabuse the poor Buddhist of his false questions and false answers
alike, leaving him blinking in surprise at the true gospel. [xxxiii] Even Pure Land
Buddhism, with its gospel of pure grace and salvation by faith, Barth
dismissed since the name to call upon was not that of Jesus Christ. [xxxiv]Oddly
enough, it was conservative Anglican C.S. Lewis who most closely
approximated Tillich's method of correlation. He reasoned (in "Religion and
Rocketry" and, I think, implicitly, in Mere Christianity and The Screwtape
Letters)[xxxv]that there might be other spiritual maladies than the one
Christianity diagnoses, and that therefore other remedies might be proper for
them.

Tillich's discussion of Jesus' lordship over history provides a second

clue as to a possible broader Tillichian doctrine. "In faith it is certain that for
historical mankind in its unique, continuous development, as experienced here
and now, Christ is the center. But faith cannot judge about the future destiny
of historical mankind and the way it will come to an end. Jesus is the Christ
for us, namely for those who participate in the historical continuum which he
determines in its meaning. This existential limitation does not qualitatively
limit his significance, but it leaves open other ways of divine self-
manifestations before and after our historical continuum." [xxxvi] What about
other divine self-manifestationsoutside our historical continuum? As we saw,
Tillich does admit the existence of other "continuums" whose meanings are
determined by different symbols or centers. And if these symbols or centers
may be seen as revelatory responses to various authentic contextual analyses
of existence, as we have suggested, then the way is open to recognize several
simultaneous "dispensations" of the New Being. The result would be
something like what John B. Cobb describes as "a full recognition of a variety
of structures of existence among which that of Jesus is one and that of
Gautama, for example, is another."[xxxvii]

Finally, it is significant that Tillich notes that the New Being is at work
even where the name of Jesus is not known. It is still "his being" nonetheless.
[xxxviii]
This implies some kind of notion of "anonymous Christians" a la Karl
Rahner.[xxxix] But in light of our tentative extrapolation of Tillich, it might be
asked whether Christians could not be claimed by other faiths as "anonymous
Hindus," "anonymous Buddhists," etc. The point is that, if there is no
indispensible connection between the knowledge of Jesus and the working of
the New Being, then perhaps neither is there an indispensable connection
between the New Being and its actualization in Jesus. Tillich admits that faith
cannot historically guarantee even the name Jesus to the first bearer of the
New Being. Could his name have been Gautama, or Muhammad (not
necessarily instead, but as well)? Why not? The important difference between
what I am suggesting and what Tillich actually says is this: he admits that the
various religions began with genuine revelatory events, but he says they were
fragmentary and preparatory for the final revelation in Jesus as the Christ.
However, if one widens the cultural base of the method of correlation, the
various revelations need no longer be seen as fragmentary, but rather as
legitimately local (including that of Jesus as the Christ). There is no question
of a "final revelation" that would somehow eliminate this necessary
concreteness. Tillich seems to realize this implicitly when he rejects the option
of union around a common (abstract) concept. I merely point out that it seems
inconsistent in the face of such an admission to maintain that the Christ-event
is the "final revelation" which must judge all others.

[i]
Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Faith of Other Men (NY: New American
Library, 1965), pp. 111-112
[ii]
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of
Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City: Doubleday
Anchor, 1967), pp. 114-116.
[iii]
Alexander J. McKelway, The Systematic Theology of Paul Tillich (NY:
Dell, 1964), pp. 202-204.
[iv]
Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (NY: Oxford University Press, 1977), p.
170.
[v]
My beloved teacher Eva Marie Fleischner floats this suggestion in
her Judaism in German Christian Theology Since 1945: Christianity and
Israel Considered in Terms of Mission. ATLA Monograph # 8 (Metuchen:
Scarecrow Press, 1975), pp. 125, 129. Cf. the suggestions of Kurt Hruby
("Jesus, Disciple of Moses"), Roy Eckardt ("Jesus the Second Abraham") and
Monika Hellwig, who advises changing the Christian credo from "Jesus is
Lord and Christ" to "Christians have pledged themselves to a task of salvation
yet to be accomplished." See Michael B. McGarry,Christology After
Auschwitz (NY: Paulist Press, 1977), for a fascinating survey of such guilt-
stricken revisionism, especially pp. 76, 95-96.
[vi]
Though Daniel B. Stevick is discussing the overtures of Edward John
Carnell and his fellow Neo-Evangelicals to dialogue with Neo-Orthodox
theologians, his words apply equally well to inter-religious dialogue: "We
cannot sit down together showing the 'mutual signs of humility' that Carnell
desires if one party to the conversation wants it understood at the outset that it
represents a 'classic' normative truth" (Beyond Fundamentalism [Richmond:
John Knox Press, 1964] p. 76).
[vii]
Gnter Lling, "Preconditions for the Scholarly Criticism of the Koran and
Islam, with some Autobiographical Remarks" Journal of Higher Criticism 3/1
(Spring 1996), pp. 73-109, esp. pp. 89, 101-109.
[viii]
Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational
Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational. Trans. John
W. Harvey (NY: Oxford University Press, 1924).
[ix]
Tillich, Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religions (NY:
Columbia University Press, 1964), p. 58.
[x]
Ibid., p. 67.
[xi]
Ibid., p. 66.
[xii]
Thomas Merton, Mystics and Zen Masters (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1966).
[xiii]
Tillich, Systematic Theology: Life and the Spirit, History and the Kingdom
of God. Vol. III (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 352. Robert
F. Streetman once suggested to me that perhaps the Sangha would be a
Buddhist analogy to the Kingdom of God.
[xiv]
Ibid., p. 143.
[xv]
Tillich, Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1955), p. 81.
[xvi]
Tillich, Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religions, p. 65.
[xvii]
Reinhold Niebuhr, "Biblical Thought and Ontological Speculation in
Tillich's Theology," in Charles W. Kegley and Robert W. Bretall, eds., The
Theology of Paul Tillich. Library of Living Theology 1 (NY: Macmillan,
1952), pp. 220 ff.
[xviii]
Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. III, ibid.
[xix]
Ibid., pp. 367-368.
[xx]
Tillich, Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religions, p. 87
[xxi]
Wilhelm Niesel, The Theology of Calvin. Trans. Harold Knight.
Lutterworth Library XLVIII (London: Lutterworth Press, 1956), chapter 6,
"The Law of God," pp. 92-103.
[xxii]
Ibid., p. 28.
[xxiii]
Ibid., p. 29.
[xxiv]
Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (NY: Harper & Row, 1958), p. 125.
[xxv]
Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith. No trans. listed. H.R.
MacKintosh and J.S. Stewart, eds. Vol. 1 (NY: Harper & Row Torchbooks,
1963), pp. 48-49.
[xxvi]
Tillich, Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religions, p. 96.
[xxvii]
Ibid., p. 97.
[xxviii]
Smith, Faith of Other Men, p. 111.
[xxix]
Ibid., p. 113.
[xxx]
Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East and West (NY: Vintage Books, 1961).
[xxxi]
Tillich, Systematic Theology: Reason and Revelation, Being and God.
Vol. I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 64.
[xxxii]
Rudolf Bultmann, "Is Exegesis Without Presuppositions Possible?"
in Existence and Faith: Shorter Writings of Rudolf Bultmann (NY: Meridian
Living Age Books), pp. 294-296.
[xxxiii]
H. Martin Rumscheidt, Revelation and Theology: An Analysis of the
Barth-Harnack Correspondence of 1923. Monograph Supplements to the
Scottish Journal of Theology (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 59.
[xxxiv]
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics. Trans. G.T. Thomson and Harold Knight
(Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1936) 1-2, pp. 340-344; Alfred Bloom, Shinran's
Gospel of Pure Grace. Association for Asian Studies: Monographs and Papers
XX (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1965), p. vii.
[xxxv]
"Religion and Rocketry" (originally a Forward Movement pamphlet) is
also called "Will We Lose God in Outer Space?" Mere Christianity (NY:
Macmillan, 1977), pp. 65, 176-177; The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape
Proposes a Toast (NY: Macmillan, 1970), p. 107.
[xxxvi]
Tillich, Systematic Theology: Existence and the Christ. Vol. II (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 101. In view here is the science fiction
scenario according to which the human race is succeeded by another species
as masters of this planet, as in the movie Planet of the Apes or in H.P.
Lovecraft's "The Shadow out of Time."
[xxxvii]
John B. Cobb, Jr., Christ in a Pluralistic Age (Philadelphia: Westminster
Press, 1975), p. 169.
[xxxviii]
Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. II, p. 164.
[xxxix]
Richard J. Baukham, "Anonymous Christianity," in Sinclair B. Ferguson
and David F. Wright, eds., New Dictionary of Theology (Downers Grove:
InterVarsity Press, 1988), pp. 25-26; Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian
Faith (NY: Crossroad Books, 1978), pp. 311-321.