PAUL
TILLICH
Existential
Christology
The Method of
Correlation
Unlike
Karl Barth, Tillich strove for correlation, if not synthesis, between secular
philosophy and Christian theology. For Tillich, the task of theology was to be
“apologetic,” not in the sense of apologizing for its existence or specific
task but in the sense of presenting the case for Christian faith in such a way
that modern men and women can understand it and relate it to their needs.
Tillich
was a highly original and creative thinker. He had neo-orthodox leanings; he
was training by the last liberals; he was strongly influenced by existentialist
philosophies. The label that might do the most justice to Tillich is
“neo-liberalism.”
The
method of his theological work may best be described as “correlation.” The
basic idea is simple: Theology should have a mutual working relationship with
philosophy asks the relevant questions, and theology provides the answers from
the perspective of Christian faith. Tillich elaborated on the method of correlation
in terms of the correlation between the questions and answer. The structure of
his main theological work, the three-volume Systematic Theology, follows this
path: First, there is a question related to the intellectual and cultural
context, and that is followed by a theological answer. Tillich reason does not
resist revelation but rather asks for it; revelation means the reintegration of
reason.
Tillich
was extreme critical both of the fundamentalism, and of the Kerygma theology of neo-orthodoxy, which
refused to look for any historical or cultural support for its claim. These two
approached, he labeled “supernaturalistic,” ignore the questions of modern men
and women. Tillich argued that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the God
of the philosophers is the same.
The Ground of Being
With
existentialists, Tillich wanted to highlight the special nature of human
existence in ontology (ontology is the branch of philosophy that inquires into
the nature of being or existence): A human being is a “microcosm,” different
from all other form of life. The gateway to Tillich’s doctrine of God and Jesus
Christ is the ontological question, that is, what is means to say that
something is, that it exists.
Tillich
follows Rudolf Bultmann in attempting to extract the existential significance
of New Testament Christology and sotoriology. Instead of the term myth Bultmann
used Tillich use symbol.
If
the question of being is the basic question of philosophy and theology, its
counterpart is the question of non-being. For Tillich, the question of
non-being raises the question of power of being that overcomes the threat of
non-being and sustain life. This has to be “Being Itself” or the “Ground of
Being.” Without this Ground of Being, everything finite would fall back to non-being
or nothingness.
Two
terms are very crucial for Tillich’s analysis: essence and existence. These two
terms define the entire structure of reality and they apply to all being.
According to Tillich, the term essence denotes the potential, unactualized
perfection of a thing as it does not yet exist. The term existence refers to
the actual being that is “fallen” from its essence, in a sense cut off from
perfection.
New Being
The
idea of Christ as “New being,” the “restorative principle” of Tillich’s theology
is the heart of Christology for Tillich. In his Systematic Theology, Tillich
analyzes the situation of human existential alienation and the question for
salvation. Tillich system introduces
Christ. As the New Being, Christ is the answer fort human beings who finds
themselves under the fallen conditions of existence.
For,
Tillich, the event on which Christianity is based has two aspects: the fact of
Jesus of Nazareth and the reception of this fact those who receive him as the
Christ. Tillich maintains that the history of Jesus and his life are
unimportant; regardless of how much critical scholarship eradicates the
credibility of the Gospel stories. Tillich is ready to affirm about Jesus is
that his was a “personal life.” Whatever the details of his life of Jesus of
Nazareth the New Being was and is active in his main. Tillich says that it is
“the Christ who brings the New being, who saves men from the Old Being, that is
from existential estrangement and its destructive consequences.”
In
Jesus, humanity became: essentialized” within existence. This was a great
paradox, a reversal of the necessary human fallenness. This Christology can
properly be called “degree’ Christology: Jesus was not different from us in
substance but in degree.
Tillich
maintains that Christology is the function of Sotoriology. In other word, the
question of salvation creates the Christological question. That gives Tillich
the freedom needed to deal with the details of Jesus’ life and even to maintain
that as the New Being Jesus Christ need not be “god” in the traditional sense
of the term.
Tillich
rejected the concept of revealed words or propositions. He went with the
mainline neo-orthodox view in which revelation is never the communication of
information but rather an event and experience that can happen through many
different media, including nature, beauty, people and speech.
Tillich
makes a distinction between “actual revelation,” meaning all events and
experiences that manifest the power of being wherever and whenever they happen,
and final revelation,” meaning ultimate, unsurpassable revelation, which is
found in Jesus Christ.
Is the Fall a Necessary
Event?
Tillich
makes the fall necessary in that as soon as one, moves from essence to
existence. In other word, he makes it an ontological necessity. Tillich
identify the fall with “actualized creation,” with the coming to existence of
the potential essence. This transition coincides with the exercise of free will
and leads to a fall from the state of dreaming innocence is union with God.
Tillich
tries to soften the necessary nature of the fall by saying that it has the
nature of an irrational leap for which humans are responsible. What then is
Salvation for Tillich? He reminds us that the Greek and Latin terms for
salvation (soteria and salus, respectively) primarily mean
“healing.” It is through the courage to be in the face of the treats of
non-being. Salvation, healing, involves participation in God’s participation in
and victory over the split between essence and existence. Salvation also means
receiving God’s acceptance and reconciliation. This hopeful leads to
transformation in personality and community. Three foundational terms of
classical soteriology- regeneration, justification and sanctification- are
restated by Tillich as “participation, acceptance and transformation.”
The
meaning of the “eternal truth” about God and Christ in his thinking remains
open, and many would argue that he majored in the temporal pole of the
dialectic.
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