Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
The foundation of Christian belief,' states Paul Tillich, ‘is not the historical Jesus, but the biblical picture of the Christ.’1 This statement is only now beginning to elicit the serious comment that one might expect from the statement of so great a theologian as Paul Tillich. Tillich's penetrating analysis of the meaning of Jesus as the Christ is a profound contribution to the Christian understanding of the Incarnation. Donald Baillie was surely right, too, in expressing his enthusiasm for Tillich's christological interpretation of history when he stated that there seemed to him to be ‘deep truth … in the idea that Christology stands for the Christian interpretation of history as against other interpretations’.2 Even Tillich's claim that ‘to practise Christology does not mean to turn backward to an unknown historical past or to exert oneself about the applicability of questionable mythical categories to an unknown historical persoanality’,3 contains a refreshing and valid emphasis upon Christology as living existential faith rather than arid theoretical speculation. Yet Christianity has always maintained that its foundation is Jesus of Nazareth in whom the Word of God became flesh. Tilliach's Christology must therefore stand or fall on this christological question which he regards as quite subordinate: the question of the historical basis of the biblical picture of the Christ. If the foundation of Tillich's Christology is “not the historical Jesus, but the biblical picture of the Christ”, how much importance Tillich does actually allow the historical dimension in his Christology must be carefully examined.
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page 258 note 1 Johnson, R. C., ‘The Jesus of History and the Christian Faith’, Theology Today, X (July 1953), 170CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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page 259 note 1 Hamilton, K., The System and the Gospel (London, S.C.M. Press, 1963), p. 163Google Scholar.
page 259 note 2 Hamilton terms this Tillich's ‘system-known’.
page 259 note 3 Vide Tillich, The Interpretation of History, p. 33, where he acknowledges the influence of Schweitzer, Bultmann and Troeltsch on his historical insights into the New Testament.
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page 268 note 5 ibid., p. 131.
page 269 note 1 ibid., p. 109.
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page 271 note 2 p. 113. In the third volume of Tillich's Systematic Theology, published since the above was written, the few allusive references to this question do not indicate any change in Tillich's position.