In 1924–25 existentialist philosopher Heidegger, New Testament scholar Bultmann, and philosophical theologian Tillich were colleagues at the University of Marburg. All three have had a marked interrelated influence on twentieth century thought and all three have utilized the now well-known existentialist approach to the “human predicament.” Actually, Bultmann tends to adopt Heidegger’s anthropology directly and (according to Tillich) limits himself to an ethical interpretation of theology. He differs from the older Ritschlian moral liberalism, however, in that he asks for a personal decision concerning the Christ of the cross, concerning the Christian kerygma or message, because of its relevance for “meaningful” existence. Tillich, too, delineates this existential-ethical approach in his discussions of God as man’s “ultimate concern.” Since 1925, however, Tillich (in contrast to both Heidegger and Bultmann) has been developing an ontological interpretation of theology that centers in the Being of God and requires man’s participation in the New Being manifest in the Christ. This fact points to important philosophical differences between Tillich and Bultmann, despite their theological agreement about the necessity of form criticism and demythologization to arrive at a kerygma that is communicable to the “modern mind.”
This summary indicates the extensive similarity between Tillich and Bultmann both as to theological method and as to existentialized doctrine. Whether a merger of the two can take place is really beside the point because in a fundamental sense one already exists. One reason Bultmann has not stirred America as he did Germany after 1941 may be in part Tillich’s development in this country of a similar theology that has been projected in a more positive, cultural context. Perhaps the current effort to translate Tillich’s works into his native language will extend the effectiveness of this type of existentialist theology in Germany too and thus prolong the seeming eclipse of Barth. In any event several ways may be noted wherein Tillich launches beyond Bultmann. The question of their joint impact upon the immediate development of religious thought in America is also significant.
Any comparison of Bultmann and Tillich should include the positive as well as the negative aspects of their existentialist theology. Even those who resent the apparent negativism of demythologizing Scripture must acknowledge Tillich’s and Bultmann’s help in sharpening today’s need for new ways to communicate the “good news” of the Bible. What these men (especially Tillich) have been trying to do for communicating the Gospel must not be lost in discussions over what they may be doing to the Gospel. Making the Word relevant to the needs of men is the special business of preachers, and using existentialist hermeneutics positively is an old and well-known tool of their trade. Reading Bultmann’s recently-published sermons, This World and the Beyond, and comparing them with Tillich’s The Shaking of the Foundations and The New Being should indicate just how successful Bultmann has been in retaining a “positive” message. Preaching must present Jesus Christ as Lord in such a manner that it places before the hearer “the decision whether he will remain the old man or become a new man” (Bultmann, “Preaching: Genuine and Secularized,” Religion and Culture: Essays in Honor of Paul Tillich, ed. W. Leibrecht, p. 242). “To communicate the Gospel means putting it before the people so that they are able to decide for or against it.… The Christian message is the message of a new Reality in which we can participate and which gives us the power to take anxiety and despair upon ourselves” (Tillich, “Communicating the Christian Message,” in his Theology of Culture, pp. 201, 208). Both men use Heidegger’s terminology to describe the tragic sense of life that engulfs many persons in our “Age of Crisis,” even though philosophers have rightfully indicated the ambiguities and onesidedness of this pessimistic approach. Tillich justifies existentialist language pragmatically because it provides in our time a persuasive way to pose the question about life’s deeper religious meaning. Indeed, Tillich’s perceptive analysis of various phases of our culture, art, literature, and psychology are much more convincing for many Americans than Bultmann’s more restricted efforts as a critical student of the New Testament.
The Bultmann series in CHRISTIANITY TOHAY has called attention to the negative side of his work. The writers of these recent essays, not unlike Barth, Cullmann, Thielicke, and other right wing critics, have warned about so demythologizing that Scripture no longer does justice to the reality of God and of Christ. Despite Tillich’s ontological emphasis, perhaps his writings, too, fail to give assurance about the personal, objective-historical basis of Christian faith. Nor does the conservative find much comfort in hearing that Bultmann is still not the most radical deviate in Christian theology. In The Scope of Demythologizing, a very stimulating study of Bultmann and his critics, John Macquarrie of Glasgow says that the kerygma of “the event of Christ” is the top limit in Bultmann’s method for demythologizing the Scriptures. Bultmann’s left-wing critics at Basel (philosopher Karl Jaspers and especially theologian Fritz Buri) feel he is quite arbitrary in stopping short of dekerygmatizing the “saving core” too. Such criticism is what Barth has aptly called “uninhibited radicalizing of Bultmann’s radicalism” (see Macquarrie, p. 131). Buri represents the danger implicit in pushing existentialist hermeneutics negatively. In this approach the Christ-myth has nothing whatever to do with fact and history but remains only (with apologies to Tillich!) a symbol of human possibilities for “authentic” existence.
Tillich’s Reconstruction
This reduction of theology to philosophy, existentialist or otherwise, is exactly what Tillich contests. He also holds Bultmann partly responsible for this problem because Bultmann leans toward an existential-ethical theology that fails to examine seriously the ontological basis of biblical religion.
How has Tillich tried to reconstruct neo-liberal theology? As noted he concurs in Bultmann’s attack on the “obsolete world view” of the Bible. At the same time Tillich warns against using the shifting status of modern science as the absolute criterion over the Bible. To those right-wing critics who wonder about really trying to remove the skandalon of the Gospel, Tillich has this to say: any effort to reduce the logical and super-naturalistic offence of preaching is justified if it helps prospective Christians confront the real “offense” or “stumbling block” of the Gospel, namely, the paradox of the cross of Christ. The real religious offense for men of all time is that God should have appeared in history with all of its estrangement, sin, and death. In short, Tillich contends that demythologizing is pragmatically justified if it helps men by-pass “unnecessary blockage” in coming to participate in the New Being manifest in Christ. By the same token, Buri’s dekerygmatizing is untenable because it removes the essential offense of calling men to genuine decision for or against reconciliation to God. Without this call one has philosophy but not Christian theology.
Definition Offered
So far as the Scriptures go, Tillich defines the real problem not so much as a matter of getting rid of myths as a task of “breaking the myth” (Dynamics of Faith, p. 51), or of deliteralizing the “genuine” religious myths in the Bible. For Tillich a myth is always a cluster of symbols; it serves as a literary medium whereby God’s transcendent reality is drawn into the categories of human temporality. Symbols and myths constitute the language of faith. Contrary to Bultmann, Tillich feels one should not try to replace myths with more acceptable scientific substitutes; rather one should deliteralize the mythical elements in the Bible, doctrine and liturgy, and thereby discover the “real” religious significance of these symbols. For Protestants, he says, the problem is to keep these symbols as full and rich as possible so they retain their power to point men beyond the symbolic material to God, who is the Ground of all being and the true object of man’s “ultimate concern.”
There is no question that Tillich succeeds in getting his religious symbols to “point beyond” in a mystical-ontological fashion. Just what they point to and whether they are “rich” enough to be comprehensively Christian are issues which Tillich’s critics have raised. Reinhold Niebuhr, for example, questions the possibility of comprehending in ontological categories the mysteries of God’s operation in history. With all of Tillich’s talk about symbols pointing to something, perhaps the greatest difficulty is that we are never quite sure what they point from. This fact is particularly significant when we consider the historical basis of the gospel concerning Jesus Christ. In volume two of his Systematic Theology Tillich claims that while Bultmann stops with the “historical element” in the words of Jesus—the message of the kingdom of God to which man must respond in his own “history”—he himself has been able to emphasize the reality of the being of Christ. This Tillich has done by using the symbolic power of biblical language to point to the ontological reality of Christ as he is accepted by faith, even though this reality cannot be verified by strictly scientific historical research. Tillich will say only that “Christological symbols are the way in which the historical fact, called Jesus of Nazareth, has been received by those who consider him to be the Christ” (p. 152). While Tillich seems to add something significant to Bultmann by referring to Christ’s resurrection as the central Christian symbol which must be accepted as both symbol and event, the “event” actually turns out to be no different from Bultmann’s. The “event” has nothing to do with the physical appearance during 40 days of the same Jesus Christ who died about A.D. 30. The “event” is not a matter of historical conviction nor of biblical authority; it rests rather on “the certainty of one’s own victory over the death of existential estrangement,” on experiencing the presence of New Being and the eternal presence of God as Spirit (p. 155). A new gnosticism (via Heidegger) confronts us if we ask about the historical reality of the “mighty act of God” from which the eschatological symbols point. Tillich and Bultmann have merged again.
A Future for the Merger?
So far as America goes, Tillich’s impact stems not primarily from his advocating a neo-liberal theology akin to Bultmann’s. His reception, rather, results from his attempt to define a theology that recognizes the philosophical and cultural challenges to Christian faith in our century. He tries to meet these challenges on their own ground by using his talent as an ontologist, existentialist, idealist, and romanticist. He applies his “principle of correlation,” his “Protestant protest,” his sensitivity to the religious foundation of history and culture (“theonomy”). He employs depth psychology. Above all Tillich has a passion for interpretation in terms of the symbols of Christian faith. It is his knowledge of the world in which we live, and for which the Gospel must be shown to have relevance that wins even those who disclaim any value for the existentialist framework or who doubt that Tillich has retained the “whole counsel of God” in his kerygma.
It is quite possible that while Tillich will and should continue to get a respectable hearing, the radical use of demythologization will have less and less appeal. This conjecture comes not from wishful thinking but from evaluating the fundamental shift from the old liberalism toward a more biblically-oriented theology that has been developing in America in the last quarter century. (See my “Has There Been a Shift in the Presuppositions of Criticism?” Bulletin of the Evangelical Theological Society, Fall, 1960. While the works of Frederick Grant and John Bright are especially emphasized here, scores of others could be cited. We suggest also Donald Rowlingson’s “Let’s Reinstate the Bible Historian!” The Christian Century, July 5, 1961, which calls for return to Jesus of Nazareth, and to his words and deeds in history as a prerequisite for any existential application.) L. H. DeWolf’s The Case for Theology in Liberal Perspective illustrates what we have in mind.
DeWolf reasons that even if some demythologizing is found to be necessary, one must also determine what aspects of the New Testament best portray the unique reality of the Christ-event (pp. 65–67). DeWolf concludes that neither vagueness about the personal character of God (as in Tillich) nor about the historical reality of Jesus Christ can provide a theology for the living church.
This trend in theology seems to indicate an increasing realization that theological presuppositions for biblical interpretation must rest on reasonable inference from scriptural evidence. It means, too, an increasing awareness that when man responds the Bible will fulfill the purposes for which it was given as divine revelation. What Albright calls the “substantial historicity” of the Bible is receiving serious attention in diverse quarters. While all of this can occasion rejoicing on the part of evangelicals it also provides a challenge. It marks a challenge to conservative scholarship co-operatively and constructively to restate its case in a way that shows an understanding of the changing position of these alternative theologies. The problem of biblical authority and interpretation has been raised in new ways by men like Bultmann and Tillich and the answers must be correlated with the actual questions which perplex them. Only with continued reclarification of the dynamic saving message of the Bible can there be effective communication to our generation. This kerygma must include the “saving history” which Bultmann denies and the miraculous Gospel at which Tillich stumbles.
WILLIAM W. PAUL
Department of Philosophy
Central College
Pella, Iowa
