The Fabric of Paul Tillich’s Theology

By taking seriously Tillich’s claim to be a confessional Church theologian rather than a metaphysician with religious interests, this carefully ordered study gains a fresh perspective on the structure of argument upon which his theological enterprise rests. Scriptural material is shown to control his judgments in much the same way that literature controls those of the literary critic--a particularly illuminating comparison in view of his argument that the verbal icon provided by the biblical picture of Jesus as the Christ bears analogia imaginis to the historical Jesus and hence provides the sole access to the original Christian revelation.Tillich’s movement from symbols as data to theological judgments as conclusions is seen to be warranted, not by his ontology, but by his presentation of the phenomenology of revelatory events. Though historical study of Jesus and of the Bible is in principle irrelevant to this use of scripture, his confusions in this area are examined, and the structural flaws in his accounts of the biblical picture of Jesus are shown to yield a Christian theology in which Christology is oddly dispensable. Finally, his discussion of God is used as a test case for the analysis of the general structure of his argument, and the various sorts of conclusions that he feels Scripture authorizes him to draw are cogently appraised.David H. Kelsey is professor of theology at Yale Divinity School, New Haven, Connecticut.