A History of Christian Thought (published in 1967) is actually a combination of two books of Paul Tillich’s lectures. The first part, A History of Christian Thought, begins with the Graeco-Roman preparations for Christianity and ends with the post-Reformation development in Protestant theology. The second part originally appeared as Perspectives on Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Protestant Theology. This section covers a range of topics, beginning with the rise of the Enlightenment and ending with the theology of Karl Barth and modern existentialism.
Tillich understands the development of Christian history and theology in terms of kairos. He explains that the appearance of Jesus Christ happened in one special moment of history when everything was ready for it to happen. He reminds us that Paul speaks of the kairos in describing the feeling that the time was ripe, mature, or prepared. Kairos, he reminds us, is just one of two ways that the Greeks had to describe the concept of time. The other term is chronos, and is clock time, time which is measured. “Kairos,” he says, “is not the quantitative time of the clock, but the qualitative time of the occasion, the right time” (1). The story of the gospel is one of “the right time.” And Tillich works in this first section of his book to show how the foundation for the ultimate revelation in Jesus Christ was being set through culture and philosophy. Tillich then returns often to this concept throughout the book to remind us of God’s constant attention to kairos throughout Christian history.
The first part of the book moves from this first section, The Preparation for Christianity, and eventually covers six major movements of Christian thought: Theological Developments in the Ancient Church, Trends in the Middle Ages, Roman Catholicism from Trent to the Present, The Theology of the Protestant Reformers, and The Development of Protestant Theology. The second part of the book covers five sections: Oscillating Emphases in Orthodoxy, Pietism and Rationalism, The Enlightenment and Its Problems, The Classic-Romantic Reaction against the Enlightenment, The Nature of Romanticism, The Classical Theological Synthesis: Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Breakdown of the Universal Synthesis, and New Ways of Mediation.
One of the most helpful concepts that Tillich illuminated for me is the idea of positivism in theological thought. He touches on this concept several times throughout the book, and offers particular insight around pages 254 and 398. Tillich understands positive Christianity as historically given Christianity, meaning that things are simply taken as they are. So, Luther, for example, understood providence as positivism. Tillich explains that this means that the Stoic doctrine of natural law, which can be used as a criticism of the positive law has disappeared. “Practically,” writes Tillich, “he [Luther] says that every Christian must put up with bad government because it comes from God providentially” (255). And, put simply, Luther can maintain this because he says that God does two kinds of work: his own proper work, the work of love, mercy and grace, and his strange work, which is also a work of love, but a strange one.
Now, move ahead to Schleiermacher and his positivistic definition of theology (cf. 398f). Schleiermacher’s famous book The Christian Faith (first published in 1821) is significantly about what is in fact positively given, that is, the Christian faith as such. “Thus,” says Tillich, “systematic theology is the description of the faith at its present in the Christian churches. That is a positivist foundation of theology. You do not have to decide about the truths or untruths of a religion in general or of Christianity in particular. You find Christianity given as an empirical fact in history, and then you have to describe the meaning of the symbols within it” (399). Schleiermacher worked to make a very sharp distinction between this empirical positive theology and the so-called rational theology of the Enlightenment. Now Tillich thinks that the problem with all of this is that it completely leaves out – for the first time in the development of theology, by the way – the question of truth. You can describe what is going on, then educate leaders of the church in this knowledge, and move forward, without ever decisively dealing with questions of truth.
There is clearly a lot going here, and I am still working to put all the pieces together. But the reason I am sifting through all of this is because of Bonhoeffer (big surprise, right?). There is this odd paragraph in Bonhoeffer’s May 5, 1944 letter to Eberhard Bethge in Letters and Papers from Prison that has been stumping me and some of my other Bonhoeffer classmates for quite some time. This question came up in my Bonhoeffer course at Princeton, and we still had a hard time even with the professor and teaching assistants trying to decipher what Bonhoeffer is saying here. This letter is one of his more famous ones, where he’s dealing with questions of ‘religionless Christianity.’ He writes, “Barth was the first theologian to begin the criticism of religion, and that remains his truly great merit; but he puts in its place a positivistic doctrine of revelation which says, in effect, ‘Like it or lump it’: virgin birth, Trinity, or anything else; each is an equally significant and necessary part of the whole, which must simply be swallowed as a whole or not at all. That isn’t biblical. There are degrees of knowledge and degrees of significance; that means that a secret discipline must be restored whereby the mysteries of the Christian faith are protected against profanation. The positivism of revelation makes it too easy for itself, by setting up, as it does in the last analysis, a law of faith, and so mutilates what is – Christ’s incarnation – a gift for us! In the place of religion there now stands the church – that is in itself biblical – but the world is left to its own devices, and that’s the mistake” (LPP, 286).
So, Tillich is helping me make sense of this paragraph of Bonhoeffer’s with some insight on the concept of ‘positivism.’ The question that stumped my Princeton colleagues and me was what does Bonhoeffer mean by ‘positivism’? Of course Princeton being the holy ground for all things Barth, this was an important question – if Bonhoeffer was going to criticize Barth, we needed to know why! Now, I don’t know if this is an accurate or fair criticism of Barth by Bonhoeffer, but it is certainly worth trying to better understand. First of all, I’m fairly certain that Bonhoeffer is not advocating for the dismissal of such key doctrines as the Virgin birth or the Trinity. Remember, this is Bonhoeffer jotting down ideas “in German script” – which he tells Bethge he normally only does for his own thoughts. But the bigger picture of what he seems to be wrestling with has to do with how we understand, accept, and then apply theology. The “positive theology” that was “handed down” to Bonhoeffer and others in the German/Lutheran church made a sharp distinction between the church and the state. Luther’s two kingdoms doctrine (while largely misinterpreted) effectively split the world into a sacred and a secular sphere, with Christ and Christians in the sacred sphere beckoning those in the world to leave the secular and join the sacred. This doctrine also allowed Christians to be in the sacred sphere on Sunday and the secular sphere on all other days. The split of church and state had also bifurcated individual lives.
Bonhoeffer says that this is not acceptable any more. This may be positivistic theology, and thus may even be where Barth is arguing from, but all it does is leave the world to its own devices. The church, affirms Bonhoeffer, stands not in a separate sphere, but stands with Jesus Christ in the very center of all reality. Jesus Christ is for the world and exists in the midst of the world. If our theology leads us to believe otherwise, be it positivistic or anything else, we need to re-evaluate our thinking based on what is biblical and revealed through the in-breaking of Jesus Christ.
