Schelling and History (1909–11)

Abstract

This chapter gathers Tillich’s academic work from 1909 to 11, including two dissertations on Schelling and his lecture on certainty and the historical Jesus. Schelling provided Tillich and his modern-positive tradition with a way of thinking about Christianity in the light of the history of religions, after the challenge of Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923) to separate historical and dogmatic method. Tillich notes Schelling’s insistence that humanity is God-positing regardless of unbelief. It is also significant that Tillich affirms the notion of an undoubtable condition of thought, whether as Schelling’s concept of ‘unpreconceivable being’ or Fichte’s I (das Ich). With Schelling, Tillich sees a wider application for justification than the ethical sphere. However, it is first in the Kassel lecture on the historical Jesus that he connects the idealist notion that knowledge is limited to the self-certainty of the subject with the claim that autonomy is justification in the area of thought. This is expressed as the rejection of the misunderstanding that faith is an intellectual work. This could have been the influence of his Lutheran tradition, encouraged by Schelling. The chapter argues it emerged from Tillich’s engagement with Wilhelm Herrmann (1846–1922).