Davide's Notes

I am thinking about Hunsinger's comment that, for Tillich,

[i]f resurrection meant no more than spiritual regeneration (first in time, then in eternity), and this experience was all that made Jesus savingly significant (along with the hope for immortality), then regeneration was logically possible first without reference to his bodily resurrection and finally without reference to him. (Christ's resurrection in recent theology, p. 7)

Reading The New Being by Tillich, and specifically chapter 2, it strikes me how this sermon (one should not forget that this is a sermon, of course) makes so little explicit reference to the meaning of the resurrection of Christ in the context of the definition of the New Being. Actually, all is said of resurrection here is that it is "the power of the New Being to create life out of death, here and now, today and tomorrow." This New Being is the effect of a New Creation, which "is manifest in Jesus who is called the Christ". (italics mine.) It seems to me then that the dispensability of Jesus mentioned by Hunsinger is paired here with the dispensability of religion, which is the focus of the entire sermon. The sense I get is of an existentalist, humanistic, quasi-illuminist ("The message of Christianity is not Christianity, but a New Reality") conception of religion.