TILLICHOVO POIMANJE KRISTOCENTRIČNE POVIJESTI
TILLICH’S CONCEPTION OF ‘CHRIST-CENTRIC HISTORY

Summary/Abstract: Paul Tillich paid special attention to the Protestant interpretation of history by which he wanted to emphasise the need for a renewal and creation of a new theonomy through the reinterpretation of the New Testament idea of ‘kairos’ in which Christ is the ‘great kairos’, or the central event in which God reveals Himself as the centre of time and the ultimate meaning of history. After we discuss the main characteristics of human history in the first part of the paper, this will be the main topic of its central part, and finally, the last part of our investigation will try to show how, under the influence of the ‘Spirit of God’, or the final and universal revelation of the ‘New Being in Jesus as the Christ’, the ‘Kingdom of God’ is actualised in history, including its end in the ‘Eternal Life’. By means of critical analysis we came to the conclusion that Tillich, through his reduction to ‘eschaton’, successfully demonstrated how this Greek word, which has a deep existential meaning and symbolizes a kind of ‘transition’ from temporal into eternal or from existence into essence, becomes the object of the present experience without losing its futuristic dimension, because it is this permanent presence of the end of history as the transcendent side of the Kingdom of God, which Tillich calls the ‘Eternal Life’, that represents the fulfilment of the historical existence on the basis of which the final victory over all ambiguities of life and historical events is achieved.

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