[505] QN: Are the Christian symbols^a by nature superior to any other religious symbols? You seem to deal with them even though they are used only as symbols. PT: "Only as symbols": I FORBID you--- don't use that. [laughter]. The first question is very important. In order to answer this question, why I am grasped by the CONCRETE power of the symbol of Jesus-as-the-Christ (whereby "Christ" is the symbol and "Jesus^b" is the event which remains a historical probability)---if I say this, then I can give you reasons for it, and these reasons are . . . [??] by conversations [?] which at the same time tries to understand the other religions and to show that there is something lacking in them---for instance, in the great Asiatic religions, there is lacking the positive affirmation and valuation of personality, and in the Semitic religions (I mean Judaism and Islam), there the LAW point of view is so predominant over against the GRACE point

of view that I would say, here Christianity is superior. But you don't need to accept that---these arguments are arguments ad hominem, they are not arguments from a point of view above them. But they are given as arguments in the circle of Christian experience, and try to make this experience universal---we cannot go beyond this. That is what the early Church did when it said Jesus the Christ is the Logos, i.e., He has universal meaning in His concreteness. Beyond this we cannot go. QN: How much is your point of view about an ultimate concern underlying ALL concerns, tied in with your theory of a naturalism which is self-transcended? PT: I don't know whether I understood that combination of concepts. QN: I wonder if a supernaturalist, for example, would be cut off from holding that all concerns

are underlaid by an ultimate concern. PT: Why would he? QN: He would have to infer God---rather than knowing God somehow directly, by being a part of God--- PT: Don't say such a word as "part of God"---that is very bad theology. Now I don't know whether