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Paul Tillich's Dialectical Humanism
By Leonard F. Wheat
287 pp. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1970. $9.00.

"Tillich's chief claim to fame will be that he fooled a lot of people" (p. 276). With this statement Leonard Wheat, an economist for the U.S. Department of Commerce, professed atheist, and critic of theology, concludes his book and sums up his thesis. In a "homestretch recapitulation," he makes the charge more explicit: "Tillich is a complete atheist who lost his belief while completing his higher education. Intellectually he despises Christianity. . . . Still, being the son of a clergyman and having a fondness for religious life … Tillich [will] have his cake and eat it too. He is going to remain with the Church for the purpose of undermining Christianity from within" (p. 187).

Working under this assumption, Wheat undertakes a review of Tillich's thought calculated to demonstrate not only his atheism but also his premediated and fraudulent deception. Basically, Wheat's argument is as follows: Because Tillich is critical of supernaturalism, it is impossible to believe that his concept of "being-itself" can refer to a transcendent being, to God. But since Tillich elsewhere says it does, he must be deceitful. Without variation, this same logic is applied to the various parts of Tillich's system-to the idea of "ultimate concern," to Jesus as the Christ as "New Being," to Tillich's concept of revelation, etc.

Now it is a notorious fact that theories of duplicity are difficult to -refute because they invariably include an attitude which from the outset must dismiss contradictory evidence as part of the deception itself. Thus, Wheat forecloses any possible appeal to Tillich's writings which might refute his thesis by labeling them as part of the hoax. For instance, Tillich's stated desire to breathe new life into Christian thought

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is called "a cover for subversive activities" (p. 58), and his description of man over against the transcendent is labeled a "sham" (p. 80), and "semantic hocus-pocus" (p. 82). Indeed Tillich's whole ontology through which he attempts to preserve the concept of God is labeled "strictly bogus" (p. 129), and his concept of the demonic, by which he seeks to prohibit the very divinization of man Wheat claims, is dismissed as a "smokescreen" (p. 171). Other such references are called a "bold masquerade," "broad satire," or, in his final peroration of invective, "nonsensical hokum and claptrap" (p. 271).

In light of the fact that Wheat neither understands, respects, nor is able to take seriously Tillich or theology, why did he bother to write this book? The answer may possibly be found on pages 153ff. where the author engages in a polemic against Jesus in the guise of presenting Tillich's Christology. Wheat finds the ethic of this Jesus "selfish," and his teaching one of "cajolery and threats." This Jesus is not only a racist but a sadist as well, who "himself planned to throw the 'goats' into the fire." (Italics Wheat.) "He blinded himself to any concern for individuals who, by failing to heed the call of the messiah, branded themselves unworthy" (p. 161). To present this whole serving of warmed-up Reimarus (who at least had the courage of his questionable convictions) as representative of Tillich's view is perhaps the most reprehensible part of a continual outrage. Tillich, of course, wrote of Jesus as "undisrupted unity with God . . . self-surrendering love . . taking the existential destruction [of all men] upon himself" (Systematic Theology, Vol. II p. 138).

Is it possible that it is Wheat, and not Tillich, who has deceitfully used the language and subject matter of theology as a ruse to attack Christianity? Could it be that the hoax here is not Tillich's use of theology but Wheat's use of Tillich? Considering the author's rather literalistic (if polemical) reading of the synoptics and his rather fundamentalistic understanding of Jesus as a harsh judge, could it be Wheat and not Tillich who "lost his faith?" Is the destructive passion of his attack that of the alienated devotee? In any case, one cannot suppress the notion that the aim and purpose of this book is not a study of Tillich but rather the launching of a diatribe against Christianity.

Quite apart from the purpose of this book, one of its problems is that the author has ignored completely the arguments and categories of medieval and ancient theology and philosophy upon which Tillich's thought so largely depends. Thus Wheat easily dismisses the whole ontological foundation of his system as "bogus." Evidently Wheat believes the problem of epistemology began with Hume, and since the idea of "being itself" can have no meaning for him, he assumes it has none

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for Tillich. But if one wants to claim (and many have) that Tillich's thought leads to a kind of atheism, he should at least demonstrate some awareness that there exists in the history of human thought a tradition which allows Tillich honestly to conceive of God as the power and ground of all being as distinguished from human being-in-existence.

The astonishing thing is not that this book should have been written, for Wheat evidently had his reasons, but that it should have been published. One hopes that few will waste nine dollars on this "exposé" and that it will hang long, albatross-like, about the necks of the editors of Johns Hopkins Press. I would, however, recommend that undergraduate and theological libraries purchase at least one copy, so that instructors may employ it occasionally as an illustration of what students should not do in their own work and that it may ever engender a healthy skepticism regarding the printed word.

Alexander J. McKelway
Davidson College
Davidson, North Carolina