268 - The Thought of Paul Tillich

The Thought of Paul Tillich

Edited by James Luther Adams, Wilhelm Pauck, and Roger L. Shinn

New York, Harper & Row, 1985. 404 Pp. $24.95.

Fundamental to the theology of Paul Tillich is the claim that "religion is the substance of culture, and culture is the form of religion." The eighteen essays prepared for this volume successfully illustrate this correlation by showing how Tillich's concepts might address cultural issues twenty years after his death. Attached to this collection is a translation of Tillich's "Open Letter to Emmanuel Hirsch" by Robert Scharlemann and Victor Nuovo in which Tillich upbraids Hirsch's betrayal of Christian Socialism for Nazism.

In two introductory chapters, Wilhelm Pauck and James Luther Adams discuss the origins of Tillich's thought and the ontological concepts that control his whole theology. The collection then proceeds to present the relation of Tillich's thought to five subject areas, namely, the socio-political, the psychological, the artistic, the religious, and the theological. In addressing Tillich's social and political thought, both Roger Shinn and Dennis McCann analyze the way Tillich used such concepts as "theonomy," the "demonic," and "kairos" to champion the cause of Religious Socialism. Both emphasize the importance of Tillich's "Protestant Principle" ("the divine and human protest against any absolute claim made for a relative reality"), which Shinn believes can arm us against the exaggerated and often demonic ideologies of nationalism and scientism. McCann, in a comparison of Tillich, R. Niebuhr, and J. L. Segundo, asserts the usefulness of this principle against the ideological objectification he sees in both Christian Realism and the theologies of liberation. Of particular interest in this section is the chapter by the economist Walter Weisskopf, who offers a close analysis of Tillich's early (1933) book The Socialist Decision. Weisskopf argues that Tillich's grasp of the antinomies of modern life (for example, collective consciousness vs. individuation) provides a better understanding of the human situation than Marxism.

Tillich's interest in psychotherapy is well known, and William Rogers and Ann Belford Ulanov show how such concepts of his as neurotic and ontological anxiety, the polarity of self and the world, and "ultimate concern" have influenced a long list of eminent psychologists, including Erich Fromm, Rollo May, Erik Erikson, and Victor Frankl. Both psychologists agree that today anxiety is caused not so much by repression of desire as by what Rogers calls an "annihilating openness." In this situation, they believe, re-integration of the self is aided by Tillich's discovery of the "spiritual center" (Rogers) that emerges in the process of "accepting acceptance" (Ulanov).

Tillich's theology of culture led him quite naturally to an investigation of the religious dimension of art. In his elegantly written chapter,

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Nathan Scott ranges from Kafka to Updike to show how Tillich's categories of "autonomy," "heteronomy," and "theonomy" reveal the hidden intention and meaning of much modern literature. Robert Scharlemann applies Tillich's theory of art to expressionism, which, he argues, serves Tillich's doctrine of symbolism in so far as the artistic material (what might be considered the natural or expected form of objects, words, or sounds) becomes secondary or transparent to the depth of being that lies behind it.

Both Scott and Scharlemann claim that even the cultural vacuity of postmodernist "anti-literature" and "anti-art" can be understood in terms of what Tillich called the "sacred void" that clears a way for an apprehension of the ultimate. According to Scharlemann, the radical sacrifice of natural objects in postexpressionism may produce a "reflexivity of style" in which the danger of representationalism (where objects become opaque to symbolic significance) is exposed by ironic representation (for example, the can of soup in a Warhol painting). Even here, argues Scharlemann, a Tillichian analysis can discover religious meaning if such art communicates a protest against the loss of the depth of meaning in being.

Tillich's translation of Christian concepts into ontological categories seemed to many to offer a universal theology capable of breaching the boundaries separating the world religions. It is interesting, however, that none of the three authors who explore this issue come to that conclusion.

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Rabbi Alfred Friedlander finds in Tillich's resistance to Nazi anti-Semitism, his transcendent monotheism, and his rejection of the incarnation points of identity with Judaism, but he also sees in Tillich's doctrine of the fallenness of human existence a continuing point of contradiction. Joseph Kitagawa acknowledges Tillich's search for religious commonalities and the openness of his doctrine of the "latent church," but he denies that a real dialogue between East and West is possible, because the categories of Western culture, even the universality of Tillich's ontology, find no real correlation in Eastern thought. Regarding Tillich's relation to contemporary cult movements, Jack Boozer believes that while Tillich might applaud their search for absolutes, he would certainly criticize as demonic their confessional absolutism.

The last five chapters of this collection focus specifically on Tillich's systematic theology in ways that disclose considerable disagreement over its original meaning. The philosopher, John Smith, finds in Tillich's theory of symbols and his definition of faith as "being grasped" significant contributions to discussion of the relation of faith and knowledge. For Smith, Tillich represents a Kantian approach to religious knowledge in so far as for him revelation is neither a product of nor discontinuous with finite reason. It is reason drawn beyond the limits of its own resources by that which transcends reason. On the other hand, the Roman Catholic theologian Thomas O'Meara, far from associating Tillich with critical philosophy, sees in his use of the analogia entis and other natural theological categories a Thomistic emphasis. O'Meara declares that Tillich was in fact "guilty" of Barth's charge that he "intermingle [s] the human and the divine" but insists it was precisely that element which constituted the indispensable "Catholic substance" of his thought.

David Tracy and John Powell Clayton examine the method and structure of Tillich's theology, and they, too, arrive at surprisingly different conclusions. Tracy attempts to associate Tillich with the subjective hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, arguing that Tillich's method allows the present situation to reshape the content of the theological tradition and presents only a "partial order" that is always open to the new and unexpected. In contrast to Tracy, Clayton emphasizes the structural inadequacies of Tillich's system, which, he argues, is rather like a sculptor's rigid armature upon which Tillich, like Rodin, hung "parts" taken from other works. Tracy, it seems to me, fails to recognize Tillich's consistent warnings against any dissolution of the polarity of self and world, of subjectivity and objectivity, and neglects as well the architectonic and even predictable nature of Tillich's method and system. Clayton, on the other hand, misses its vitality and logical coherence. The fact is that, while many of the major concepts in Tillich's Systematic Theology (such as "theonomy," "kairos," God as the "Ground of Being") can be found in his early writings,

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just as many come from the system itself or from smaller parallel works (for example, Love, Power and Justice and The Dynamics of Faith).

Langdon Gilkey provides the most unusual interpretation of Tillich by arguing for the centrality of Christology in his theology. Gilkey correctly notes the connection Tillich makes between the New Being in Jesus as the Christ and the ontological "Courage to Be" (the first the redemptive, the second the sustaining power of God or "Being Itself"), but then he goes on to claim that Tillich's whole system is the product of his soteriology of "New Being in Jesus as the Christ." To call attention to the centrality of the New Being in Tillich's thought is an important contribution. It clarifies the structure of the system neglected by Tracy and it provides a sense of its coherence missing in Clayton's analysis. But it is finally not possible to see in Tillich a Barth-like christocentricity. To say that the New Being "in Jesus as the Christ" or that "christology" is central for Tillich's system as a whole implies a closer identity between the man Jesus and the universal power of the New Being than either Tillich or Gilkey's own analysis of him really allows.

This problem of interpretation not withstanding, Gilkey's discussion of Tillich's christology offers astute and helpful insights (as his distinction between "historical" and "ontological" paradox in Tillich). Moreover, in the concluding chapter of this volume, he projects particular points of Tillich's thought into the future of theology where he believes his vision of the sustaining and unifying power of being may speak a healing word to the increasing fragmentation of personal and intellectual life. In this way, Gilkey's contribution reflects the intention of this collection of important essays.

ALEXANDER J. McKELWAY

Davidson College
Davidson, North Carolina