Religion: The Mind & the Heart

One of the surprises of the 20th century has been the renaissance of Protestant theology. Earth, Brunner, Baillie, Bultmann, Cullmann & Co. have kept things lively and dialectical in Europe; in the U.S., Reinhold Niebuhr has made theology exciting. And since World War II. Americans have been increasingly aware of another Protestant theologian: German-born Paul Tillich, University Professor* at Harvard, where he is now beginning his first year, after more than 20 at Manhattan’s Union Theological Seminary.

Professor Tillich has published a skillful splicing of theology and depth psychology called The Courage to Be. But his lifework is a formidable trilogy of which only the first volume has appeared, called Systematic Theology. Tillich’s systematic theology is a new attempt at the classic theological enterprise—correlating the Biblical revelation of God and the philosophical reasoning of man. For sometimes there seems to be an unbridgeable gulf between those who seek God in revelation and those who seek Him through reason. Mathematician Blaise Pascal carried in the lining of his coat a record of his own mystical experience that delineates the difference: “FIRE . . . The God of Abra ham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers . . .” In a new book, Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality (University of Chicago; $2.25), Tillich walks around the problem and looks at it.

Being & Reality. The root of every philosophy, says Tillich, is what philosophers call the ontological question: What is “being,” what is real, what is “ultimate reality beyond everything that seems to be real”? Man is moved to make the search for ultimate reality, says Tillich, because “we stand between being and nonbeing and long for a form of being that prevails against nonbeing in ourselves and in our world.” This is merely technical language for the doubt and fear men feel when they try to think about life, death and the human condition. Human reason cannot conceive of nothingness, yet men fear it and want to be reassured.

This doubt, and man’s attempt to think his way out of it, is in a sense unBiblical, for both the Old and the New Testaments present God as a living confrontation of man—not as an idea. Yet Theologian Tillich reasserts the fact that man’s two approaches to the divine—Biblical faith and philosophical reflection—are compatible. To support this view, Tillich asks the reader to recognize that faith is not pure belief: a man may be committed, but his doubt is still there. “Faith is the continuous tension between itself and the doubt within itself . . . Faith says ‘Yes’ in spite of the anxiety of ‘No.’ ”

Black & White. In his own way, says Tillich, the philosopher is in a similar predicament. His function is to question, to doubt. But in order to doubt, he must first know something else, e.g., he cannot question whether the night is black unless he first knows what white looks like. Thus going back step by step, the philosopher, too, must arrive at some form of faith. In other words, the religious believer’s function is to believe in spite of doubt; it is the skeptical philosopher’s function to doubt in spite of faith. That is where, in Tillich’s view, “ontology and Biblical religion find each other.”

Concludes Tillich, “Against Pascal I say: The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the God of the philosophers is the same God. He is a person and the negation of himself as a person. Faith comprises both itself and the doubt of itself . . . To live serenely and courageously in these tensions and to discover finally their ultimate unity in the depths of our own souls and in the depth of the divine life is the task and the dignity of human thought.”

*Harvard’s “University Professors” are distinguished scholars commissioned to work “on the frontiers of knowledge” without limitation to any one school or department. Tillich both lectures in the Divinity School and gives a general course, Religion and Culture.