Religion: Between Mountain & Plain

The world of 20th century Protestantism is divided by a vast, sloping, natural barrier, more oppressive in its way than the well-posted boundary lines of denominations. At one extreme, pressed against the plain, are the disciples of the “liberal” theology, men suspicious of absolutes and friendly to change; their energies are thrown into the struggle for a better world and they like the Sermon on the Mount best when it is translated into free soup kitchens or psychiatric counseling. High on the mountain above them are their theological archenemies, the “orthodox” and the “neo-orthodox”; clustered around their patriarch, Swiss Theologian Karl Earth, they turn their faces firmly upward and preach the Word in their private language; for them the world is hopelessly evil and Christian social reformers hopelessly naive; not men’s actions but belief in God’s Word can bring salvation.

Between the mountain and the plain there is a brisk two-way traffic in theologians. Many of them make their camp at some convenient halfway point (although in these trying times a mountain residence is considered more comfortable) —and there are some commuters. But few have dared attempt to bring the mountain and the plain together in a single theological system. Of these, the man who has made the most systematic effort—and, along with Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, the most brilliant—is a 66-year-old professor at Manhattan’s Union Theological Seminary, Dr. Paul Tillich. In The Theology of Paul Tillich (Macmillan; $5.50), edited by Professors Charles W. Kegley and Robert W. Bretall, a group of well-known philosophers and theologians*has given detailed and awed recognition of Tillich’s success.

Barth’s Finger. “I was thinking about infinity,” says Paul Tillich, “at the age of eight.” Until his 305 Tillich performed his thinking along orthodox and unspectacular lines, reflecting his strict Lutheran background in eastern Germany. After four years as a German army chaplain in World War 1, he came home to find his country in the midst of a deep revolution, cultural as well as political. The revolutionary trends were socialist and secular. To his dismay, young Pastor Tillich found that German Lutheranism made little attempt to understand these trends or to interpret them in a religious framework.

Tillich—by then a philosophy professor at the University of Berlin—helped start a short-lived Christian socialist movement: an attempt at a “reunion of religion and secular culture.” The effort failed, but in planning it Tillich laid the cornerstone of his later philosophy: “Religion is the substance of culture, and culture the form of religion.”

Other good Christians, who thought on similar lines about culture and religion, succeeded only in confusing the two. Tillich made no such mistake. He saw Theologian Earth’s “neo-orthodoxy” as “a finger warning against becoming completely ‘horizontal’ (i.e., this-worldly).”

Tillich adapted Earth’s emphasis on the Bible and personal salvation, but he could not stomach the Barthian conviction that it is impossible to project the Word of God into the context of modern culture. Neither nature nor civilization is wholly evil, Tillich protested. On the contrary, he wrote, “God reveals himself not only in history but also through history as a whole.” His conclusion: without losing his image of Christ as Savior, the Christian must adjust the externals of his faith, his philosophy and culture to the circumstances of the time. The Protestant religions, for example, resulted from the changing circumstances of the 15th and 16th centuries, which made necessary a new formal expression of Christianity.

Schleiermacher’s Thesis. Starting off from this premise, Tillich began to build a new synthesis of Protestantism. The essence of Protestantism, he taught, need not be fixed in sacraments, ecclesiastical authority, or even in Protestant churches themselves. (“Protestantism may live in the organized Protestant churches. But it is not bound to them.”) Churches and sacraments have meaning only because of what they symbolize. Thus, their outward forms may and in fact must constantly change. As an earlier German thinker Friedrich Schleiermacher put it, “The Reformation must continue.”

What does not change, said Tillich, is “the Protestant principle,” a prophetic power to call men to an awareness of God’s infinite nature and their own limitations. Tillich held that the Protestant principle has existed since the dawn of Christianity, and must exist because it is necessary to Christianity. It is the “protesting” voice of the prophet outside the temple calling the people back to God and away from the formalism and sophistries of the priest.

To Tillich, the quarreling liberal and orthodox theologies are merely different aspects of the Protestant principle. Although the Protestant principle gave liberals “the right and the good conscience” to criticize the Bible scientifically, it also led the orthodox to look at the Bible as “Holy Scripture, namely as the original document of the event which is called ‘Jesus the Christ’ . . . The Protestant principle made the liberals realize “that Christianity, as well as every Christian, is involved in the universal structures and changes of human life”; it made the orthodox proclaim “that man in his very existence is estranged from God, that a distorted humanity is our heritage.”

Aquinas’ House. Around the Protestant principle Tillich has constructed one of the most impressive Protestant theological systems since the time of the reformers. Critics compare him with St. Thomas Aquinas, who in the isth century integrated Catholic thought so that theology, philosophy and art are coordinated in one impressive system. Like Aquinas, Tillich has been weaving his religious thought into a broad pattern, but his is looser and more adjustable. As he explains it, “Catholicism deals with these things from the point of view of having the entire truth and the perfect form of life. Protestantism is always learning, without the claim of being itself the Kingdom of God.”

Tillich resents the attempt of the Catholic philosophers to prove the existence of God by rational means. “It is blasphemy,” he says, “to affirm the existence of God. The answer cannot come out of the question.” His reasoning: since God is “The Unconditional,” and utterly outside human experience, it is impossible to describe Him or to attempt proofs of His existence in limited human terms. Along with Theologian Earth, Tillich has rejected Aquinas’ “two-story house” of supranatural and natural theology (“There is no natural theology”). His substitute is a roomy one-story structure open at all times to the sky. Within it God can be known only through grace—”by being grasped in the totality of our being by the ground of our being.” The experience of grace can be realized in many ways, e.g., by listening to a sermon, by looking at a picture. It will come whenever the mind is “open” to it.* That is why to reach souls religion must spread its message outside the churches as well as within.

Tillich sees Catholicism and Protestantism almost as twins engaged in a perpetual sibling rivalry. The “Catholic substance” is good in that it preserves the tradition of Christianity and its sacramental message. But in Catholicism the authority of the church interferes with individual responsibility to God, and the prophetic power is perverted in the hands of an established priesthood. It is the “Protestant spirit” which must bring back the direct connection between God and the individual.

For the Homeless. In 1933, when the Nazis deprived Tillich of his job at the University of Frankfurt, Reinhold Niebuhr asked him to join the faculty of Union Seminary. He has taught and preached there ever since. Both men deal in questions of philosophy and theology, but where Niebuhr is Protestantism’s No. 1 theologian in the U.S., Tillich can be called its No. 1 philosopher.

In The Theology of Paul Tillich, his fellow scholars have written down a sound if technical analysis of Tillich’s broad and difficult religious philosophy. Oberlin’s Professor Walter Marshall Horton writes: “In its main lines it is now fixed . . . Before it perishes, it will have furnished a dwelling place for multitudes of homeless modern minds, and it will have contributed to the reform of the modern Church and the reintegration of modern culture.”

*Including Niebuhr, Philosophers John Herman Randall Jr. and Theodore M. Greene, Theologians James L. Adams, Nels F. S. Ferre. *This is really a restatement of Luther’s “justification by faith alone,” a doctrine Tillich feels most Protestants no longer understand.