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)."