Religion: Between Mountain & Plain

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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."