Boundaries of Belief
The Protestant Era.
by Paul Tillich.
Translated with a concluding essay by James Luther Adams. University of
Chicago Press. 323 pp. $4.00.
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The Protestant Era, by Paul Tillich | commentary 1/8/18, 2'29 PM
“border situation”—between the infinite and the finite, the conditioned and
the unconditional, faith and anxiety—into the essence of the human
condition, and the locus of the religious declaration.
The religious declaration has two main clauses. The first proclaims the
permanent crisis which lends its name to “crisis theology.” This refers
ultimately to man’s separation from God and his perpetual judgment under
God; the crisis in mankind is an eternal one that results from man’s being a
spiritual animal Who exists tensely on that borderline which is the human
line.
The second clause proclaims the “Protestant principle,” which in turn consists
of the “religious obligation” and the “religious reservation.” The religious
obligation is to work God’s will on earth, to establish justice and love in
economic and social relations (Tillich is a devout socialist), and to hasten the
day of messianic redemption. The religious reservation is to protest against
any absolute claim to truth made in the name of a relative, historical reality—
whether that reality be a totalitarian state, a religious institution, a dogmatic
creed, or a social movement—and it is thus possible to be loyal to the
Protestant principle without belonging to a Protestant, or any other church.
There is an inevitable trend in human communities toward idolatry—the
worship of certain institutions and beliefs as having absolute and
unquestionable validity, as being at long last “the final word.” What the
Protestant principle asserts is that the only absolute truth is this: man can
never attain absolute truth—“the final word” is always with God and it comes
as a judgment upon man. The Protestant era, Tillich says, is coming to an end
with a thunderclap of moral and social collapse; but whatever the religious
forms that the future will throw up, they too will be subordinate to the
Protestant principle.
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The Protestant Era, by Paul Tillich | commentary 1/8/18, 2'29 PM
Tillich knows that at present organized religion is, on the whole, a pretty
dreary affair, and as a religious radical he is not so much concerned with
crying woe as with reorganizing society, and turning up a soil into which
religious institutions will be able to sink their roots. But he also believes that
there is today a vast, unrecognized religious impulse—unrecognized because
it operates outside the churches and because it often considers itself non-
religious or even anti-religious. To meet the challenge of this, Tillich daringly
extends Luther’s doctrine of “justification through faith,” and discovers the
possibility of discerning God “at the very moment when all known assertions
about ‘God’ have lost their power.”
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The Protestant Era, by Paul Tillich | commentary 1/8/18, 2'29 PM
This process of “justifying through faith” those who most vehemently reject
faith and justification has something of the air of a debater’s trick. But it is, I
think, more than that; and we seem implicitly to concede its relevance when
the term “religious” is applied to such “unbelieving” writers as D. H.
Lawrence or James Joyce. Somehow it seems appropriate.
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It is still too early to estimate the sum total of Tillich’s contribution to modern
thought. His work will certainly excite criticism for many years to come, and
in some respects he has left himself vulnerable. (His use of Marxist concepts
tends to be stiff, and his references to scientific method are arguable.) It is
possible, too, that the strident intellectualism of his religious thought is only
the last gasp of religious futility; one is tempted to say with Hobbes that “It is
with the mysteries of our religion, as with wholesome pills for the sick, which
swallowed whole have the virtue to cure, but chewed are for the most part
cast up again without effect.”
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