The Protestant Era by Paul Tillich

The Protestant Era was published by The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois in 1948. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock< The Protestant Era was published by The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois in 1948. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock<

Chapter 4: Religion and Secular Culture …

So the gap between religion and culture is filled: religion is more than a system of special symbols, rites, and emotions, directed toward a highest being; religion is ultimate concern; it is the state of being grasped by something unconditional, holy, absolute. As such it gives meaning, seriousness, and depth to all culture and creates out of the cultural material a religious culture of its own. The contrast between religion and culture is reduced to the duality of religious and secular culture with innumerable transitions between them. The revolutionary movements, for instance, represent an ultimate concern, a religious principle, hidden but effective within them. The Lutheran churches, for example, represent a special cultural period in which an ultimate concern, a religious principle, has embodied itself manifestly and directly. Both are religious and both are cultural at the same time. Why, then, the difference? The answer can only be that the Kingdom of God has not yet come, that God is not yet all in all, whatever this “not yet” may mean. Asked what the proof is for the fall of the world, I like to answer: religion itself, namely, a religious culture beside a secular culture, a temple beside a town hall, a Lord’s Supper beside a daily supper, prayer beside work, meditation beside research, caritas beside eros. But although this duality can never be overcome in time, space, and history, it makes a difference whether the duality is deepened into a bridgeless gap, as in periods in which autonomy and heteronomy fight with each other, or whether the duality is recognized as something which should not be and which is overcome fragmentarily by anticipation, so to speak, in a theonomous period. The kairos which we believed to be at hand was the coming of a new theonomous age, conquering the destructive gap between religion and secular culture.

But history took another path, and the question of religion and culture cannot be answered simply in those terms. A new element has come into the picture, the experience of the “end.” Something of it appeared after the first World War; but we did not feel it in its horrible depth and its incredible thoroughness. We looked at the beginning of the new more than at the end of the old. We did not realize the price that mankind has to pay for the coming of a new theonomy; we still believed in transitions without catastrophes. We did not see the possibility of final catastrophes as the true prophets, the prophets of doom, announced them. Therefore, our theonomous interpretation of history had a slight tinge of romanticism, though it tried to avoid any kind of utopianism. This has come to an end because the end itself has appeared like a flash of lightning before our eyes; and not only among the ruins of central and eastern Europe but also within the abundance of this country has it been seen. While after the first World War the mood of a new beginning prevailed, after the second World War a mood of the end prevails. A present theology of culture is, above all, a theology of the end of culture, not in general terms but in a concrete analysis of the inner void of most of our cultural expressions. Little is left in our present civilization which does not indicate to a sensitive mind the presence of this vacuum, this lack of ultimacy and substantial power in language and education, in politics and philosophy, in the development of personalities, and in the life of communities. Who of us has never been shocked by this void when he has used traditional or untraditional secular or religious language to make himself understandable and has not succeeded and has then made a vow of silence to himself, only to break it a few hours later? This is symbolic of our whole civilization. Often one gets the impression that only those cultural creations have greatness in which the experience of the void is expressed; for it can be expressed powerfully only on the basis of a foundation which is deeper than culture, which is ultimate concern, even if it accepts the void, even in respect to religious culture. Where this happens, the vacuum of disintegration can become a vacuum out of which creation is possible, a “sacred void,” so to speak, which brings a quality of waiting, of “not yet,” of a being broken from above, into all our cultural creativity. It is not an empty criticism, however radical and justified such criticism may be. It is not an indulgence in paradoxes that prevents the coming-down to concreteness. It is not cynical detachment, with its ultimate spiritual dishonesty. It is simple cultural work out of, and qualified by, the experience of the sacred void. This is the way-perhaps the only way- in which our time can reach a theonomous union between religion and culture.

…

Personality is the most emphasized ideal of modern religious and secular humanism. Personality is considered as the most necessary symbol for God. God is even described as the person in whom all human perfections are perfectly embodied. In this case the disintegration of a symbol has occurred, and the result has been its large-scale removal. In classical theology, “person” was used only for the three principles in the divine life, not for God himself; and “personality” was not used at all in this connection. The idea of God in classical theology united personal with supra-personal traits. God was less and more than personal, as well as personal; he was the unity of all potentialities. In this sense personal symbolism could be applied to him on the basis of man’s real existence, which unites prepersonal and postpersonal elements with personality. In the degree to which first Protestantism, then humanism, neglected the nonpersonal elements in man-his vital and mystical side-for the sake of consciousness, God became one person alongside others. He ceased to be the supporting and transcending center of every personal life. But as such he was superfluous, one more autonomous personality beside the others, although exceeding them in power and value. The persons were left alone, centered in themselves and very soon unable to stand this situation of monadic loneliness. The symbol and, along with it, the reality from which it was taken disintegrated in mutual interdependence. When God became a person, man’s personality was driven into neurotic disintegration.

In classical theology God is, first of all, Being as such. Deus est esse. Being in this sense is not the most abstract category, as a mistaken nominalism asserts; it is the power of Being in everything that is, in everything that participates in Being. So long as this is the basic statement about God, we are in a theonomous situation because it implies that every finite reality is rooted in the creative ground, in Being itself. Therefore, it is possible to find the traces of the ultimate in everything, and the scientific approach to Being is an approach to that which concerns us unconditionally. When Being lost its symbolic power under the influence of nominalism and when, more definitely in the second half of the Renaissance, Being became the object for a subject, to be calculated and controlled, God ceased to be Being itself and Being ceased to be divine. If today you say that God is Being, it sounds almost blasphemous. The consequence of this whole development was that science observed the relation of all beings to one another and the calculable rules of their behavior, but that it lost Being itself, its unity, its power, its meaning. Science had destroyed the unity of reality before it learned to split up any given structure of reality. Science openly confesses that it no longer has anything to do with Being, but only with equations. When Being as a symbol was lost, Being itself was lost. If it is denied that Deus est esse, Deus as well as esse is given up.

If God is called ipsum esse, Being itself, he can also, and must, be called ipsum verum, the true itself. But if God is a being beside others which may or may not exist, or a person beside others whom we may or may not discover, a statement like Deus est veritas, “God is truth,” has no meaning. There is perhaps no point in the history of human thought at which the transition from theonomy to a cleavage between autonomous culture and heteronomous religion is more obvious and more clearly discussed than in this question. In a recent paper about the two types of philosophy of religion, I have tried to show how the first slight break in theonomous thinking occurred when Thomas Aquinas interpreted the Augustinian-Franciscan principle that God is truth (and, therefore, immediately certain more than anything else, including myself) in Aristotelian terms and said that God is immediately certain for himself but not for us.( “The Two Types of Philosophy of Religion,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review, I, No. 4 (May, 1946), Editor.)

We need mediating discourse and ecclesiastical authority to reach him. This gap was deepened by Duns Scotus and made insuperable by the nominalists who in this, as in many other respects, opened the way toward a secular culture. If the statement that God is the true has itself lost its symbolic power, two consequences follow. The first one is that there is no truth about God in terms of the prius of all other truth, that the truth about God is secondary, and this necessarily leads to a secular world without God. The second consequence is that within this secular world the idea of truth is reduced to the realm of observable and, if possible, calculable relations, while the truth about existence itself and its meaning for us is left to emotions and opinions, a situation most useful for the rise and victory of uncontrolled authorities. Being and truth are lost if they cannot be applied to God any more, and God is lost if Being is mere objectivity and truth mere subjectivity. The two-edged character of any symbol used for God is manifest even in concepts like “being” and “truth” which, if applied to God, unite a symbolic and a nonsymbolic element.

from http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=380&C=92