Retrieving the Radical Tillich

His Legacy and Contemporary Importance

Russell Re Manning, Russell Re Manning, Russell Re Manning

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137373830
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Filosofía de la religión

Paul Tillich is best known today as a theologian of mediation. Many have come to view him as an out-of-date thinker a safe exemplar of a mid-twentieth-century theological liberalism. The way he has come to be viewed contrasts sharply with the current theological landscape one dominated by the notion of radicality. In this collection, Russell Re Manning breaks with the widespread opinion of Tillich as 'safe' and dated. Retrieving the Radical Tillich depicts the thinker as a radical theologian, strongly marked but never fully determined by the urgent critical demands of his time. From the crisis of a German cultural and religious life after the First World War, to the new realities of religious pluralism, Tillich's theological responses were always profoundly ambivalent, impure and disruptive, asserts Re Manning. The Tillich that is outlined and analyzed by this collection is never merely correlative. Far from the dominant image of the theologian as a liberal accommodationist, Re Manning reintroduces the troubled and troubling figure of the radical Tillich.

Part I

Tillich’s Radical Legacy

Chapter 1

A Homage to Paulus

Thomas J. J. Altizer

Speaking as one who was initiated into faith by reading Paul Tillich, and who had many serious theological dialogues with him in his later life, I am called to pay homage to him as I have not before, and I do so with the conviction that it was Tillich who made radical theology possible in the twentieth century. Of course, Tillich himself was profoundly affected by Schelling’s radical theology, and it was Schelling who initiated Tillich into a radical understanding of both Being and the Nothing, including an integral relation between Being and the Nothing—making possible a history of Being itself, as recorded in the three differing editions of the Ages of the World. Tillich’s primal work can be understood as a renewal and reconstitution of Schelling’s philosophical theology for the late modern world, but it simultaneously demanded a deep confrontation with the radical imagination and the radical politics of that world—making Tillich unique as the genuine theologian of culture.

While Tillich alienated many because of his own alienation from the Church, this made possible his own theology—the most nonecclesiastical theology of his world—and, with the exception of the theology of the Catholic von Balthasar, the only theology then grounded in the imagination itself. That in itself is a radical expression of theology; but unlike von Balthasar and the Catholic world, Tillich employed a radical philosophical ground, and this attracted many Catholics, and did so in the context of Tillich’s commitment to the integration of the Protestant principle and Catholic substance. This even had an impact upon the Second Vatican Council, and just as there are Catholic Tillichians, many Protestants became open to Catholicism through Tillich, whose own theology is the most ecumenical theology of our world.

Above all, Tillich is committed to an integration of ontological thinking and the imagination, committed to a correlation of the being-itself that he knows as God with the deeper art and poetry of his world, so that it is that art and poetry that is the deepest witness to God, and one that must be shielded from every apologetic or ecclesiastical judgment. Barth and Tillich were united in their opposition to apologetics, even if they were absolutely opposed on every other theological issue, and if theirs was the deepest theological conflict of the twentieth century, it was one that truly energized theology itself. Indeed, Tillich’s pervasive influence is truly remarkable, and while Protestant evangelicals and conservative Catholics could ignore him, no one else could—not even militant secularists.

An Atheistic Theologian

I remember my own teacher, Joachim Wach, urging Anglicanism upon Tillich, but Tillich replied that he missed the Protestant principle in Anglicanism. I suspect he would have missed it in any Protestant church, for what he understands as the Protestant principle is an expression of a radical chasm between the creature and the Creator that only becomes manifest in a uniquely modern world. While mystics such as Boehme and his circle can know that chasm, this makes possible a uniquely modern mysticism, one that deeply affected Tillich, but is nonetheless alien to all other expressions of mysticism, just as Tillich is alienated from all common expressions of religion. While it was Barth who first created an atheistic theology, knowing the established God of Christendom as being wholly illusory, Tillich, too, is an atheistic theologian by this criterion.

This was a decisive source of his own enormous theological impact. While it is true that classical theism disappears in both Barth and Tillich, it does so more dramatically in Tillich and, as opposed to Barth, here virtually everyone can understand it, and Tillich became widely known as the first atheistic theologian. Ironically, this drew even more attention to him and, despite his thick German accent, Tillich was the most homiletic of all theologians—the one whose voice had the greatest impact, and could widely be heard as an atheistic and holy voice at once.

Tillich is also truly distinctive as a theologian of the history of religions; perhaps his deepest academic engagement was in the famous Tillich-Eliade seminar on theology and the history of religions at the University of Chicago. I participated in that seminar for a year and, always at its conclusion, the three of us would meet for drinks and conversation at Eliade’s apartment, and it was there that I had my deepest theological encounters with Tillich. He was then not only wholly open but also wholly engaged, again and again declaring that the real Tillich is the radical Tillich, and actualizing that judgment in his own theological positions, which are more radical in his speech than in his writing. The truth is that Tillich could speak more effectively—far more effectively—than he could write, the only exception being his early writing, which was rewritten by James Luther Adams. Of course, his later writing was rewritten by many editors, and his must be the most edited of all theological writing; this makes it all the more difficult to hear the real Tillich, whom perhaps we can best hear by respeaking Tillich in our own voice.

Tillich was a man of great passion, here reminding one of Augustine, whose Confessions is perhaps the greatest and certainly the most passionate of all theological works. While Tillich wrote nothing comparable to this, his own theology is deeply passionate, and perhaps most so in its all too minimal evocations of God. Absence can be a passionate absence and this is true of the absence or veiling of Tillich’s God: a God at once absolutely essential and absolutely peripheral in Tillich’s theology and a God absolutely namable and absolutely unnamable at once. Here, modern mysticism is a decisive source, and here, too, the Protestant principle is crucial, for it embodies an absolute critique of everything whatsoever that is total or religious.

Tillich was deeply grounded in Luther, although alienated from Lutheran churches, and he deeply knew the early and radical Luther—that revolutionary Luther who had a greater effect upon the world than any other theologian and who created a truly new Christianity. Tillich, too, was committed to a new Christianity, and a truly new Christianity, not one that would be a return to primitive Christianity, but rather a genuinely new Christianity. This is perhaps the point at which Tillich had the greatest theological impact and innumerable Christians became committed to this goal: here lies Tillich’s greatest legacy, even if it is just here that Tillich is now most ignored. Any genuine homage to Tillich must renew this legacy—a renewal that could occur by way of a renewal of Tillich’s theology—but such a renewal could only be a Kierkegaardian repetition and thus not a return, but a radical movement into the future.

Blake is the most revolutionary of all Christian visionaries, and while I was never able to lead Tillich to Blake—he was much too German for that—Blake does embody a great deal to which Tillich was committed. Blake was the first visionary to enact the death of God, in his first epic, America, engraved in 1793, and Blake enacted our most total and comprehensive vision of Satan, even in his late epics unveiling Satan as the Creator. Yet Blake is as far as it is possible to be from Gnosticism, enacting the totality of flesh and the body as has no other visionary, and calling for a total Energy that is ecstasy itself. Thus, Blake can be a decisive way into Tillich, giving concrete imagery to what Tillich seemingly only knew abstractly, thereby immensely strengthening Tillich’s theology.

So, too, Tillich’s theology can be strengthened by being associated with the mystical theology of Simone Weil, a mystical theology that can be understood as an atheistic theology, as it is by Susan Anima Taubes, who knew the Tillichs, and who committed suicide near their home in East Hampton. And the greatest theological challenge to Tillich came from her husband, Jacob Taubes, in an article on Tillich, published in The Journal of Religion in January 1954.¹ Taubes identifies Tillich as a Dionysian theologian, and Dionysian in the late Nietzschean sense, which Taubes identifies as an ecstatic naturalism, an existential intensity of existence in the immediate moment, which Tillich calls “ultimate concern.”

While many secularists had long recognized Tillich as a theological ally, just as many theologians had assaulted him as an atheist, it was not until this article of Taubes that this position was articulated with real power, and, all too gradually, it had great impact. Yet, ironically, this enhanced Tillich’s theological power, making possible a genuinely theological atheism—one that Tillich could personally, but not publicly, accept—but it ushered in a new theological world, a world to which Tillich was profoundly committed. Now a ri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction   The Real Tillich Is the Radical Tillich
• Part I   Tillich’s Radical Legacy
• Part II   Tillich and Contemporary Radical Theologies
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index