Word: protestantize
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Schleiermacher's Thesis. Starting off from this premise, Tillich began to build a new synthesis of Protestantism. The essence of Protestantism, he taught, need not be fixed in sacraments, ecclesiastical authority, or even in Protestant churches themselves. ("Protestantism may live in the organized Protestant churches. But it is not bound to them.") Churches and sacraments have meaning only because of what they symbolize. Thus, their outward forms may and in fact must constantly change. As an earlier German thinker Friedrich Schleiermacher put it, "The Reformation must continue...
What does not change, said Tillich, is "the Protestant principle," a prophetic power to call men to an awareness of God's infinite nature and their own limitations. Tillich held that the Protestant principle has existed since the dawn of Christianity, and must exist because it is necessary to...
To Tillich, the quarreling liberal and orthodox theologies are merely different aspects of the Protestant principle. Although the Protestant principle gave liberals "the right and the good conscience" to criticize the Bible scientifically, it also led the orthodox to look at the Bible as "Holy Scripture, namely as the original...
...impressive system. Like Aquinas, Tillich has been weaving his religious thought into a broad pattern, but his is looser and more adjustable. As he explains it, "Catholicism deals with these things from the point of view of having the entire truth and the perfect form of life. Protestantism is always learning, without the claim of being itself the Kingdom...
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...