Word: tillich
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...undergoing an "ever-broadening understanding" in the modern religious community. In deciding unanimously that unorthodox believers qualify as conscientious objectors under the Selective Service Act, the court dealt at length with the nature of a Supreme Being, and produced a ruling studded with references to the Vatican Council, Paul Tillich's Systematic Theology, and Anglican Bishop John Robinson's Honest...
...test of Supreme-Being belief (the court specifically avoided the question of whether an atheist could qualify as a conscientious objector). Associate Justice Tom Clark argued for the court that Congress did not intend the act to apply only to orthodox members of organized churches. He cited Protestant Theologian Tillich, "whose views the Government concedes would come within the statute." Tillich firmly rejects the God of traditional theism in favor of a "God above God" who is the "ground of all being" and the source of man's "ultimate concern." Bishop Robinson likewise rejects the traditional notion...
Effective authority, Tillich said, needs power, and the conflict of authority with authority leads, inevitably, to the use of force. "But when is coercion a just expression of power, when an unjust one?" Old criteria-the medieval concept of the just war, for example-no longer serve in an age of possible atomic conflagration, and the many laws that apply to men can only obliquely serve as guides to the proper conduct of nations...
These problems led Tillich to conclude that there is a definite limit to hope for peace on earth as prescribed by Pope John. Men must "distinguish between genuine hope and Utopian expectations." Genuine hope is found in such factors as the atomic threat that has imposed on mankind a common destiny, the conquest of space that makes neighbors of distant nations, international cooperation in science and medicine...
...this limited cooperation may emerge what Tillich called "communal eros"-the love of men for other nations. But, he said, "there is no hope for a final stage of history in which peace and justice rule. History is not fulfilled at its empirical end; but history is fulfilled in the great moment in which something new is created, in which the Kingdom of God breaks into history conquering destructive structures of existence. This means that we cannot hope for a final stage of justice and peace within history; but we can hope for partial victories over the forces of evil...