Word: tillich
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Tillich Sees Spiritual Realms...
Whereas professors like Morton White and Buttrick emphasize the difference between teaching religion and teaching about it, Paul Tillich, University Professor, sees an essential spiritual unity in all attempts at scholarship. In a disquisition last November to the Overseers on "Religion in the Intellectual Life of the University" Tillich concluded: "in many realms of the scholarly work of a university the religious dimension is revealed, independent of a concrete religious tradition." For Tillich, "the religious question is the queston of human existence generally...
...Tillich, then, a University must by its very nature transcend mere secular considerations; it is an institution dedicated to matters of ultimate concern. For teachers with less of the Tillichian "vision," however, the questions of religion in education appear more controversial, for they are bound to earthly considerations of sect and creed...
...vague that, like certain very rare gases, it becomes highly enigmatic to say that He is "there" at all. Such a being certainly seems incapable of having much more of an effect on human life than the normal inhalation of argon. Most of these notions come close enough to Tillich's to be intellectually "shoe," however, and their conformity to the negative doctrines of some of the authorized Judaeo-Christian mystics gives them a certain eccentrically orthodox sanction that allows the West's religious tradition to appear superficially unbroken...
Like Iscariot, we are prostrated by a weight too oppressive for us to bear, and it is anything but an accident that, as Niebuhr and Tillich and Dawson have shown us, religious language provides the most adequate metaphors for conveying our thoughts and feelings on this subject. But it is of the first importance to remember what the distinguished theologians themselves sometimes forget, that these are only metaphors. Only religious discourse has evolved expressions powerful enough to convey how pressing political concerns have become today because the latter alone today speaks meaningfully of what once the former alone could speak...