From a seminar on
on at Bethel Seminary on Theology and Contemporary Culture
Introduction
In highlighting
sharply distinctive points of reference, McClendon, in Witness:
Systematic Theology, Vol 3, draws out Paul Tillich, Julian Hartt, and John
Howard Yoder in broadly typological terms, with Tillich representing the
cultural point of reference, Hart, the theological, and Yoder the
ethical/political. While his selection is rooted in a typological
motivation, he has chosen well, given Tillich’s substantive work on the
important role of cultural analysis in the shaping of theological
investigation, Hart’s on the depth of his theological rooting in the
centralities of the Great Tradition of Christian orthodoxy, and Yoder’s
emphasis on the non-violent politics of Jesus of Nazareth, sifted through a
sharply-focused ethical lens. Moreover, his discussion of these modes of
Christianity is “thicker” than the very broad-based typological presentation of
H. R. Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture.
Typology is useful in
identifying distinctive points of (in this case, theological) reference, which,
however, can mask the ways in which the representative theologians speak to the
concerns of the others in the given model. Thus, Tillich also embraces
the theological significance of the centrality of the risen Christ, and clearly
addresses ethics, while Hart—as McClendon notes—also addresses culture, rooted
in the same mid-20th-century concerns (especially existential
anxiety) that influenced the later Tillich. As McClendon also observes,
Yoder addresses culture and the orthodox Christian faith tradition, along with
his particular concern for a radical non-violent ethics that eschews just war
theory, based on his interpretation of the first century mission of Jesus of
Nazareth. There is value McClendon’s model-based approach that allows him
to establish “a three-stranded cord—which opens space for his notion of a
theological “trajectory—in which the whole is stronger than any of its
contributing parts” (p. 49), a point which neither Tillich, Hartt, or Yoder
would deny.
I focus my substantive
comments here by drawing out McClendon’s analysis of Tillich.
Specifically, McClendon identifies two major aspects of Tillich’s work: the
emphasis he places on culture in giving shape to the critical theological
issues of any given historical context through which Tillich introduces his
intriguing term, “theonomy,” and his theology of “correlation,” which many
interpret as the necessity to define the Christian faith through the prism of
pressing contemporary, commonly viewed, secular concerns and frames of
reference—not totally accurately—at the expense of a more vital appreciation
of the centralities of the Christian faith.
Caveat
As a prelude, I share
many of the critiques of Tillich issued by McClendon and Hartt. Those
criticisms are well taken of Tillich not relying sufficiently on the
inscripturated Word of God embodied in Scripture, his relative failure to
embrace the Great Tradition of Christian orthodoxy in its full Chalcedon
incarnational and Trinitarian meaning, and his unique terminology through which
he characterizes the human encounter with the holiness of God—new being,
ultimate concern, theonomy, Kairos, as well as his symbolic understanding of
God as the Unconditional (McClendon, pp. 39-40). With this concern noted,
my goal in this post is to present something of the significance of Tillich’s
“apologetic” theology of culture, with the hope that it provides a valuable perspective
on the Christ-culture relationship that evangelicals and other more traditional
orthodox Christians can draw on. In this, I am echoing Richard Lints’s
challenge that, in the case of his writing, “conversation with postmodern
theologians will stretch evangelicalism like it has never been stretched
before.” As Lints further statesin The Fabric of Theology,
“there is no guarantee that evangelicalism will not break [through the
encounter]—except for God’s faith to be faithful.” As he concludes: “for
a people whose collective memory includes the cross as well as the resurrection
of Christ, this may well be a discomfiting comfort” (p. 256). So, it may
be for evangelicals in the risky encounter with the theology of culture of Paul
Tillich.
In referencing
Tillich, I draw on Paul Tillich: Theologian on the Boundaries
(http://fortresspress.com/product/paul-tillich-theologian-boundaries),
which includes a comprehensive 23-page introduction by editor, Mark Kline
Taylor. For the purposes of this post, I highlight two short selections
that deal, respectively, with Tillich’s “theonomous” theology of culture and
his theology of correlation. The first is titled, “Religion and Secular
Culture” (pp. 119-126); the second, “The Problem of Theological Method” (pp.
126-141).
Tillich’s Notion of the Theonomous
In the first article,
Tillich introduces his concept of the “theonomous” as the spirit of God which
can break in within any historical moment, whether commonly viewed as
secular—which, when disconnected from the holy devolves into the “autonomous”
sphere—or its opposite, the formally religious, when disconnected from the
immanent and transcendent power of God, which Tillich refers to as a state of
“heteronomy.” Tillich makes a distinction between theonomy,
which refers to the potentiality of such breaking in of the
spirit of God within any given historical (as well as personal) movement or
moment, and the Kairos as “the fulfilled moment of time in
which the present and the future, the holy that is given and the holy that is
demanded [by the theonomous potentiality of a given moment] meet, and from
whose concrete tensions the new creation proceeds in which sacred import is
realized in necessary [contextual] form” (Taylor, p. 57). That is, when
the spirit of God moves from the potential to the fulfilled in any given
cultural context. This is at least what I think Tillich means.
Tillich’s theological
focus emerged amidst the breakdown of the known world order in the chaos and
violence that sprang forth in Europe in the cataclysmic events of World War I
and its 30-year aftermath, with the rise of Nazism, the economic depression of
the 1930s, WWII, the holocaust, the atomic bomb and the emergence of the Cold
War. Within this cauldron, old religious certainties broke down for Tillich and
the need for a new world order of God’s indwelling within history was called
for, in order for the power of God to reappear in a world gone fundamentally
astray, not unlike the new world order promised by Second Isaiah amidst the
Babylonian onslaught that threatened to tear apart the very fabric of Israel’s
identity as Yahweh’s special people. In Tillich’s terminology, as in
Israel of old, the foundations were truly shaken in the post-1918 European
cultural, social, political, and religious world order.
Initially, Tillich
linked a theonomous potentiality to the underlying spirit of democratic
socialist movements, which in the upheavals emerging from the Nazi onslaught
and the Soviet gulags, turned demonic. By the 1950s he pinned his hopes
in the emergence of a “sacred void” (p. 124) as a counter-response to the
existential angst in the mid-century age of alienation and despair.
For Tillich, “a
theonomous culture expresses in its creations an ultimate concern and a
transcendent meaning not as something strange but as its own spiritual ground”
(p. 121), whether a social movement, a work of art, a psychological theory, a historical
explanation, or even a religious movement. The issue for Tillich was not
whether the potentiality for God’s indwelling—what Old Testament theologian
Walter Brueggemann refers to as “hope within history”—was formally religious or
secular, but that it carried within it the living spirit of God’s immanent
transcendence, which brought “new being” and new life through its
manifestations and symbols in response to a given period’s “ultimate concern.”
Tillich’s theology was
very much rooted in existential theology in the realization of, and working
through anxiety, the consequence of human guilt, estrangement from self,
others, and God in the quest for the “courage to be” through which the power of
transcendence has the capacity to break forth. As expressed by Tillich,
“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” (p. 123), regardless of whether formally acknowledged as
religious.
A Few Words on Tillich’s Correlation Methodology
Because my text
on Tillich’s concept of theonomy is already overly long, I will by-pass a
substantive discussion of his methodology of correlation, other than to
highlight a few key points and passages. One is his distinction between
kerygmatic and apologetic theology. The first he defines in predominantly
biblical or classical theological terms as commonly identified in traditional
orthodox Christianity. The second (and only the second) he links to given
“prephilosohical and philosophical interpretations of reality” (p. 138),
broadly speaking, through which to engage the culture. His methodology of
correlation pertains to the second sphere, only; however, the terminology he
draws on to describe his understanding of the presence and power of God is
implicitly linked to the language forms and underlying presuppositions of
existential philosophy and mid-century depth-psychology.
McClendon is correct
in critiquing Tillich’s underdeveloped utilization of the fullness and depth of
the OT and NT biblical narrative, a problem that is partially offset in
Tillich’s published collections of sermons, particularly, The Shaking
of the Foundations. Nonetheless, in the following passage, at least,
the similarities between Tillich and Hartt are not that far apart even though
the latter uses more formal traditional Christian terminology than the
former. According to Tillich:
“If the question
implied in human finitude is the question of God and the idea of God is the
answer to the question, then modern [mid-century] existential analysis of human
finitude becomes extremely valuable for the theological treatment of God.
[Viewed thusly], God becomes the correlate to human anxiety and
contingency. He becomes the symbol of a ‘transcendent courage’, in which
the characteristics of finitude, as essential insecurity, loneliness, having to
die, etc. are overcome. In this way the idea of God attains existential
significance” (p. 140).
In short, any
religious or theological response to the gospel needs to be linked to the
questions and concerns people actually identify, in which a correlational
methodology is designed for this expressed purpose. For Tillich, the
response is ultimately rooted in the living God, though he expends a great deal
more energy than most in probing the implicit and explicit questions rooted in
culture through a stimulating faith-culture dialectic. As he puts it,
“question and answer must be correlated in such a way that the religious symbol
is interpreted as the adequate answer to a question implied in man’s [sic]
existence” (p. 139), clearly, a high bar. In this emphasis Tillich played
a most formative role within the various contextual theologies of the second
half of 20th century into the first two decades of the 21st century,
particularly death of God theologies of the 1960s, and, in his initial search
for the Kairos in democratic socialism, in the liberationist theologies of
Latin America.
Concluding Note
As McClendon notes,
Tillich is a theologian of culture to be contended with, perhaps more than he
acknowledges, his substantial critique notwithstanding. A critical
question remains on the extent to which thoughtful evangelicals can appropriate
significant aspects of his theology of culture, while remaining thoroughly
rooted in their own prevailing traditions, particularly, in movements of God
within history that are not expressly religious, in the spheres of art,
literature, science, philosophy, and culture, the respective spheres that
McClendon addresses in Witness. As we go forward, it will be
instructive to see whether a Tillichian theology of culture can effectively be
drawn upon to complement McClendon’s own cultural theology, or for that matter,
the Christ-culture relationship in Henry’s Uneasy Conscience and
in H. R. Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture.
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