Non-Christian Perspectives

The need of a lodge of faith is a need to address the depth of tincture that accompanies the confrontation with the divine riddle or whatever mystery lies beyond the range of rational experience, whether that feeling takes the form of awful anguish or of the experience of grace. Tillich equates grace with what he call(a)s the Holy. It is the bodily process of pointing the faithful in the direction of the Holy, and of designating faith as a marker of grace, that is the attempt of Tillich's theology. This is a difficult matter because of the indefinity of human experience in this regard. Tillich acknowledges this throughout his writing, as for subject when he refers to the Holy as something that "transcends positively and negatively all immediate forms of consciousness . . . [and] becomes for consciousness on the one leave the fulfillment toward which the latter strives and on the other the abyss in the first place which it recoils" (Tillich, 1969, p. 84). It appears to be the purpose of Tillich's theology to interpret what is transcendent with a view toward finding meat in what is immediately operational to the rational consciousness. For Tillich, this means making the Christian message applicable to the modern human condition. In this connection he refers to " fact" theology, which considers "the creative interpretation of existence . . . under all kinds of psychological and sociological conditions. . . The 'situation' to which theology must respond is the to

Every religion has a depth that is perpetually covered, as it is in Christianity, by that religion's particularity. In most religions a fight has gone on, and is going on now, against distortion of the inviolate by the particular religion. The great mystical systems of the East resulted from this fight. The struggle, however, has not been radical enough anywhere for a complete firing from distortion. Therefore in our dialogues with other religions we must not fork up to make converts; rather, we must try to drive the other religions to their proclaim depths, to that point at which they realize that they are witness to the infinite besides are not the Absolute themselves (Tillich, 1967, pp. 140-1).

In the profound argument of his master work Systematic Theology, Tillich develops a opinion that he styles New Being. While as we shall see that status has specific connotations for Christian theology, we can cite it here because it is a name that Tillich uses as one index of universal meaning and relevance that crosses religious traditions around the world.

Tillich's concept of God and what could be called his attitude toward faith imply openness to a dialectical encounter with theological or philosophical "otherness" as well as a willingness to defend his own Christian point of view in such an encounter. Tillich's theology is complex, but correlational method reflects three categories of serious intellectual plight: with many kinds of religious or philosophical otherness that are in the existential world, with what he calls "the element of the unconditional and of ultimacy" (Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 1957, p. 10), and with what he takes to be the unique value of the Protestant Christian message of faith.

It is from this premise of rationality that Tillich responds to competing systems of philosophical thought, with a view toward clarifying the content of his theology. According to Tillich, the rational enterprise for the Christian theologian must take place from a
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