The Protestant Era, by Paul Tillich | commentary 1/8/18, 2'29 PM

The Protestant Era, by Paul

Tillich
Irving Kristol Mar. 1, 1949

Boundaries of Belief
The Protestant Era.
by Paul Tillich.
Translated with a concluding essay by James Luther Adams. University of
Chicago Press. 323 pp. $4.00.

These eighteen essays by an outstanding Protestant thinker are so compact

and significant that they require extended commentary and criticism. All that
can be done in this brief review is to point to some of the leading themes and
the way they are used. Actually there is only one theme: “The first element in
Protestantism is and must always be the proclaiming of the human boundary
situation.”

The concept of the “borderline” or “border situation” runs through all of

Tillich’s writings in much the same way that all of Thomas Mann’s work
weaves about the tension between life and the artist, with a self-conscious
and creative egocentricity. In the autobiographical sketch that formed the
first part of his Interpretation of History (1936), Tillich wrote: “The concept
of the borderline might be a fitting symbol of the whole of my personal and
intellectual development. It has been my fate, in almost every direction, to
stand between alternative possibilities of existence, to be completely at home
in neither, to take no definitive stand against either.” From this vantage point
he has acted as a productive mediator between faith and reason, theology and
philosophy, Lutheranism and socialism, religion and culture. And, again like
Mann, Tillich has deftly universalized his predicament; he has elevated the

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-protestant-era-by-paul-tillich/ Page 1 of 4
The Protestant Era, by Paul Tillich | commentary 1/8/18, 2'29 PM

“border situation”—between the infinite and the finite, the conditioned and
the unconditional, faith and anxiety—into the essence of the human
condition, and the locus of the religious declaration.

The religious declaration has two main clauses. The first proclaims the
permanent crisis which lends its name to “crisis theology.” This refers
ultimately to man’s separation from God and his perpetual judgment under
God; the crisis in mankind is an eternal one that results from man’s being a
spiritual animal Who exists tensely on that borderline which is the human
line.

The second clause proclaims the “Protestant principle,” which in turn consists
of the “religious obligation” and the “religious reservation.” The religious
obligation is to work God’s will on earth, to establish justice and love in
economic and social relations (Tillich is a devout socialist), and to hasten the
day of messianic redemption. The religious reservation is to protest against
any absolute claim to truth made in the name of a relative, historical reality—
whether that reality be a totalitarian state, a religious institution, a dogmatic
creed, or a social movement—and it is thus possible to be loyal to the
Protestant principle without belonging to a Protestant, or any other church.
There is an inevitable trend in human communities toward idolatry—the
worship of certain institutions and beliefs as having absolute and
unquestionable validity, as being at long last “the final word.” What the
Protestant principle asserts is that the only absolute truth is this: man can
never attain absolute truth—“the final word” is always with God and it comes
as a judgment upon man. The Protestant era, Tillich says, is coming to an end
with a thunderclap of moral and social collapse; but whatever the religious
forms that the future will throw up, they too will be subordinate to the
Protestant principle.

_____________

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-protestant-era-by-paul-tillich/ Page 2 of 4
The Protestant Era, by Paul Tillich | commentary 1/8/18, 2'29 PM

It is obvious that this approach is less a product of primitive, uncontained

faith than of sophisticated disillusionment. Not disillusionment with God, to
be sure, but with men and their works—even with religious men and their
works. Of all theologians, Tillich is the most sensitive to history. The future,
as he sees it, is already full of incessant, stubborn idolatries in which some
men who claim the absolute truth will battle those who deny it. Lest such a
prospect lead to nihilistic despair, Tillich has discounted it in advance, and
has incorporated it into an enduring perspective on the human condition. But
if all philosophy and theology can be misused by fate, what is the point of it
all? The point, Tillich answers, is that there is one belief that is above history:
“the certainty that fate is divine and not demonic”—the religious confidence
that the world is to be redeemed.

Tillich knows that at present organized religion is, on the whole, a pretty
dreary affair, and as a religious radical he is not so much concerned with
crying woe as with reorganizing society, and turning up a soil into which
religious institutions will be able to sink their roots. But he also believes that
there is today a vast, unrecognized religious impulse—unrecognized because
it operates outside the churches and because it often considers itself non-
religious or even anti-religious. To meet the challenge of this, Tillich daringly
extends Luther’s doctrine of “justification through faith,” and discovers the
possibility of discerning God “at the very moment when all known assertions
about ‘God’ have lost their power.”

Tillich’s doctrine of “justification through faith” involves a re-definition of

“the religious”: it is no longer a belief in a supernatural being but rather a
state of “ultimate concern,” a sense of something ultimate, unconditional, and
all-determining—and this may express itself in secular as well as in religious
forms. Even unbelief or disbelief can be an ultimate concern, and as such are
testimony to truth: thus, “he who seriously denies God affirms him”—the
important word here is seriously. Doubt, despair, disgust, denial—all of these

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-protestant-era-by-paul-tillich/ Page 3 of 4
The Protestant Era, by Paul Tillich | commentary 1/8/18, 2'29 PM

can be religious provided that they represent an experience of the

“unconditional,” and the acknowledgement of an absolute claim upon one’s
person. (Tillich’s idea of the “unconditional” is too subtle and complicated to
be discussed here. Briefly, it is a quality we experience with our whole being
in encountering reality, an existential intuition.) A demonically inspired
person, as well as a divinely inspired one, testifies to the existence of the
unconditional, the infinite—as something he fears and refuses to embrace.

This process of “justifying through faith” those who most vehemently reject
faith and justification has something of the air of a debater’s trick. But it is, I
think, more than that; and we seem implicitly to concede its relevance when
the term “religious” is applied to such “unbelieving” writers as D. H.
Lawrence or James Joyce. Somehow it seems appropriate.

_____________

It is still too early to estimate the sum total of Tillich’s contribution to modern
thought. His work will certainly excite criticism for many years to come, and
in some respects he has left himself vulnerable. (His use of Marxist concepts
tends to be stiff, and his references to scientific method are arguable.) It is
possible, too, that the strident intellectualism of his religious thought is only
the last gasp of religious futility; one is tempted to say with Hobbes that “It is
with the mysteries of our religion, as with wholesome pills for the sick, which
swallowed whole have the virtue to cure, but chewed are for the most part
cast up again without effect.”

_____________

Click to write a letter to the editor

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-protestant-era-by-paul-tillich/ Page 4 of 4