The purpose of this research is to examine the encounter between the Christian theology of Paul Tillich and a range of non-Christian religious and philosophical perspectives. The plan of the research will be to place Tillich's theological method and principal conceptions in the perspective of modern thought, and then to show how his correlational theology, which is an elaboration of faith and a philosophical response to the modern world, informs the manner in which he deals with alternative secular and religious systems of thought.
To infer a connection between the human condition and spiritual writing, whether in the form of theology or scripture, is simply to note that the latter is the intelligent, sensitive being's way of coping with or otherwise coming to terms with the former. The impulse toward making meaning and significance out of a flood of content and experience is the psychological provenance of written communication in general and spiritual writing in particular. This is true across cultures and ages, and indeed across theistic and atheistic modes of thought.
When in the opening sentence of Systematic Theology Tillich assigns the term theology to the realm of Christian thought, he adds that it "must serve the needs of the church" (Tillich, 1951, p. 3). The fact that he is referring to the community of Christian faith and not sectarian interests or, still less, a building, is only the beginning of the concept of what the church needs. The need of a community of faith is a need to address the depth of feeling that accompanies the confrontation with the divine mystery or whatever mystery lies beyond the range of rational experience, whether that feeling takes the form of unutterable anguish or of the experience of grace. Tillich equates grace with what he calls the Holy. It is the activity of pointing the faithful in the direction of the Holy, and of designating faith as a marker of grace, that is the enterprise of Till...