Paul Tillich & Other Religious Perspectives

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

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ethodical way; he must use formal, technical reason. In neither the case of the ordinary believe nor the systematic theologian does reason create the contents of theology, but also in neither case is faith or formal theology irrational." And even though the admitted purpose of theology is to explain Christianity, the systematic theologian's main purpose is not to create a structure of theological formalism as such--that would point logically in the direction of the orthodoxy that Tillich rejects--but rather to make the explanations clear and relevant. Consistency, Tillich says, not formally structured argument, is critical to informing this enterprise: "It is the function of the systematic form to guarantee the consistency of cognitive assertions in all realms of methodological knowledge" (Tillich, ST I, p. 58). Tillich describes his theology as correlational, a term connected at least as closely to what is thinkable about the human experience as to what is emotionally felt. Cobb summarizes Tillich's method of correlation as presenting "an analysis of the human situation as posing the existential questions and then [presenting] the answers that are given in the Christian message" (Cobb, 1986, p. 260). The reasoned analysis that d
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