What Is Religion? by Paul Tillich (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 177 Some readers, however, may find fault with his interpretation of some texts. A fault of the book is that it has nothing to say on the period between Maximus the Confessor (7th cent.) and Teilhard de Chardin. It is dismissed simply" after Maximus the Confessor, for reasons too many and too complex to be developed here, Christ's dynamic presence and activity in the world was not sufficiently stressed...." (p. 15) The chapter on Teilhard de Chardin is an excellent summary of his Christology. This is not a book everyone will be able to read. But for those really interested in the problem of cosmic Christology, it makes a valuable contribution to the literature on the subject. St. Charl1!8' Seminary Nagpur, India ANTHONY MORRIS, 0. p. What Is Religion? By PAUL TILLICH. New York: Harper and Row, 1969. Pp. 191. $5.95. This volume contains three early works by Paul Tillich: " The Philosophy of Religion," which originally appeared in 19~5; " The Conquest of the Concept of Religion in the Philosophy of Religion " and " On the Idea of a Theology of Culture," originally presented in 19~~ and 1919 respectively . The main themes of Tillich's central work, his Systematic Theology, appear in these early essays. With interest these three essays are read in the reverse order in which they are published in this volume. Then one can see the progress of Tillich's thought as he grapples ever more profoundly with the problem of the relation of religion and theology to culture. On the other hand, the essays in the order in which they are published lead reasonably from more general notions of religion and the philosophy of religion to the specific task of theology vis-a-vis culture. Tillich's notion of the philosophy of religion is not the common one. Philosophy of religion is not a detached, objective study of religious phenomena. It is the first part of a " normative cultural science." Such a science in the case of religion involves: (I) a determination of the criteria for authentic religion and the categories for comprehending religious phenomena (the philosophy of religion); (~) a cultural history organizing the data of the empirical sciences of religion according to the norms determined in the philosophy of religion; and (3) a concrete normative science of religion (theology) which is elaborated in the light of the norms and categories of the philosophy of religion and on the basis of the materials of cultural history. Tillich hopes to overcome the opposition between philosophy of religion 178 BOOK REVIEWS and theology, between reason and revelation, without falling into pure rationalism and yet without a supernatural which is isolated from the totality of culture. All of this theory is grounded in Tillich's own metaphysical vision. The problems of both the theory and its underlying metaphysics have been raised in appraisals of other works of Tillich. The only comment here is that, if Tillich's insight is valid and a true solution to the problems of the relation between religion and culture, philosophy of religion and theology, reason and revelation, some language must be employed to sell it to contemporary Americans other than the language of classical German philosophy. The first essay in this volume is " heavy " reading, full of broad abstractions and sweeping generalizations, with occasional references to empirical facts which appear to be examples to corroborate the creative imagination rather than empirical evidence from which the abstractions and generalizations are gathered. Most interesting in the volume is the final essay, "On the Idea of a Theology of Culture." Such a theology would replace a theological ethics developed out of dogmatics, out of a body of knowledge given from on high in revelation, extrinsic to, and separate from, other knowledge. If religion is a dimension of all reality, of all culture, namely, its relation to the Unconditional, then what is needed is a theology which embraces not only ethics but all the functions of culture: a theology of culture. Theology of culture stands in contrast to Church theology; the former is based on the idea that religion is a dimension of all culture and generally embodies religion; the latter envisions religion as...