Skip to main content

Paul Tillich: A Quotation



Paul Tillich.jpg

The great mid-20th-century theologian Paul Tillich wrote the words italicized below. They are worth repeating because it seems, reading them, as if Tillich is responding to some of the misguided evangelicals of our day, who want to turn Creation into "intelligent design" and repackage it as "science" for secondary schools.

"Knowledge of revelation does not increase our knowledge about the structures of nature, history, and man. Whenever a claim to knowledge is made on this level, it must be subjected to the experimental tests through which truth is established. If such a claim is made in the name of revelation or of any other authority, it must be disregarded, and the ordinary methods of research and verification must be applied. ...Knowledge of revelation is knowledge about the revelation of the mystery of being to us, not information about the nature of beings and their relation to one another."  
SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY, Vol. 1

Since Martin Luther King day was just less than a week ago, it seems also more-or-less timely to note that King wrote his doctoral dissertation (1955) about the concept of God in Tillich's work, comparing Tillich in this regard to another thinker, the Unitarian Henry Nelson Wieman.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

  1. HenryJanuary 24, 2016 at 9:30 AM

    Tillich's comment, up to the final sentence, is unobjectionable, if obvious. But the final sentence makes little sense. The words "Knowledge of" and "knowledge about" serve no purpose; we could replace them with "Ignorance of" and "ignorance about" and the meaning of the sentence would not change. The sentence is saying only that revelation is revelation of the mystery of being to us. But other things may also be revealed. Therefore, all Tillich is saying is that the revelation to which he refers is revelation of the mystery of being to us. But the main problem with the sentence is that Tillich offers no reason why we shouldn't disregard that revelation as we should disregard other revelation, and, like other revelation, subject it to experimental tests.

    ReplyDelete
  2. BloggerAugust 27, 2017 at 5:39 AM

    This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

The Lyrics of "Live Like You Were Dying"

Back in 2004 Tim McGraw recorded the song "Live Like You were Dying." As a way of marking the one-decade anniversary of this song, I'd like to admit that a couple of the lines have confused me for years. I could use your help understanding them. In the first couple of verses, the song seems easy to follow. Two men are talking, and one tells the other about his diagnosis. The doctors have (recently? or a long time ago and mistakenly? that isn't clear) given him the news that he would die soon. "I spent most of the next days/Looking at the X-rays." Then we get a couple of lines about a man crossing items off of his bucket list. "I went sky diving, I went rocky mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu." Then the speaker -- presumably still the old man -- shifts to the more characterological consequences of the news. As he was doing those things, he found he was loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and givin...
1 comment
Read more

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable a...
Post a Comment
Read more