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Paul Tillich: A Quotation


Paul Tillich.jpg
I wrote the following three years ago this week, and I repost it for the same seasonal reason I posted it when I did, one that will become clear to the reader in due course. 

 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 own 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.


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