Introduction: Tillich in conversation

Paul Tillich understands religion as a symbol; the unconditional can happen to a person anywhere. Rudolf Bultmann, for his part, wants to demythologise religion — a conversation with Professor Matthias Kroeger about two important representatives of liberal Protestantism.

The interview was broadcast in German on Deutschlandfunk on 4 March 2013. What follows is a working translation for study purposes; the German wording is authoritative.

Rüdiger Achenbach: Professor Kroeger, how does liberal Protestantism develop at the beginning of the twentieth century, on into the new century?

Matthias Kroeger: What is especially worth noting from today’s vantage point is that a man began to work and to think then who now counts among the great figures of the twentieth century. His name is Paul Tillich. Let me put it in terms of one central essay, or one idea, that he had early on, in the 1920s. The title is “Theology of Culture”. What he says in it is this: the experience of the holy, or of the unconditional, or of the religious, cannot be confined to one particular segment — as though religion were either ethical or aesthetic or whatever else. Rather, religion is an essence, an element and a component of every sphere of reality. For this Tillich brought a term of his own into play at the time: the religious, the valid religious, is the experience of the unconditional. The unconditional — that something can seize you totally and pull you out of the neutrality of your own life story. The unconditional is something that can appear in every area of human life. For example, there is a famous account: at a gathering in Frankfurt in the 1920s, Tillich is missed at an evening party. Where is he? He is standing outside in the garden on a night in May, entirely absorbed, marvelling at the fresh spring blossom, and he says: is that not a revelation of the divine and the unconditional? For that you need not reach for a Bible or hold a hymnbook; you need only have the eye for it — in any form, an artistic image, say Franz Marc’s “Tower of Blue Horses”, or a poem: anything can become the place where the unconditional is experienced.

Rüdiger Achenbach: And here he makes the connection with theology through what he calls the method of correlation.

Matthias Kroeger: Correlation — or one could equally say, through the concept of symbol. It comes to the same thing, namely: that I always put whatever I am seeing at the moment in relation to a religious theme or text. You can be gripped anywhere. And that is religion. In doing so he also takes up something already present in Schleiermacher: if you want to grasp what is meant by God, then forget everything you have heard about it, he said once in one of his speeches on religion — look only at where something has seized you unconditionally and laid claim to you. Then you know what the divine is. It is what addresses you and grips you and pulls you out of your neutrality. That is to say, Tillich opens up a worldwide possibility of experiencing God. Wherever you are, if you expose yourself with your heart or your conscience or your reason or your feeling, with all your instruments, you can become aware of the unconditional, which is everywhere. That is an enormous relief, a widening of the way theology sees and experiences.

Rüdiger Achenbach: If one can experience this understanding of religion, this unconditional that concerns you unconditionally, everywhere, then one has of course to consider how the experience one then has can be brought into connection with theology.

Matthias Kroeger: Precisely. Theology, Tillich says, should not consist in the constant repetition of its old categories. Nor should the concept of God. That can be entirely irreligious. But to the extent that we are ready to see the religious experience of the unconditional in everything, every religious concept can also be probed for the religious experience and insight it harbours within it. For all religious concepts go back somewhere to experiences, and they carry experiences deposited in them. There is either the possibility of the method of correlation, as I have just said. Then a relation is established between biblical texts and the experiences they intend. But it can also be done with another concept. Where religious concepts make themselves absolute and become dead conceptual idols, there Tillich teaches, and says: consider whether you might not get further if you grasp that every religious concept — the concept of God, the concept of Christ, sin, salvation — that all of these are only symbols for a greater intended reality.

Rüdiger Achenbach: That stands behind them.

Matthias Kroeger: That lies behind them and that can be awakened by the concept of symbol. If you say, is there a God, you are immediately caught in the wrong question. But if you say, God is a symbol — well, a symbol for what? For the greater thing that grips you. And you decide how you want to use and apply and understand it.

Rüdiger Achenbach: But at this point he does try, as far as possible, to avoid the concept of God again and again and to replace it with something else — with being itself and the like.

Matthias Kroeger: Right, because the concept of God can be a conversation-stopper. He says: let yourself in for experiences, and then all these concepts will wake up and show their relevance. It is not without reason that Tillich was someone who always held that he was both at once: theologian and philosopher. He began with a doctorate on Schelling — a theological one and a philosophical one, two doctorates. He was always someone who felt himself to be on the boundary. He said, you can understand all theological concepts as symbols for a theological state of affairs or for an existential one. Every concept — sin, for example — Tillich brings into connection with the Marxist concept of estrangement. We all live under conditions more powerful than ourselves. Estrangement under capitalism surrounds us. We have conditions of life that are not as they should be. But our task is to break through this estrangement, with the help of God and of Jesus. What does that mean, then? And then these concepts suddenly wake up as thoroughly current concepts of existence, or, put religiously, as symbolic concepts.

Rüdiger Achenbach: That is to say, religious symbols uncover something like a hidden layer of reality.

Matthias Kroeger: Just as I said before, in the theology of culture: every image, every water, every dance, every poem, every flowering May bush can become a revelation of the mystery of the world and of the unconditional that grips you. Everywhere. And so too the concepts. They are reminders of what unconditionally should be and can be, and of the facets of our experience. But what he opens up here is singular in its disclosive power, in that he permits people their own aliveness and religiosity — and expects it of them.

Rüdiger Achenbach: Let us try to pin this concept of symbol down to something quite concrete, for example the concept of Christ. That would mean, if we want to follow how this symbol came about — it must come from somewhere — then one would say that the earliest community, early Christianity, took this concept over from Judaism. So the concept is there as the concept of Messiah and then becomes the symbol of Christ. And this symbol of Christ then passes into Christian doctrine. That is to say, religion, Christianity included, always draws on symbols from its surroundings as well.

Matthias Kroeger: Absolutely. For the concept of Christ that means: we know exactly what is meant by it, namely that here is a human being who has, or represents, the power to break open the closedness under which we live, to make new openings possible again. That is the historical side. When Tillich asks what that means today, he himself introduces a concept at this point and says: Jesus is the embodiment of the new being. He is the possibility of breaking out of the old, reduced, broken being …

Rüdiger Achenbach: Of estrangement …

Matthias Kroeger: … of estrangement, of breaking out and coming back to the creativity that was actually intended for us.

Rüdiger Achenbach: Into the neighbourhood of being itself.

Matthias Kroeger: Right.

Rüdiger Achenbach: Now there are several places in Tillich where he warns against taking a symbol literally, word for word. That is, he says a symbol taken literally loses its power.

Matthias Kroeger: Because it has then already been turned into an object. The symbol has the advantage — for example, if I grasp God as a symbol, the word “God” as a symbol, then I know it is a word that alludes to something I cannot reach with conceptual, definitional thinking. God is not definable. But we all know what is meant by the symbol “God”, namely what is greater than all reason or, if one wants to quote the First Letter of John, “greater than our heart”. Everyone grasps that without wanting to define it exactly. But if you do try to define it, you make it dead and broken.

Rüdiger Achenbach: For Tillich that must also mean that religion cannot manage at all without the language of symbols. We only have to make them intelligible.

Matthias Kroeger: It cannot manage without that language — in the knowledge that symbols, and in part also concepts that are actually meant to be alive, can be deadly. Tillich put this most sharply as a paradox when he said that every human being has the possibility of the unconditional within them. At the same time Tillich says that a great deal of mischief has already been done with the concept of religion; that the concept of religion, which we are trying to keep alive, really has to be overcome. For the concept of religion depicts and harbours everything that people believe it is and is and is. It defines far too much, and in doing so it makes the concept dead.