Provincialism

The second provincialism is the “provincialism of theistic religions”. (Tillich 1990b: 60) This provincialism would reduce religion to a relation to a transcendent and, usually personal, divine entity. Here Tillich is combating that form of Christian theological provincialism which would deny the status of religion to communities bonded without such a God. The obvious target is any form of literal biblical theism based exclusively on a relation to a wholly transcendent and personal God. In amplifying this point Tillich endorses as “great religions” the Buddhist, Confucian and Taoist traditions who thrive without the kind of God described by biblical personalism. (Tillich 1990b: 61) It could here be argued that Tillich’s attack on biblical theism is not without ample precedent in his work. It is operative in his repeated contention that the most adequate theological response to a divinity immersed in the subject– object structuring of reality is atheism. (Tillich 1951: 172–173, 205, 245) Biblical portrayals of the divine–human relation are obviously thus immersed. God is a subject who objectifies the human. The human is a subject who objectifies God. Unfortunately Tillich is less specific in describing the consciousness operative in a relation to the divine which escapes the confinement of a subject–object relation. To do this he would have to move into an experience like that of apophatic mysticism which penetrates the formless or the nothingness beyond the subject–object split and loses the individual in moments of identity with the divine. Tillich was cautious with such moves. (Dourley 2005) Nevertheless his late authentication of Godless religions as truly salvific lies in direct continuity with his earlier and ongoing rejection of the biblical reduction of the divine–human relation to the wholly personal and marks an advance in his making explicit what previously had been at most a tantalizing implication in his thought.The third provincialism is that “provincialism of religion proper over against the powerful quasi-religions of our time”. (Tillich 1990b: 60, 61–63) In the light of his identification of the quasi-religions in these lectures, Tillich is here conferring on communism, nationalism and humanism a certain religious status as expressions of the underlying holy and, in so doing, implicitly affirming their values to be religious and at least potentially redemptive of their members. In amplifying this form of provincialism Tillich argues that such secular quasi-religions have “points of identity with religions proper”. (Tillich 1990b: 61) Behind each of them there is always “a background of a religious character in the proper sense of religion”. (Tillich 1990b: 62, 63) One cannot escape Tillich’s implication that certain forces and the communities they create often identified and dismissed as “secular” by a provincial religious perspective can be themselves the bearers of salvation.