Sacramental

In this lecture Tillich also amplifies the meaning of the sacramental as that religious power endemic to humanity which gives rise to religion universally and to the mystical and iconoclastic responses to the specific religions this sacramental power inevitably generates. Here Tillich describes this power as “a universal revelation . . . which becomes the presupposition of every concrete and particular revelation”. (Tillich 1990b: 64) In effectively equating the sacramental principle with a universal revelation as the generative power underlying all religions Tillich is making more explicit what remains more or less implicit in his previous theology. In the third volume of his Systematic Theology a universal revelation as the generative source of specific revelations grounds the distinction he draws between “formal faith”, a universal ultimate concern, and “material faith”, the inevitable and diverse expression of formal faith in finitude. Material faith then becomes the content of the specific religions such universal concern, formal faith, breeds by the necessity of its own dynamic toward expression in history. (Tillich 1963: 130–131) In an obviously lingering provincialism Tillich goes on to describe Christianity as the identity of formal and material faith and so as the culmination of religious history, “the fulfillment toward which all forms of faith are driven.” (Tillich 1963: 131) To identify formal and material faith, thus understood, as coalescing in Christianity was an unfortunate and constraining position. Tillich had, in the distinction between formal and material faith, the possibility to show formal faith as fostering a multiplicity of material faiths of which Christianity would be one but not the exhaustive culmination of the others. Such an enlightened relativism and pluralism lay within his grasp and Tillich refused to take advantage of them at least in the very late third volume of his Systematics.