Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000

RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.

Countrymen,

ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT

In 1965, Harvey Cox published The Secular City. The volume was notorious for attacking the “old” as “old” and promoting the “new” as “new.” Cox stirred waves in many quarters, including the editorial office of Playboy Magazine. As recently as 1990, Cox was complimenting himself on the volume, gloating over his approving anticipation of victimization/dependency ideologies fostered by gender and racial combinations and reasserting his dismissal and condemnation of elders in the field of theology, chief among them Paul Tillich, who, after a world-famous career at the Union Theological Seminar in New York City, became University Professor at Harvard University, Cox’s academic home, from 1955-1962.

In 1963, the year Cox received the PhD at Harvard and two years before he published The Secular City, Paul Tillich published Volume III of his Systematic Theology, anticipating Cox’s tone and thesis in The Secular City and setting forth the correction of the latter, there being no correction of the former. Tillich defeated the Cox attack on the old, including himself — which was and continues to be actually against God — before that attack was executed in public.

Tillich’s successor in the chair of Systematic Theology at Union was The Reverend Dr. Paul Lehmann — my professor in that subject there — who referred to Cox as a newspaper theologian. Cox has always reveled in notoriety and sought successfully to make money from it.  He is a charlatan, like Malcolm Boyd.

Here is Tillich’s answer, two years ahead of its publication, to Cox’s The Secular City:

Systematic Theology
Volume III
Part IV, Life and the Spirit
Section III, The Divine Spirit and the Ambiguities of Life
Subject 4, The Conquest of Religion by the Spiritual Presence and the Protestant Principle
Pages, 243-245
The University of Chicago Press, 1963

In so far as the Spiritual Presence is effective in the churches and their individual members, it conquers religion as a particular function of the human spirit. When contemporary theology rejects the name “religion” for Christianity, it is in the line of New Testament thought. The coming of the Christ is not the foundation of a new religion but the transformation of the old state of things. Consequently, the church is not a religious community but the anticipatory representation of a new reality, the New Being as community. In the same way, the individual member of the church is not a religious personality but the anticipatory representative of a new reality, the New Being as personality. Everything said heretofore about the churches and the life of their members points in the direction of the conquest of religion. Conquest of religion does not mean secularization but rather the closing of the gap between the religious and the secular by removing both through the Spiritual Presence. This is the meaning of faith as the state of being grasped by that which concerns us ultimately and not as a set of beliefs, even if the object of belief is a divine being. This is the meaning of love as reunion of the separated in all dimensions, including that of the spirit, and not as an act of negation of all dimensions for the sake of a transcendence without dimensions.

In so far as religion is conquered by the Spiritual Presence, profanization and demonization are conquered. The inner-religious profanization of religion, its transformation into a sacred mechanism of hierarchical structure, doctrine and ritual, is resisted by the participation of church members in the Spiritual Community, which is the dynamic essence of the churches and of which the churches are both the existential representation and the existential distortion. The freedom of the Spirit breaks through mechanizing profanization — as it did in the creative moments of the Reformation. In doing so it also resists the secular form of profanization, for the secular as secular lives from the protest against the profanization of religion within itself. If this protest becomes meaningless, the functions of morality and culture are opened again for the ultimate, the aim of the self-transcendence of life.

Demonization is also conquered in so far as religion is conquered by the Spiritual Presence. We have distinguished between the demonic that is hidden — the affirmation of a greatness which leads to the tragic conflict with the “great itself” — and the openly demonic — the affirmation of a finite as infinite in the name of the holy. Both the tragic and the demonic are conquered in principle by the Spiritual Presence. Christianity has always claimed that neither the death of the Christ nor the suffering of Christians is tragic, because neither is rooted in the affirmation of its greatness but in the participation in the predicament of estranged man to which each belongs and does not belong. If Christianity teaches that the Christ and the martyrs suffered “innocently,” this means that their suffering is not based on the tragic guilt of self-affirmed greatness but on their willingness to participate in the tragic consequences of human estrangement.

Self-affirmed greatness in the realm of the holy is demonic. This is true of the claim of a church to represent in its structure the Spiritual Community unambiguously. The consequent will to unlimited power over all things holy and secular is in itself the judgment against a church which makes this claim. The same is true of individuals who, as adherents of a group making such a claim, become self-assured, fanatical, and destructive of life in others and the meaning of life within themselves. But in so far as the divine Spirit conquers religion, it prevents the claim to absoluteness by both the churches and their members. Where the divine Spirit is effective, the claim of a church to represent God to the exclusion of all other churches is rejected. The freedom of the Spirit resists it. And when the divine Spirit is effective, a church member’s claim to an exclusive possession of the truth is undercut by the witness of the divine Spirit to his fragmentary as well as ambiguous participation in the truth. The Spiritual Presence excludes fanaticism, because in the presence of God no man can boast about his grasp of God. No one can grasp that by which he is grasped — the Spiritual Presence.

In other connections I have called this truth the “Protestant principle.” It is here that the Protestant principle has its place in the theological system. The Protestant principle is an expression of the conquest of religion by the Spiritual Presence and consequently an expression of the victory over the ambiguities of religion, its profanization, and its demonization. It is Protestant, because it protests against the tragic-demonic self-elevation of religion and liberates religion from itself for the other functions of the human spirit [culture and morality], at the same time liberating these functions from their self-seclusion against the manifestations of the ultimate. The Protestant principle (which is a manifestation of the prophetic Spirit) is not restricted to the churches of the Reformation or to any other church, being an expression of the Spiritual Community. It has been betrayed by every church, including the churches of the Reformation, but it is also effective in every church as the power which prevents profanization and demonization from destroying the Christian churches completely. It also is not enough; it needs the “Catholic substance,” the concrete embodiment of the Spiritual Presence; but it is the criterion of the demonization (and profanization) of such embodiment. It is the expression of the victory of the Spirit over religion.

In my opinion, these are the most apropos, for present conditions, and inspiring words Tillich wrote.

Systematic Theology, Vols. I, II, III

The Rev. Dr. Paulus Johannes Tillich

AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA