The Call

I have a soft spot in my heart for the 20th century theologian Paul Tillich. I wrote my first research paper (in high school) on Tillich because his thinking could not be contained by dogmatic constraints--he was too much an historian of religion to allow himself to be hemmed in by orthodoxies. "Dogma does not drop from heaven like a stone," he wrote. Consequently, in his view, the Christian church should not be afraid to retire doctrines that have lost credibility in the modern period.

Unfortunately, Tillich's inclusive and iconoclastic vision of theology never caught on with his co-religionists--far from it. Instead, since his death in 1965, Christian triumphalism and the will to believe "the unbelievable" (his description of what passes for faith among most religious people) has rebounded with renewed vigor (one might even say a vengeance).

Tillich was, in significant respects, an heir to Tolstoyan theology as his famous address/sermon "The New Being" amply demonstrates. In it we hear the call of that voice we have always heard behind us but to which we have not responded--for we lack the courage required to challenge the dead hand of the past and re-imagine our relationship to it and, therefore, to one another.