Is God an Addition?
The Holy and the Secular in Paul Tillich’s Theology – Part One
Abstract
The contemporary relationship between society, culture, and religion is best characterized as postsecular, marking an era in which the categories of religious and secular can no longer be described in terms of mutual exclusion. However, church discourse in Hungary remains mostly entrenched in dualistic approaches which sharply separate the holy and the secular. These tendencies, particularly evident in Protestant spirituality, often go hand in hand with a rigorously critical stance towards the secular world. This paper aims to explore Paul Tillich’s theology as a potential foundation for a Protestant sacramental vision, which is based upon the dialectics of participation and transcendence and emphasizes God’s manifestation in all created things on the one hand, but also God’s infinite transcendence on the other. According to Tillich, the ’unreconciled duality’ of the holy and the secular, religion and culture is the consequence of sin, and he envisions their eschatological unity in terms of a mutual interpenetration of the religious and the cultural/secular which he calls theonomy. The author proposes that this theonomical intersection makes it possible for the church to have a non-aggressive presence in the world.
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