ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 contended that Tillich stepped back from a full embrace of Boehme’s experience of divinity and humanity as polarities engaged in an organic and all encompassing process of the mutual conferring of consciousness upon each other as the base meaning of both historical and individual human life. Boehme’s categories would make it impossible to separate the religious, philosophical and psychological dimensions of his experience of a divinity driven to create and to become conscious in humanity through humanity’s recurrent and cyclical return to its origin in divinity. This vision would imply a divine need to create, the possibility of a divine aggrandizement or loss within the vagaries of human history and a divine dependency on human consciousness for its own conscious growth. All of these positions would be forbidden to Tillich’s Christian orthodoxy, at least, until very late in his life.
