ABSTRACT
Paul Tillich’s doctrine of God is at once both religious and philosophical. The religious aspect is expressed by the statement “God is that which concerns man ultimately”. The key notion in the statement expressing the religious aspect of Tillich’s doctrine of God is ‘ultimate concern.’ Tillich turns to Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy, pointing out that for Otto the awareness of the holy is the awareness of a presence “which remains mysterious in spite of its appearance and it exercises both an attractive and a repulsive function on those who encounter it”. In Dynamics of Faith Tillich says that, which is our ultimate concern demands total surrender, requires the sacrifice of every other claim to it, promises total fulfillment. Tillich uses ‘concern’ not only in his special sense of ‘commitment to,’ but also in the more ordinary sense of ‘anxious about.’.
