ABSTRACT
The opening chapter concluded that the mature Tillich continued to affirm that humanity was religious by nature even as he sought to substantially qualify, if not abandon, earlier positions that humanity’s historical religious development culminated in some definitive sense in the Christ event. Tillich’s late move toward relativism and pluralism can easily be understood as a natural, if not necessary, development of his essentialism and of his understanding of the relation of the essential to the existential. His essentialism provided Tillich throughout his corpus with a platform to argue that humanity cannot escape its religious propensity. A religionless humanity remained for Tillich impossible and so unthinkable. On the other hand the senior Tillich came increasingly to realize that such essentialism could with great difficulty identify one or other of its historical expressions in existence as definitive or exhaustive of its potential. For Tillich the essential always is grounded in God and remains alive in existential consciousness imbuing it with a profound sense of removal from and drive back to its essential or divine origin. This dialectical play between essence and its existential distortion establishes the universality of religion as a human phenomenon even as it would question or undermine the claim that any specific religion as an expression of the essential could exhaust its possibilities in the form of a “final revelation”.
