ABSTRACT
The discussion to this point suggests that Tillich’s late appreciation of the symbol systems of the world’s religions would prompt a reflection on their common origin in the source of humanity’s natural religious experience. Each religion would come to view itself as a precious variant of a common font. Yet in examining Tillich’s appropriation of Boehme it became evident that Tillich, the Christian theologian, could not fully accept either Boehme’s moment of mystical identity with the divine beyond the Trinity or its consequence, the unification of the divine opposites, not in the Trinity, but in humanity’s historical religious maturation. However, the earlier discussion has also made evident that Tillich’s mind was in a state of tension and growth to the end. One area of such development was his sensitivity to the religious implications of the then developing feminist movement. This almost prophetic interest led him to look for images of the feminine in the Christian Protestant tradition. In this context he points, in his fullest treatment of the Trinity, to the ground of being, first moment of Trinitarian life, as maternal in its role of generating, supporting and drawing consciousness back to itself. (Tillich 1963: 293, 294) In this passage Tillich adumbrates a cyclical process of birth, death and resurrection in terms as psychological as theological. He also approaches the gnostic realization that the first moment of divine life could be gendered as Mother/Father or beyond both to better describe its birthing of divine and human consciousness and, indeed, every form that proceeds from its womb.
