Tillich And The Abyss

This book examines Paul Tillich ́s theological concept of the abyss by locating it within the context of current postmodern antifoundalist discussions and debates surrounding feminism, gender, and language. Sigridur Gudmarsdottir develops these tropes into a constructive theology, arguing that Tillich’s idea of the abyss can serve as a necessary means of deconstructing the binaries between the theoretical and the practical in producing nihilistic relativism and the safe foundations of knowledge (divine as well as human). How does one search for a map and method through an abyss? In his writings, Tillich expressed the ambiguity and groundlessness of being, the depth structure of the human condition, and the reality of God as an abyss. The more we gaze into this abyss, the more we encounter the faults in our various foundations. This book outlines how Tillich’s concept of the abyss creates greater opportunities for complexity and liminality and opens up a space where life and death, destruction and construction, fecundity and horror, womb and tomb, can coincide.

Paul Tillich was one of the great theologians and philosophers of the 20th century. Born before the advent of the automobile, he lived to see the launch of Sputnik, the Mercury and Gemini programs, and the dawn of the nuclear age. One of the key events in his early life was the First World War, during which he served the German army as a Chaplain. He survived that war, and his early works grew out of the optimistic and creative zeitgeist that emerged in its wake. Before he turned 60, he had survived the Second World War as well. His later work might be seen as a reaction to the pessimism and anxiety triggered by that conflict’s atrocities and by technological advancements capable of extinguishing life on this planet. Tillich always lived his life on boundaries. He straddled 19th and 20th centuries, feeling at home in both, but never quite feeling as if he fully belonged to either. If such a boundary existence created anxiety for him, it also brought him both intellectual and personal satisfaction. He believed that, to fully live, one must do so on the boundary. While the works of other existentialist philosophers have been applied to education, there have been few, if any, attempts to apply Tillich’s work specifically. This book demonstrates Tillich’s place in pedagogy, by showing how a specifically “Tillichian” approach to education may help diminish students’ existential anxieties and make them better prepared to live in the modern world. It suggests that taking such an approach might also help in diminishing devastating societal ills, such as opioid dependence and suicide rates.

Indecent Theology brings liberation theology up to date by introducing the radical critical approaches of gender, postcolonial, and queer theory. Grounded in actual examples from Latin America, Marcella Althaus-Reid's highly provocative, but immaculately researched book reworks three distinct areas of theology - sexual, political and systematic. It exposes the connections between theology, sexuality and politics, whilst initiating a dramatic sexual rereading of systematic theology. Groundbreaking, intriguing and scholarly, Indecent Theology broadens the debate on sexuality and theology as never before.

Is religion a positive reality in your life? If not, have you lost anything by forfeiting this dimension of your humanity? This book compares the theology of Tillich with the psychology of Jung, arguing that they were both concerned with the recovery of a valid religious sense for contemporary culture. Paul Tillich, Carl Jung and the Recovery of Religion explores in detail the diminution of the human spirit through the loss of its contact with its native religious depths, a problem on which both spent much of their working lives and energies. Both Tillich and Jung work with a naturalism that grounds all religion on processes native to the human being. Tillich does this in his efforts to recover that point at which divinity and humanity coincide and from which they differentiate. Jung does this by identifying the archetypal unconscious as the source of all religions now working toward a religious sentiment of more universal sympathy. This book identifies the dependence of both on German mysticism as a common ancestry and concludes with a reflection on how their joint perspective might affect religious education and the relation of religion to science and technology. Throughout the book, John Dourley looks back to the roots of both men's ideas about mediaeval theology and Christian mysticism making it ideal reading for analysts and academics in the fields of Jungian and religious studies.

This study explores the possibility that even films lacking religious subject matter might have a religious impact upon their viewers. It begins with a reading of Paul Tillich's theology of revelation through culture and continues with a qualitative research project assessing the experiences of filmgoers in Latin America.

This volume explores the political theology of Paul Tillich, one of the foremost thinkers of the 20th century. Tillich's discerning analysis of fascism, grounded in his socialist commitments, and continuing efforts to write theology in correlation with culture, make his voice a crucial one for contemporary political theology.

The Courage to Be introduced issues of theology and culture to a general readership. The book examines ontic, moral, and spiritual anxieties across history and in modernity. The author defines courage as the self-affirmation of one's being in spite of a threat of nonbeing. He relates courage to anxiety, anxiety being the threat of non-being and the courage to be what we use to combat that threat. Tillich outlines three types of anxiety and thus three ways to display the courage to be. Tillich writes that the ultimate source of the courage to be is the "God above God," which transcends the theistic idea of God and is the content of absolute faith (defined as "the accepting of the acceptance without somebody or something that accepts").

Rupturing Eschatology is Eric Trozzos constructive retrieval of Luthers theology of the cross seeking to establish a contemporary Lutheran and emerging account of the cross, silence, and eschatology. The book explores Luthers early theology of the cross and divine hiddenness in concert with the work of the Lutheran mystical tradition and modern Lutheran theology. Trozzo argues for an account of divine possibility oriented around a contemporary theology of the cross marked by reclamation of the biblical and mystical practice of silence as the space that creates hope.