Tillich’s Relation of Religion with Other Fields: History and Philosophy of Religion

Özet

In our article, we tried to explain Paul Tillich's understanding of history and philosophy. In this article, what Tillich understood from history is explained by quoting from his past sources. While his approach to history exhibits an existential structure, his main focus is on the figure of Jesus, the Messiah, that is, the Jesus of faith. According to him, while whether events are real or not is a subject of another science, as a philosopher who looks at history through religion, the meaning that historical events express for the person is more important. Another approach style is seen in explaining the relationship between religion and philosophy. While conceptually separating the sign and symbol, he also states that these sciences use different styles of expression. For example, while philosophy expresses the reality it investigates with concepts; religion explains by referring to symbols. As a method, we have tried to use a holistic and critical perspective that sees the whole as it is without forcing it. Tillich is a thinker who lived in both America and Europe, experienced big and small cities at the same time, was raised in a liberal family environment from his mother and a conservative family environment from his father, and has also seen both transitional centuries. He aims to use nothing in his method without wasting it, and while doing so, he exhibits an approach that does not resort to reductionist forcing.

Keywords: Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, History, Tillich.

Highlights

• History records unique events, not repetitive processes that can be retested.
• Historical events are not subject to experimentation.
• Man cannot escape from history. This inability to escape is due to the fact that man is the subject that makes history from within history.
• Faith cannot guarantee truth based on facts, but faith can interpret the meaning of facts from the point of view of man's ultimate concern.
• Philosophical truth is the truth about the structure of being; the truth of faith is the truth about one's ultimate concern. But the difference is that there is a point of similarity between the ultimate of the philosophical problem and the ultimate of religious concern. In both cases, ultimate reality is sought and expressed - conceptually in philosophy, symbolically in religion.