Paul Tillich, “Dynamics of Faith,” HarperCollins, 1957.

“Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned: the dynamics of faith are the dynamics of man’s ultimate concern… But man, in contrast to other living beings, has spiritual concerns – cognitive, aesthetic, social, political. Some of them are urgent, often extremely urgent, and each of them as well as the vital concerns can claim ultimacy for a human life or the life of a social group. If it claims ultimacy it demands the total surrender of him who accepts this claim…” (p. 1)

“If a national group makes the life and growth of the nation its ultimate concern, it demands that all other concerns, economic well-being, health and life, family, aesthetic and cognitive truth, justice and humanity, be sacrificed.” (p. 2)

“If the civil authorities consider the Church as the basis of the conformity and cultural substance without which a society cannot live, they persecute the heretic as a civil criminal and use means of indoctrination and external pressure by which they try to keep the unity of the religio-political realm.” (p. 29)

“The most ordinary misinterpretation of faith is to consider it an act of knowledge that has a low degree of evidence… If this is meant, one is speaking of belief rather than of faith.” (p. 36)

“The fundamental symbol of our ultimate concern is God. It is always present in any act of faith, even if the act of faith includes the denial of God.” (p. 52)

“Humanism is the attitude which makes man the measure of his own spiritual life, in art and philosophy, in science and politics, in social relations and personal ethics. For humanism the divine is manifest in the human; the ultimate concern of man is man.” (p. 72)

“It is this humanist faith of the moral type which was taken over by the revolutionary movement of the proletarian masses in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its dynamic is visible every day in our present period. As for every faith, the utopian form of the humanist faith is a state of ultimate concern. This gives it its tremendous power for good and evil.” (p. 79)

“Every scientific truth is preliminary and subject to changes both in grasping reality and in expressing it adequately. This element of uncertainty does not diminish the truth value of a tested and verified scientific assertion. It only prevents scientific dogmatism and absolutism.” (p. 93)

“Science can conflict only with science, and faith only with faith; science which remains science cannot conflict with faith which remains faith… The famous struggle between the theory of evolution and the theology of some Christian groups was not a struggle between science and faith, but between a science whose faith deprived man of his humanity and a faith whose expression was distorted by Biblical literalism.” (p. 95)

“Courage does not need the safety of an unquestionable conviction. It includes the risk without which no creative life is possible.” (p. 118)

“Where there is ultimate concern there is the passionate desire to actualize the content of one’s concern.” (p. 134)