Paul Tillich, “Theology of Culture,” Oxford University Press, 1959.

“Religion comes to the moral functions and knocks at its door… It is admitted as long as it helps to create good citizens, good husbands and children, good employees, officials, and soldiers. But the moment in which religions makes claims of its own, it is either silenced or thrown out as superfluous or dangerous for morals.” (p. 6)

“So religion must look around for another function…and it is attracted by the cognitive function. … Again religion is admitted, but as subordinate to pure knowledge, and only for a brief time. Pure knowledge, strengthened by the success of its scientific work, soon recants its half-hearted acceptance of religion and declares that religion has nothing whatever to do with knowledge.” (p. 6)

“Once more religion is without a home within man’s spiritual life. … Why not try to find a place within the artistic creativity of man?… Religion remembers that is has old relations to the moral and the cognitive realms, to the good and to the true, and it resists the temptation to dissolve itself into art.” (pp. 6-7)

“Religion, if banished to the realm of mere feeling, has ceased to be dangerous for any rational and practical human enterprise. But, we must add, it also has lost its seriousness, its truth, and its ultimate meaning.” (p. 7)

“Religion, in the largest and most basic sense of the word, is ultimate concern.” (pp. 7-8)

“It [religion] forgets that its own existence is a result of man’s tragic estrangement from his true being. It forgets its own emergency character.” (p. 9)

“…the concentration of man’s activities upon the methodical investigation and technical transformation of his world…and the consequent loss of the dimension of depth in his encounter with reality.” (p. 43)

“Man is supposed to be the master of his world and of himself. But actually he has become a part of the reality he has created, an object among objects, a thing among things, a cog with a universal machine to which he must adapt himself in order not to be smashed by it.” (p. 46)

“…some may have the strength to take anxiety and meaninglessness courageously upon themselves and live creatively, expressing the predicament of the most sensitive people in our time in cultural production.” (p. 46)

“Because the Christian message is the message of salvation and because salvation means healing, the message of healing in every sense of the word is appropriate to our situation.” (p. 49)

“They must feel that the Christian symbols are not absurdities, unacceptable for the questioning mind of our period, but that they point to that which alone is of ultimate concern, the ground and meaning of our existence and of existence generally.” (p. 50)

“These three considerations of human nature are present in all genuine theological thinking: essential goodness, existential estrangement, and the possibility of something, a ‘third’ beyond essence and existence, through which the cleavage is overcome and healed.” (p. 119)

“…we must ask every critic of theology to deal with theology with the same fairness which is demanded from everyone who deals, for instance, with physics–namely, to attack the most advanced and not some obsolete forms of a discipline.” (p. 129)