International Journal of Systematic Theology Volume 15 Number 4 October 2013

doi:10.1111/ijst.12020

The Religious Meaning of Culture:

Paul Tillich and Beyond
RUSSELL RE MANNING*

Abstract: Throughout his theological career Paul Tillich (1886–1965) was

fundamentally concerned with the question of the religious meaning of culture.
The answers that he gave – initially in the revolutionary ferment of 1920s–1930s
Germany and then again in the brave new world of post-World War II America
– were profound and far-reaching in their importance for twentieth-century
theology. This article will explore the development of Tillich’s interpretations of
the religious meaning of culture and apply his analyses to our contemporary
religious and cultural situation by suggesting a trinitarian enlargement of
Tillich’s concept of theonomous metaphysics towards a multidimensional
theology of culture.

Introduction

This article explores – with and beyond Paul Tillich – the question of the religious
meaning of culture.1 I start with Tillich and aim to be faithful to the overall contours
of his seminal re-envisioning of the enterprise of theology as fundamentally
concerned with what he called the ‘theology of culture’. Nonetheless, I also want to
move beyond Tillich, both into situations of human existence that he did not
encounter, and to emphasize dimensions of the religious meaning of culture that he

* Divinity, University of Aberdeen, King’s College, Aberdeen AB24 3UB, UK.

1 This article originated in the invitation to deliver the Fall 2011 Paul Tillich Lecture at the
Memorial Church, Harvard University. I am most grateful to Bill Crout for his kind
invitation and his warm hospitality in Cambridge, MA. I am also grateful to Harvey Cox
and David Lamberth for their responses. Later versions were read to the Theology and
Ethics seminar in the University of Durham and to the Systematic Theology seminar in
the University of Aberdeen. I wish to thank Chris Insole, Gerard Loughlin, John Webster,
Tom Greggs and all those whose questions have improved the article no end. Finally,
I also gratefully acknowledge the comments from two anonymous reviewers for IJST.
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438 Russell Re Manning

left underemphasised. That is to say, my aim is not simply to recount Tillich’s

theology of culture but to put it into practice.
Tillich’s theology of culture is undoubtedly the single most important
theological engagement with the religious meaning of culture in modern times. In a
situation of tremendous cultural and religious upheaval, Tillich’s proposals for
and writings in the theology of culture are a powerful affirmation of the religious
significance of culture and the cultural significance of religion. No one who wants to
think seriously about the relations between religion and culture, and specifically,
to ask the question of the religious meaning of culture, can afford to ignore Tillich’s
theology of culture.
And yet . . . times change and, as Tillich was himself only too aware, the
enterprise of theology of culture can never be simply repeated. Indeed, it would be
precisely against the very spirit of Tillich’s project of theology of culture simply to
reapply it wholesale to a new cultural situation. In this sense, it is precisely the genius
of Tillich’s theology of culture that it can be, as it were, re-enacted, and not
simply just repeated.
This article is just such a re-enactment, developing what I call a
‘multidimensional’ account of the religious meaning of culture that both responds to
the changing spiritual situations of cultural history and preserves a distinctively
Christian theological voice.2
My claim is that such a multidimensional theology of culture remains true
to the spirit of Tillich’s project and that Tillich provides us with resources
for such a multidimensional cultural theology, even though he himself tends to
overemphasize one particular dimension, namely the dimension of depth. By
identifying three distinct yet interrelated spiritual situations – post-World War I
Germany, post-World War II America and our global present – I want to propose
three distinct yet interrelated dimensions to the theology of culture. In my view,

2 Of course, the idea of ‘multidimensionality’ is a characteristically Tillichian one. Tillich

explores the use of what he calls ‘the metaphor of “dimension” ’ at length in Systematic
Theology, vol. III (London: SCM Press, 1963), pp. 11–30. Focused on the idea of the
‘multidimensional unity of life’, Tillich here prefers ‘dimension’ to the overly
hierarchical alternative metaphor of ‘level’. Tillich defines dimension in this passage as
‘a section of encountered reality [that] shows unique categorical and other structures’, p.
17. He affirms that there is no ‘definite number’ of dimensions, but refers to the inorganic,
the organic and the historical or spiritual as ‘several obvious dimensions of life’.
For a fuller discussion of this aspect of Tillich’s thought, see Adam Pryor, ‘Tillichian
Teleodynamics: An Examination of the Multidimensional Unity of Emergent Life’,
Zygon 46 (2011), pp. 835–56 and Tabea Rösler, ‘Reconstructing Paul Tillich’s
Anthropology: Multidimensional Life in Dialogue with Feminist Process Theology’,
Dialog 45 (2006), pp. 63–73. For the purposes of the present article my interest lies in the
multidimensional character of the religious meaning of culture and my concern is that
Tillich’s discussion is dominated by reference only to one dimension, namely that of
depth. As such, I am aware that I am using the term ‘dimension’ more loosely than Tillich
does and extending it from its spatial origins to indicate the pluriform character of the
religious substance (or Gehalt) of culture.
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Religious Meaning of Culture 439

Tillich’s emphasis on the depth dimension of culture correlates to a cultural

anxiety about the past and to the revelatory aspect of God as Unconditioned,
such that Tillich accordingly presents his theology of culture as a ‘theonomous
metaphysics’. I suggest that alongside such a theonomous metaphysics be placed
simultaneously both a ‘Christonomous metaphysics’ that emphasizes the ‘actual’
dimension of culture correlated to a cultural anxiety about the present and the
revelatory aspect of Christ as bearer of the New Being, and a ‘pneumanomous
metaphysics’ that emphasizes the ‘utopian’ dimension of culture, correlated to
a cultural anxiety about the future and the revelatory aspect of the Spirit. I
suggest that not only is such a multidimensional ‘neo-Tillichian’ theology of
culture required by the new situations of human experience, beyond that which
was formative for Tillich, but equally that the specifics of the Christian account of
revelation demand such an explicitly trinitarian account of the religious meaning
of culture in any historical situation.
In passing we might recognize that in the background here are two profound
tensions within Tillich’s thought, tensions that both make Tillich’s theology so
dynamic and exciting and also give it a certain structural instability. The first tension
is that between the iconoclasm of the Unconditioned on the one hand and the
particularity of the Christian revelation of the trinitarian God on the other.
The second tension is between Tillich’s ‘essentialist existentialism’ (that is to say, his
interest in the nature of human being in general) and his understanding of the
historical dynamism of human nature in all its changeability. Both tensions
themselves are symptoms of an even more fundamental duality characteristic of all
forms of Christian Platonism, of which Tillich’s theology is a classic example,
namely between the One and the Many, between the abstract and the concrete,
between permanence and change.

The idea of a theology of culture

This section turns to my main theme: Tillich’s project of a theology of culture,

or as he sometimes calls it, a ‘theology of historical revelation’.3 I begin with
his formal proposals.
Tillich famously defends a two-fold understanding of religion. On the one
hand, religion is a specific cultural sphere with its own particular concepts,
institutions and practices. On such a view of religion, determining the religious
meaning of culture is a fairly straightforward matter. The question is simple:
to what extent do cultural productions accurately depict the central claims,
institutions and practices of that particular religion? On the other hand, and more
importantly, Tillich argues for a far broader concept of religion as what he calls

3 Paul Tillich, ‘Natural and Revealed Religion’ (1935), in Christian Danz, Werner Schüßler
and Erdmann Sturm, eds., Ausgewählte Texte (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008), p. 273.
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440 Russell Re Manning

‘a certain quality of consciousness’.4 In his seminal 1919 lecture ‘On the Idea
of a Theology of Culture’ in which he first sets out his manifesto for the
reconsideration of theology as theology of culture, Tillich outlines his new
definition of religion. In a key passage he claims:
Religion is the experience of [or directedness towards] the unconditioned and
this means the experience of absolute reality founded on the experience of
absolute nothingness. One experiences the nothingness of entities, of values,
the nothingness of the personal life. Wherever this experience has brought one
to the nothingness of an absolute radical No, there it is transformed into an
experience, no less absolute, of reality, into a radical Yes. This Yes has nothing
to do with a new reality that stands beside or above things; such a reality
would only be a thing of a higher order, which in its turn would become
subject to the power of the No. Rather, throughout everything, the reality
forces itself upon us that is simultaneously a No and a Yes to all things. It is
not a being, it is not substance, it is not the totality of beings. It is, to use
a mystical formulation, what is beyond being, what is simultaneously and
absolutely nothing and something. Nevertheless, even the predicate ‘is’
conceals what is at issue here, because it is not a question of some actual
being that concerns us, but of an actuality of meaning that convulses
everything and builds everything anew.5
From this basic understanding of the nature of religion, Tillich develops various
images and metaphors to express his central conviction that ‘religion is not a
special function of man’s spiritual life’, including of course his famous notion of
religion as ultimate concern.6 One metaphor comes to be particularly privileged in
Tillich’s theology of culture, namely, that religion is ‘the dimension of depth’ in all
human functions or otherwise ‘the substance, the ground and the depth of man’s
spiritual life’.7 I will come back to this point again later, but for now, I simply want
to highlight that whilst it is certainly natural for Tillich to gloss his basic
redefinition of religion in his 1919 lecture in terms of the metaphor of the
dimension of depth, that definition also clearly points towards other potential
glosses. Just as Tillich refers to the Unconditioned as ‘beyond being’ (and thus
evoking an essentialist pre-existence of the origin of being beyond being), so too
his reference to an ‘actuality’ of meaning that convulses everything and ‘builds
everything anew’ evokes, or at least enables us to evoke, images of other
dimensions orientated towards the present and the future.

4 Victor Nuovo, Visionary Science: A Translation of Paul Tillich’s ‘On the Idea of a
Theology of Culture’ with an Interpretive Essay (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1987), p. 23.
5 Nuovo, Visionary Science, pp. 24–5.
6 Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 5.
7 Tillich, Theology of Culture, p. 8.
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Religious Meaning of Culture 441

Just as he redefines religion, so too Tillich redefines ‘culture’ in terms of what he

calls ‘man’s spiritual life’.8 For Tillich culture is the expression of the human spirit
in history. Drawing on the contrast between nature and culture, Tillich identifies
culture with the self-interpretive function of humanity, or the manifestation in history
of the human spirit. By spirit here he means ‘the self-determination of thought within
being’.9 He develops this idea in his 1923 work The System of the Sciences:
The essence of spirit, its inner tension, its dynamic character, is derived from the
infinite opposition between thought and being . . . spirit is neither a mode of
thought nor a mode of being. In spite of its dependence on both of these
elements, it is an irreducible mode. Spirit is the mode of existing thought.10
As such, the human spirit is metaphysical, characterized by both the universal and
the particular. Therefore any spiritual science must contain both a universal a priori
formal analysis and an historical concrete analysis of the distinctive act of the human
spirit, namely historical creation (i.e. culture). More than this, as a science of spirit,
it ‘participate[s] in the positing of the objects [it] seeks to know’; it is not only
‘re-creative’ but also ‘co-creative, or productive’.11 As such, a third moment is
required beyond the universal-conceptual and the historical-concrete, namely, the
normative. Hence, for Tillich, the theology of culture as the normative spiritual
science of culture is the attempt to adopt systematically the religiously normative
stance towards the meaning of culture. Its three moments correspond to the universal
forms, material content and norms of the cultural productions of the human spirit.12
Tillich’s theology of culture is thus what we might call ‘prophetic-critical’.
It can pass negative judgement on those cultural productions that can be said
to be ‘demonic’ in their distortion of their positive religious meaning or their
misidentification of their religious dimensions. And yet, Tillich’s theology of
culture can also pass positive judgement and identify and celebrate those cultural
productions replete with positive ‘kairotic’ religious meaning, even if this meaning
can often be surprising or difficult at first to discern because it differs from traditional
forms of religious life. Here, of course, and as Tillich knew only too painfully from
his exchange with Emmanuel Hirsch in 1934–5, there is great risk and potential
danger in such cultural theological endorsements of particular cultural productions.13
As a cultural being, the theologian of culture participates in cultural life and must
recognize her own situatedness. At the same time, such risk-taking is precisely the
task of the theology of culture and cannot be avoided.

8 Tillich, Theology of Culture, p. 8.

9 Paul Tillich, The System of the Sciences: According to Objects and Methods, trans. Paul
Wiebe (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1981), p. 137.
10 Tillich, The System of the Sciences, p. 137.
11 Tillich, The System of the Sciences, p. 146.
12 Nuovo, Visionary Science, p. 20.
13 See A. James Reimer, The Emanuel Hirsch and Paul Tillich Debate: A Study in the
Political Ramification of Theology (Lewiston, NY: Edward Mellen Press, 1989).
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442 Russell Re Manning

Theonomous metaphysics

With these formal structures in place, I now turn to Tillich’s concrete development of
his theology of culture in response to the spiritual situation of his time.
This is the theology of culture for which Tillich is best known and which
he continued to develop throughout his theological career with reference to a
remarkably broad range of cultural productions.14 The key feature of the material
(historical-philosophical) moment is his diagnosis of a split between culture and
religion (in the narrow sense). On the one hand is the cultural revolution of secular
autonomy driven by the modernist headlong rush towards the future after the
calamities of the recent past; on the other the religious communities are characterized
by a defensive transcendentalism, standing heteronomously against culture. Tillich
identifies the root cause of this split in the tragic estrangement of human existence
that has been further exacerbated by what he calls the ‘spirit of the industrial
society’ or otherwise ‘capitalism’. Tillich’s normative response is his call for a
synthetic theonomous metaphysics – variously manifest as ‘religious socialism’,
existentialism, expressionism and indeed theology of culture itself.15 In all of these
cases, the key is that the split between religion and culture is healed by the two being
held together (as differentiated but not split) by their common deferral to their
common ground – religion in the broad sense of being grasped by the Unconditioned,
which Tillich characterizes as their depth dimension.16

14 For an assessment of the range of Tillich’s cultural engagements, including with popular
culture, see Kelton Cobb, ‘Reconsidering the Status of Popular Culture in Tillich’s
Theology of Culture’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 63 (1995), pp.
53–84; Kelton Cobb, The Blackwell Guide to Theology and Popular Culture (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2005); and Russell Re Manning, ‘Tillich’s Theology of Art’, in Russell Re
Manning, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Paul Tillich (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009), pp. 152–72.
15 For Tillich’s clearest endorsement of religious socialism as a striving for a theonomous
society, see his essay of 1923 published in English as ‘Basic Principles of Religious
Socialism’, in Paul Tillich, Political Expectation, ed. James Luther Adam (New York:
Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 58–69; on existentialism (in connection with ‘depth
psychology’), see his 1955 essay ‘The Theological Significance of Existentialism and
Psychoanalysis’, in Theology of Culture, pp. 112–26; Tillich endorses expressionism
as the pre-eminently theonomous cultural style on numerous occasions, notably in his
programmatic lecture ‘On the Idea of a Theology of Culture’ – see Nuovo, Visionary
Science, p. 30. For more on the role of theonomy in Tillich’s theology of culture, see John
J. Carey, ed., Theonomy and Autonomy: Studies in Paul Tillich’s Engagement with
Modern Culture (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1984).
16 For a fuller account of Tillich’s theology of culture, see Russell Re Manning, Theology
at the End of Culture: Paul Tillich’s Theology of Culture and Art (Leuven: Peeters, 2005).
A related concept in Tillich’s account of the possibility of revelation through culture is
that of ‘breakthrough’ (or Durchbruch). In his earlier writings in particular, Tillich
consistently links the idea of the breakthrough of the unconditioned into the conditioned
with the possibility of a theonomous culture. A notable instance is his important 1922
essay ‘The Conquest of the Concept of Religion in the Philosophy of Religion’,
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Religious Meaning of Culture 443

This is no doubt familiar to many; but what I want to pay particular attention to
here is the predominance of the metaphors of depth and ground, and images of
substance and origins within Tillich’s theonomous metaphysics. Such is Tillich’s
emphasis on the dimension of depth that the religious meaning of culture is
effectively rendered one-dimensional: the religious meaning of culture (and of
religion) is simply identified with its dependence upon that which originates and
sustains it. It is this that is captured in his famous slogan: ‘As religion is the substance
of culture, so culture is the form of religion.’17
It goes without saying, of course, that a theology of historical revelation – in the
sense that Tillich gives to that phrase – must itself be situated historically. To affirm,
as Tillich does, that there is only one theology (of both religion and culture) is
precisely not to promote a ‘once-and-for-all-time’ theology, abstracted from the
particularities of history and hence from the dynamics of existential questions and
religious answers. Instead, Tillich’s theology contains, in John Clayton’s telling
phrase, ‘a planned obsolescence’, such that we must never succumb to the temptation
to take Tillich’s theology out of context and ‘apply’ it wholesale to new historical
situations.18 To be more specific, I think we have to accept that Tillich’s account
of the religious meaning of culture was definitively developed in the particular
historical situation of post-World War I Germany. It is, in short, a cultural theology
for a culture without a past in correlation to a revelation of the unshakeably certain
reality of God as the unconditioned ground of all that is. It is precisely this
situatedness that gives Tillich’s early theology of culture its potency. In Tillich’s
analyses of the religious meaning of socialism and the religious style of
expressionism we find some of the finest theological engagements with the cultural
situation of that time.
Moreover, and in explicit contradiction of his own methodological requirements
and notwithstanding his repeated engagements with the cultural situations
of different times in his life, throughout Tillich remained wedded to an analysis of
the religious meaning of culture that is derived definitively from the situation of the
Weimar Republic. There is a remarkable, and as such, regrettable, consistency to
Tillich’s theology of culture. This consistency lies in Tillich’s life-long conviction

published in Paul Tillich, What is Religion?, ed. James Luther Adams (New York: Harper
& Row, 1969), pp. 122–54. Tillich writes: ‘I would like to call a spiritual situation
theonomous in which all forms of spiritual life are expressions of the unconditionally-real
that breaks through in them’ (p. 150). The concept of breakthrough characterises the
dynamic through which cultural forms become transparent to their religious meaning –
their depth – and thus adds greatly to Tillich’s account of the mechanisms of the paradox
of the religious meaning of culture. It does not, however, alter the one-dimensionality of
that account. For a full evaluation of the rise and fall of Tillich’s use of the concept of
breakthrough (and the related notion of paradox), see Uwe Carsten Scharf, The
Paradoxical Breakthrough of Revelation (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1999).
17 Paul Tillich, On the Boundary (London: Collins, 1967), pp. 69–70.
18 John Clayton, The Concept of Correlation: Paul Tillich and the Possibility of a Mediating
Theology (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980), p. 5.
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444 Russell Re Manning

that the problem of his time was that of the separation of religion and culture, and that
the answer to the cleavage between the heteronomy of religion and the autonomy of
culture was to affirm a theonomous metaphysics according to which both religion
and culture are shown to be interdependently dependent on that which provides the
ground of their being and meaning. Again and again Tillich’s strategy is always to
deny both heteronomy and autonomy by deferring both to their theonomous depths.

From ‘theonomy’ to ‘Christonomy’19

This, however, is by no means the full story. And here I want to suggest a corrective
to what might otherwise sound like a rather uncharitable dismissal of Tillich’s
significance. I want to suggest that whilst one theology of culture does indeed
dominate Tillich’s thought, there are hints of a real development in his theological
diagnosis of the problem of and the solution to the religious meaning of culture in his
later years. I suggest that Tillich glimpses, but never fully discerns, that the problem
characteristic of the spiritual situation of post-World War II America is no longer
that of the split between religion and culture with their competing and seemingly
irreconcilable claims to ultimacy, but rather, is the rejection of all claims to ultimacy
per se.20 Far from the triumphant secular humanism of modernism in its celebration
of the death of God as the birth of humanity, this is the anchorless nihilism that we
have come to identify with the spiritual situation of postmodernism. Here the death
of God is not an existentialist opportunity to create new meaning but rather the blank
soullessness of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence. In such a situation all is surface and
Tillichian deferrals to dimensions of depth simply have no purchase.
In my view, Tillich shows some awareness of this new cultural situation in some
of his later writings, particularly those engaging the visual arts – always the clearest
expressions of the spiritual situation of a particular time – for instance, in 1965 in the

19 As far as I am aware, Tillich only uses this term in one writing, namely his unfinished
1913 sketch entitled ‘Systematic Theology’, in Gert Hummel and Doris Lax, eds.,
Ergänzungs- und Nachlassbände zu dem Gesammelten Werken Paul Tillichs, Band 9:
Frühe Werke (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1998), pp. 273–434.
20 Tillich does also address the situation of ‘the anxiety of doubt and meaninglessness’ as
characteristic of ‘our period’ in The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1952), pp. 171–8. However, here Tillich’s analysis is still couched in one-dimensional
terms of theonomous depth, even as he reverses the direction to talk of the ‘God above
God’ as ‘present, although hidden, in every divine-human encounter’, p. 187. In this, I
propose that Tillich remains committed to the characteristic move of his earlier theology
of culture that sought to heal the rift between cultural autonomy and religious
heteronomy through an assertion of their transcendence by theonomy, even in a situation
where cultural autonomy is manifest as existential anxiety rather than the more optimistic
humanism of the Weimar Republic period. That said, that Tillich does recognize the
seriousness of ‘radical doubt’ in the mid-century period is a significant indication of at
least some awareness of the changed spiritual situation and of the development of a
theology of culture capable of responding to this new situation.
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last lecture that he ever gave on the relation between theology and art, entitled
‘Religious Dimensions of Contemporary Art’ (University of Santa Barbara). As we
might expect, Tillich glosses the idea of religious dimensions in terms of depth as
‘conveying the basic sense of what religion means’.21 He then turns to examine
examples of the latest artistic developments – he refers inter alia to works by
Wilhelm de Kooning, George Segal, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann, Robert
Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Claues Oldenberg and José de Rivera. He seems
somewhat stumped by this art. He asks: ‘Is there something creative, original, and
brilliantly new in these works?’ and goes on to identify this novelty with their refusal
of their own actuality:
There are some fascinating, artistic elements, expressive elements in this new
art; but at the same time, one finds an element of style that is ‘nonart’. In
other realms of culture similar phenomena are emerging. There is a religion of
nonreligion . . . there is a theology that makes use of a language ‘without God’
. . . philosophy, which derives from philia loving, and Sophia wisdom, now
seeks to avoid the question of wisdom, that is, dealing with the principles of
reality and the meaning of life . . . Even music now ignores the muses, the
goddesses of art, and seeks simply to combine noises together.22
What then is the result of this encounter with ‘non-culture’? ‘[A] whole cemetery of
dead categories. And this certainly is a situation which makes us dizzy: A kind
of metaphysical dizziness grasps us.’23
Just as Tillich here gives hints of an alternative, proto-postmodern, analysis, so
too, I suggest, he also gives hints of a suitably correlative response in the perhaps
surprising form of his Christology of the New Being. The key notion here is that of
the actuality of the New Being: in contrast to Tillich’s ‘official’ theology of culture
of depth and ground, here we find a cultural theology of actuality. It is, in short, a
kairotic Christonomous metaphysics. Of course, the mention of the notion of the
kairos reminds us that this emphasis on the actualized fulfilment of the present –
the now in all its rich, unique and unrepeatable novelty – is itself nothing new to
Tillich. What perhaps becomes more explicit here, however, is a christological
emphasis that Christ as the bearer of New Being must be considered as the revelatory
norm of all historical kairoi. In an historical situation marked by the rejection of the
actualism of the present and turning increasingly towards postmodern forms of
virtuality and images of endlessly networked loops of interconnectivity, a Tillichian
theology of culture must repeatedly assert the normativity of the actual reality of the
Christ. Let me give just one example drawn from Tillich’s Bampton Lectures of 1961
on ‘Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religions’. Typically, Tillich rejects

21 Paul Tillich, ‘The Religious Dimensions of Contemporary Art’ (1965), in John

Dillenberger and Jane Dillenberger, eds., On Art and Architecture (New York: Crossroad,
1989), p. 172.
22 Tillich, Art and Architecture, p. 182.
23 Tillich, Art and Architecture, p. 182.
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446 Russell Re Manning

the idea that the encounter between religions must result in either the triumph of one
religion over the others or the end of the religious age altogether. Instead, he affirms
that Christianity must pass judgement on itself and thus break through its own
religious particularity. Here, Tillich is clear: ‘The way to achieve this is not to
relinquish one’s religious tradition for the sake of a universal concept which would
be nothing but a concept.’24
For Tillich, the Christian theologian of culture, the criterion for religious
normativity is uniquely ‘the event on which Christianity is based . . . the appearance
and reception of Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ’.25 It is this ‘image, particular yet free
from particularity, religious yet free from religion, [that provides] the criteria . . .
under which Christianity must judge itself and, by judging itself, judge also the other
religions and the quasi-religions’.26
This, then, is a Christonomous account of the religious meaning of religions, and
by extension, of all cultural productions. What Tillich presents as a criterion for
judging religions is simultaneously a norm that might be taken to characterize a
Christonomous theology of culture, in which not theonomous depth but the actuality
of the ‘New Being’ in the historical event of Jesus as the Christ responds correlatively
to the situation of ‘presentlessness’. As such then, Tillich’s Christology can be read
as an implicit theology of culture, articulating the religious meaning of culture (and
religions) in terms that refuse the ‘essentialist/particularist’ either/or by presenting
instead the norm of Jesus as the Christ as the bearer of New Being as uniquely able
to straddle ‘Lessing’s ditch’ and provide an historical ground of meaning and being
in the conquest of existential estrangement.27
A Christonomous theology of culture thus emphasizes the dimension of
actuality within cultural productions against a cultural autonomy that denies such
spiritual freedom and against a religious heteronomy that can only repeat an
ahistorical particularity. Just as Tillich finds theonomous cultural promise in the
political and aesthetic styles of religious socialism and expressionism, so perhaps
(taking our cue from Mark C. Taylor) we might identify a Christonomous religious
culture in emergentist networks of complexity and in the disfiguring style of post-
expressionist artists, such as Anselm Kiefer, Micheal Heizer and Michelangelo
Pistoletto.28 Such cultural productions are both at home within their historical
situation – they are of their time – and yet they equally point beyond it, transforming
it into a manifestation of that which it typically denies, namely the possibility of the
actual and, as such, the ‘conquering of the estrangement of actual existence’.29 That

24 Paul Tillich, ‘Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religions’ (1961), in
Ausgewählte Texte, p. 453.
25 Tillich, Ausgewählte Texte, p. 446.
26 Tillich, Ausgewählte Texte, p. 447.
27 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. II (London: SCM Press, 1957), pp. 112–16.
28 Mark C. Taylor, Dis-figuring: Art, Architecture and Religion (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992).
29 Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. II, p. 137.
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Religious Meaning of Culture 447

phrase, tellingly, comes from Tillich’s account of the newness of the New Being in
Systematic Theology, part III, chapter XVIII.
Here Tillich’s theology of culture functions by showing forth neither the
possibility nor even the necessity of ultimacy but by showing forth its actuality to a
culture without an ultimate concern. In many ways, Tillich is, in effect, enacting that
most subversive postmodern strategy against postmodernity itself, namely, turning to
its unprethinkable other: the historical revelation of a pure present moment. It is
important to recognize how this Christonomous theology of culture differs from
Tillich’s theonomous theology of culture. Gone is the appeal to religion as the depth
dimension of the human spirit; in its place is a new concept of religion as the eruption
of novelty within the human spirit. In contrast to the emphasis within Tillich’s
official theology of culture on the Unconditioned as the ground of being and
meaning, in Tillich’s ‘second’ theology of culture the central emphasis is on Jesus as
the Christ as the bearer of new being and meaning. We might say that what we have
here is not so much a theonomous metaphysics as a Christonomous metaphysics, in
which the revealed religious norm of Christ takes centre stage over the revealed
religious norm of the Unconditioned (or God the Father).

Towards ‘Pneumanomy’

Thus far I have argued for the existence within Tillich’s own writings of a second
normative dimension to his theological analysis of the religious meaning of culture,
characterized as the Christonomous dimension of actuality in response to the cultural
crisis of presence in the postmodern rejection of ultimate concern. In this I have
gone beyond Tillich’s own ‘official’ formula of theology of culture in an attempt to
advance a Tillichian account of the religious meaning of culture that can address
itself to the change in the spiritual situation from post-World War I Germany
to post-World War II America, characterized as a shift from competing claims to
ultimacy to a thoroughgoing rejection of ultimacy per se. In what follows, I extend
this argument one step further to consider what a ‘neo-Tillichian’ theology of culture
might look like in today’s spiritual situation. As already advertised, my suggestion is
that what is required is a pneumanomous metaphysics that identifies the religious
meaning as the utopian dimension of a spiritual situation characterized by a culture
without a future.
Of course, as is the case with all such historical-philosophical analyses of the
concrete material of any culture, my diagnosis of the existential-spiritual questions
raised by our contemporary situation must be somewhat provisional. Reading the
signs of the times is a risky enterprise. And yet, it is also an obligation for anyone
who wishes to undertake theology at all, in the Tillichian mode.
Our current spiritual situation is post-postmodern and marked above all by the
tight grip of global financial capitalism on our cultural imagination. The second
naïveté of postmodernism’s confidence in the liberating potentialities of post-
metaphysical flux – the directionless erring that so inspires postmodern cultural
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theologians such as Mark C. Taylor – has given way to a return of metaphysics

and the resurgence of particular religions.30 Much to the surprise of many, the self-
denying forms of religion, theology and philosophy that Tillich glimpsed in the
1960s have been replaced by more self-assertive successors. From the dominant
trope of postmodern ironism a new seriousness is emerging and new forms of realism
are being developed – from religion and theology to philosophy and science the idea
of ultimacy is no longer off limits. The real, it seems, is once more thinkable.31
And yet, such a resurgent realism conceals a hidden ideological commitment.
There is one single particular ultimate concern that informs the cultural imagination
of our age, either explicitly or implicitly, namely ‘capitalist realism’.32 Post-industrial
financial capitalism has become for our times the only reality imaginable. It is a ‘no
alternative’ capitalism that quite simply blocks all possible alternatives. That the
global financial system is inherently unstable and in a state of perpetual crisis does
nothing to undermine our faith in its unquestionable reality. In fact, what the recent
– and current – financial crises show all the more clearly is rather that we simply
cannot imagine an alternative and that we have no choice but to keep playing the
same game. As the Eurozone economies are finding out, one after another, the
solution to their serious debt crisis can only be to borrow more. As we are repeatedly
told, the alternatives are quite literally ‘unthinkable’. A similar point can be
made about the global environmental crisis and the deeply entrenched structural
inequalities between the developed and the developing worlds. In both cases the
common consensus is clear: global financial capitalism is simultaneously the cause
of the problem and the only realistic solution. Such capitalist realism has an infinite
capacity to absorb and even value its apparent alternatives; even anti-capitalism has
become a brand that in effect plays by the rules of that which it aims to subvert.
In short, whereas for the spiritual situation of the early twentieth century the
crisis of culture was the crisis of a culture without a past, teetering permanently
on the cusp of the modernist new in the name of autonomous self-assertion,
and for the mid-to-late-twentieth century the cultural crisis was of a culture
without a present, endlessly looping in the postmodernist spiral of the rejection
of closure, we today in the twenty-first century are experiencing the crisis of a
culture without a future, subject only to the ultimate authority of the speculative
materialism of the market.

30 For Taylor’s classic embrace of the postmodern situation for theology, see Mark C.
Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
31 To single out one particular aspect of this ‘new realism’, it is striking how much
continental philosophy, for instance, has turned against its previously anti-realist stance
towards an embrace of what has become known as ‘speculative realism’. See Lee Brave,
A Thing of this World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 2007) and L. Bryant, N. Srnicek and G. Harman, eds.,
The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (Melbourne: re.press, 2011).
32 See Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Ropley: 0 Books, 2009)
and Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then As Farce (London: Verso, 2009).
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Of course, this analysis of the centrality of the spirit of capitalism to our spiritual
situation would be familiar to Paul Tillich. Indeed, Tillich’s ‘religious socialism’ is
precisely his powerfully suggestive cultural theological response to a remarkably
similar situation.33 We, however, can no longer follow Tillich’s ‘socialist decision’
with its hopeful synthesis of expectation and origin.34 For Tillich, the prospects for
the future of religious socialism were far from guaranteed, and yet he was bold
enough to hope (even in 1933) in the victory of socialism.
Here the difference between Tillich’s situation and ours becomes apparent. Our
future is no longer threatened by the power of a romantic myth of origin to which we
can oppose an expectation of an alternative future. Instead, we are trapped in the
endlessly repeating present of the global financial system. For all its language of
‘futures’ and ‘derivatives’, the spirit of today’s capitalism and the political and
cultural forms that go with it do not allow for future-thinking.
In this situation, my suggestion is that we must move beyond Tillich to
formulate a ‘neo-Tillichian’ normative theology of culture to expose the religious
meaning of our contemporary culture through what I call its ‘utopian dimension’
under the guiding revelatory norm of the Spirit. By the idea of a utopian dimension
I mean to invoke the impossible idea of a ‘no place’ (ou-topos) rather than the
perfectionist ideal of a ‘good place’ (eu-topos). On such a view, utopia is impossible
and utopian imaginings are precisely imaginings of the impossible. As Tillich’s
one-time doctoral student, Theodor Adorno, enigmatically puts it: ‘Utopia is blocked
off by possibility . . . that is why is seems abstract in the midst of things’.35
For such an impossibilist utopianism, the idea of utopia is uniquely able to
provide a critical perspective from which to respond to the otherwise unshakable
hegemony of the status quo. By dwelling deliberately and unapologetically in the

33 See Paul Tillich, The Socialist Decision, trans. Franklin Sherman (New York: Harper and
Row, 1977).
34 For a sustained evaluation of Tillich’s ‘critical interpretation of capitalistic modernity as
a key to his social thought’, see Francis Ching-Wah Yip, Capitalism as Religion? A Study
of Paul Tillich’s Interpretation of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2010), p. 11. Yip’s important study rightly recognizes the centrality of Tillich’s
critique of capitalism beyond his early explicit writings in religious socialism and
avers that Tillich’s interpretation of capitalism ‘remains current’ notwithstanding the
transformations of capitalism since Tillich’s day. However, in presenting Tillich’s
critique as directed towards ‘capitalist modernity’ as a more generic description of
the cultural situation of the historical epoch of the ‘modern age’, Yip emphasizes the
continuities between the most recent forms of capitalism and their precursors. As such,
his analysis does not address the application of a Tillichian critique to our contemporary
situation, as is attempted in the present article. That said, Yip does propose a critical
‘enhancement’ of Tillich’s position by incorporating insights from Jürgen Moltmann and
Émile Durkheim to address Tillich’s alleged ‘Eurocentrism’ and his ‘asocial’ conception
of religion, see pp. 109–48.
35 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life (London: Verso,
2005), p. 57.
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dialectical confrontation with the real, such utopianism can provide that which realist
alternatives cannot, namely an escape from the embrace of the present. In its very
impossibility utopia opens up an unthinkable otherness.36
As before, the crucial move here is the recognition that such pneumanomy
stands both with and beyond the dominant forms of contemporary cultural
autonomy, transforming it from capitalist realism’s seamless occupation of
the horizons of the possible to an openness to the miracle of the impossibility
of the future. Similarly, rejecting new heteronomies that envisage a nostalgic
return to an alternative pre-capitalist imagination, the pneumanomous emphasis on
the utopian dimension of culture pushes us towards the, in principle, unimaginable
reality of the future.37
Of course, in invoking the concept of utopia, I am aware that Tillich himself
explicitly engaged with the question of what he called ‘The Political Meaning of
Utopia’ in a series of lectures delivered to the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik in
Berlin in the summer of 1951.38 In these lectures Tillich takes a characteristically
dialectical approach to the question of utopia which he argues has ‘a foundation in
man’s being’.39 After assessing the positive and negative meanings of utopia he turns
in conclusion to what he calls the ‘transcendence of utopia’.40 Here Tillich refers
to a state of radical uncertainty where ‘what lies beyond reality – what has not
yet become reality – lies still beyond the decision of whether it is possible or

36 For more on the idea of utopia and its importance for a Tillichian theology of history
see Patrick Vieira and Michael Marder, eds., Existential Utopia: New Perspectives on
Utopian Thought (London: Continuum, 2012); Gabriel Vahanian, Paul Tillich and the
New Religious Paradigm (Aurora, CO: The Davies Group, 2004); Ronald H. Stone, ‘On
the Boundary of Utopia and Politics’, in Manning, ed., The Cambridge Companion to
Paul Tillich, pp. 208–22; and Russell Re Manning, ‘Utopia: The Theology of History and
the Miracle of the Future’, in Marc Dumas and Martin Leiner, eds., Paul Tillich
interprète de l’histoire (Münster: LIT Verlag, in press, 2013).
37 As such, this approach presents an alternative to both the secular and religious
versions of new heteronomy within political theology represented, notwithstanding their
differences, by Žižek, Critchley and Milbank. See Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing:
Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012); Simon
Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (London: Verso,
2012); and John Milbank, The Future of Love: Essays in Political Theology (London:
SCM Press, 2009).
38 This, of course, is far from the only place that Tillich engages with the question of utopia.
See Stone, ‘On the Boundary of Utopia and Politics’, for a full discussion of the recurrent
importance of the idea of utopia for Tillich, from his earliest writings in the philosophy
and theology of history. For his later reflections on the inadequacy and danger of
utopianism, see Systematic Theology, vol. III, pp. 354–5. Interestingly, the conception
of utopia that Tillich unequivocally rejects in this context is a ‘progressive’ utopianism
that aims to realize an earthly fulfilment of history; he does not consider the
‘impossibilist’ alternative as advocated in this present article.
39 Paul Tillich, ‘The Political Meaning of Utopia’, in Tillich, Political Expectation, p. 126.
40 Tillich, Political Expectation, p. 173.
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impossible, and for this reason utopia is always and necessarily suspended
between possibility and impossibility’.41 For Tillich, utopia points towards a further
dimension of reality: the dimension of its self-transcendence towards its future
fulfilment. It is this utopian dimension that I suggest should inform the normative
metaphysics of a neo-Tillichian response to a spiritual situation marked by the
all-embracing dominance of one form of ultimate concern.
Correlated to the revelatory aspect of the Holy Spirit, such a pneumanomous
theology of culture identifies the religious meaning of culture as its openness
towards an alternative future. As with the use of the term ‘Christonomy’ to invoke
the religious meaning of culture through the dimension of the actuality of culture,
so my use of the term ‘pneumanomy’ intends to invoke the religious meaning
of culture through its utopian dimension. Once again this is to complement
Tillich’s tendency to collapse these different dimensions into the one dimension
of theonomous depth.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I recognize that by extending Tillich’s theology of culture from a

theonomous metaphysics of the depth dimension of culture to a multidimensional
normative metaphyiscs of theonomy, Christonomy and pneumanomy I have certainly
taken us ‘beyond Paul Tillich’. I have done so, though, on the basis established by
Tillich’s formal requirements for theology as theology of culture and in response to
spiritual situations that differ markedly from that which was so richly formative
for Tillich himself.
I close with just one more suggestion. On the first occasion that Tillich spoke at
Harvard – in the 1935 Dudleian Lecture – he developed an early version of his
famous concept of correlation. In proposing ‘a simile that is more than a simile’,
Tillich ventures that:
Revelation is an answer which is understandable only if there has been
a question . . . questioning for revelation must precede revelation, but this
questioning is not possible without a certain knowledge of the subject for which
the question is asked. That means: the questioning for revelation presupposes
revelation, and conversely: they are dependent on each other.42
As such, we might conclude that the normative metaphysics that is theology must
itself presuppose both a questioning for revelation and a receipt of revelation; and
that as a Christian theology of culture, Tillich’s must always be formed both by the
cultural questions of human historical existence and by the answers of the Christian
– trinitarian – divine revelation. For the Christian theologian therefore, the religious

41 Tillich, Political Expectation, p. 173.

42 Tillich, Ausgewählte Texte, p. 272.
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meaning of culture must always be multidimensional, in accordance with the

trinitarian norms of Christian historical revelation as they correlate to specific
concrete historical situations. This, then, is the ongoing task of the theology of
culture: to articulate the multidimensional normative religious meaning of culture
with Paul Tillich and beyond.

© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd