Where do we have to look if we want to paint a picture of Christianity's encounter with world religions. The concept of faith that allows for such a large expansion of the meaning of the term is as follows. This conflict can be avoided if the driving force is national war defense.
During the periods of their heroic struggle against the despotism of the past, their quasi-religious character was evident, as was their religious background. We kept the considerations of the two actual types of religion - the theistic and the non-theistic - in the background. The dramatic nature of the current encounter between world religions is brought about by the attacks of the quasi-religions on the real religions, both theistic and non-theistic.
And the same must be said of the Greek Orthodox Church in Eastern Europe and of. Nationalism in the modern sense of the word can only arise when secular criticism has dissolved the system. The "invasion" of Russia by its own communist intelligentsia was one of the great events in the meeting of the world's religions.
The similarity lies in the identity of the invaded group and the structural analogy between the Mohammedan religion and the.
Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religions by Paul Tillich
Christian Principles of Judging Non-Christian Religions
In the second case, some statements and actions of one or the other party are considered false, others true. The demonic cruelty of the former is contrasted with the comparative gentleness of the latter. In early Christianity the judgment of other religions was determined by the idea of the Logos.
The Church Fathers emphasized the universal presence of the Logos, the Word, the principle of divine self. They tried to show the convergent lines between the Christian message and the intrinsic quest of the pagan religions. At the level of theological thought, they took in some of the highest conceptualizations of Christianity.
The Hellenistic and, more indirectly, the classical Greek sense of life -- terms such as physis (nature), hypostasis (substance), ousia (power of being), prosopon (persona, not a person in our sense) and above all logos (word and rational structure in the later Stoic sense). Semitism, which was - and still is - one of the many components of a radicalized nationalist quasi-religion. But Christianity's meeting of new and old world religions during the Crusades didn't just work for the fanatics.
Schleiermacher gives a construction of the history of religions in which Christianity has the highest place in the highest type of religions. Any relativistic attitude towards world religions was condemned as a negation of the absolute truth of Christianity. The answer presupposes a discussion of Christianity's relationship to the secular realm in general.
The general attitude of the Christian churches towards the secular empire determines their judgment on the quasi-religions that arose on the basis of secularism. Its positive appreciation of the secular makes the relationship of Protestantism to the quasi-religions much more dialectical and even ambiguous. Only in the late nineteenth century did the nationalism of the newly founded German Empire come into conflict with the Roman Church.
It is a symptom of Protestantism's openness to the danger of what might be called nationalist apostasy. Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religions by Paul Tillich World Religions by Paul Tillich.
A Christian-Buddhist Conversation
Such an effort is perhaps the most difficult one in the comparative study of religions, but if successful, it is the most fruitful for understanding the seemingly incomprehensible jungle that religious history presents to the inquiring mind. The tension drives both towards conflicts and beyond the conflicts towards possible unions of the polar elements. For example, in the problem of the relationship of Christianity and Buddhism, Hegelian dialectic views Buddhism as an early stage of the religious development that is now total.
Therefore, the decisive point in a dialogue between two religions is not the historically determined, conditional embodiment of. Under the method of dynamic typology, any dialogue between religions is accompanied by a silent dialogue within the representatives of each. At the same time, it provides an example of the encounter and conflict between the elements of the sacred within each particular religion.
One of the important points that applies to all discussions today between representatives of true religions is the constant reference to quasi-religions and their secular background. It is a question of the intrinsic goal of existence -- in Greek, the telos of all existing things. This is where any interfaith debate should begin, not by comparing opposing concepts of God or man or history or salvation.
They can all be understood in their specific character if the specific character of their concept of telos is understood. In the telos formula of the Greek philosophers was their entire vision of man and the world. But the dialogue continues, and the question is asked whether the nature of the sacred has not forced both sides to incorporate, at least implicitly, elements that predominate on the other side.
According to our derivation of all religious types from elements in the experience of the saint, this is unthinkable, and there are indications in the history of both symbols that converging tendencies exist. But here too a warning must be given against mixing or diminishing the concrete character of both religions. An analogous attitude in Hinduism, which also depends on the principle of identity, is the treatment of the higher animals, the prohibition of killing them, and the belief, connected with the doctrine of Karma, that human souls in the process of migration can be embodied in animals.
Under the predominance of the symbol of the kingdom of God, history is not only the stage where the fate of individuals is decided, but. With regard to the state of the future, this means that the symbol of the Kingdom of God has a revolutionary character.
Christianity Judging Itself In the Light of its Encounter with the
The way to this point is through participation, but how can one participate in a past event? It is possible, through participation, to discover in the appearance of Christ in history the criteria by which Christianity must judge itself, but it is also possible to miss them. 34; Christianity and the Meeting of the World's Religions." In the second chapter we discussed two tensions in Christian self-interpretation, the first that determined Christianity's relationship to the religions proper, and the second that determined the relationship of Christianity to the religions themselves, the quasi-religions.
Both tensions arise from the nature of the event on which Christianity is based. The worst consequence of this tendency was the schism of the church during the Reformation period and. The solution of the race problem in Islam and its wisdom in dealing with primitive peoples are on two points.
We discussed Christianity's judgment against itself based on the judgment it received from without. This struggle is quite strong in the Old Testament, where it is strongest in the attack. The ritual element was devalued by the Reformation both in the theology of the great reformers and evangelical radicals.
What remained was a philosophical concept of God as bearer of the moral imperative. Cult and myth disappear in eighteenth-century philosophy, and the Church is redefined by Kant as a society with moral purposes. The main argument used in the counterattacks is the observation that the loss of cult and myth is the loss of the revelatory experience on which all religion is based.
As one of the symptoms of this struggle, we mentioned the opposition to the concept of religion in the philosophy of religion. For these people, Christianity became an expression of ultimate meaning in the actions of our daily lives. This would mean that Christianity would judge itself when it judges others in the present meeting of world religions.