Reconcilierea dintre sacru și profan în viziunea lui Paul Tillich

Abstract

The philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich’s writings were
concerned with the connection between Christianity and secular culture. Thus, the
human person is a religious being, people’s activity has a religious significance,
religion is actually identified with their spiritual life, and people’s spiritual concerns
have a religious importance. But paradoxically, religion has found itself in the
strange situation of being confined to its own specific realm, different from the
secular one. But this weird split between the sacred and the profane will be
removed in the future that the Book of Revelation tells us about. Tillich highlights
the idea that the rupture between the sacred and the profane is neither possible nor
acceptable from a biblical point of view, the two realms being in a relationship of
harmonious interpenetration, and not of juxtaposition or opposition. Any attempt
to separate the secular from the sacred realm is the consequence and salient proof
of the deplorable situation in which the fallen man finds himself. This state of
division and conflict that we are currently witnessing is completely unnatural, as he
further argues: Paul Tillich disassociates himself equally from the extremist
positions of secularism and ecclesiastic imperialism. Just as he is not a supporter of
the divorce between the divine and the mundane, Paul Tillich also tries to find the
coordinates of a just relationship between religion and culture.