The Reconciliation between the Sacred and the Profane in Paul Tillich’s Vision

Abstract

The philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich’s writings were concerned with the connection between Christianity and the secular culture. Thus, a human being is a religious, people’s activity has a religious significance, religion is actually identified with people’s spiritual life, and their 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. 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 which 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.