Abstract

This book is a detailed and challenging brief for the view that Paul Tillich was fundamentally an atheist seeking to convert fellow Christians to the humanistic faith to which he himself was converted in his days as a university student. The "God above God" is simply humanity; and an ultimate concern which is not demonic must be one that is "transparent to humanity," that really amounts to a devotedness to all of humanity. The author does not write this from the viewpoint of a theist protesting Tillich's views, but from that of an atheist rather dubious about the advantages of his method. While the strategic use of ambiguity and obscure symbols is said to have enabled Tillich to work within Christianity for the subversion of belief in any God above man and nature, his work seems oddly to have provided less penetrating readers with motives for retaining their supernatural beliefs. The author is an economist and political scientist, not a philosopher or theologian. Still he has studied Tillich and his sources carefully, and in his study he gives a good survey of the literature about Tillich. In this survey he underlines the interesting point that most orthodox theists find Tillich a believer, but immensely obscure; while most atheistic interpreters find it very clear that Tillich is an atheist. The author does not have an especially subtle understanding of the classical expression of theism. For example, he finds "the crucial question" to be: Does being itself have mental attributes resembling those of a person? But his weaknesses here do not totally invalidate the work: Wheat assigns a very large defensive task to theistic interpreters of Tillich.--R. D. L.