'Myth of Origin,' Civil Religion and Presidential Politics

Abstract

During the decades of the 1950s and 1960s Paul Tillich was widely considered the premier American theological inter preter of culture. Since his death in 1965 this view has steadily yielded to the power of American faddism, which finds Tillich's thought no longer fashionable. Even current citations of the writings of Paul Tillich are too often nothing more than polite, lackluster forms of homage to a departed master of a past epoch. A very notable exception to this trend is a recent work of Lang don Gilkey, called simply Gilkey on Tillich.1 While Gilkey was a former student of Tillich, the book is far more than an affection ate salute to a great teacher. For in this compact overview of Tillich's thought, Gilkey persuasively argues that the key ele ments of Tillich's method and insights, once suitably reworked, continue to throw important theological light on many of the urgent problems and challenges of our times. Like Gilkey, this author also numbers among those theolo gians who have never been persuaded that Tillich's theology is out of date or that his major insights are no longer relevant to contemporary concerns. One such insight is Tillich's notion of Myth of Origin — an idea that served him as an important hermeneutic tool in his 1933 German work, The Socialist Deci sion (Die Sozialistishe Entscheidung). In this pivotal work of the Weimar period, Tillich argues that all political thought is rooted in human nature itself, which ultimately means in that most distinctive feature of humanity called consciousness. Human consciousness reveals a duality between its sense of