BOOK REVIEWS The Protestant Era. By PAUL TILLICH. Translated and with a Concluding Essay by James Luther Adams. Chicago: University of ·Chicago Press, 1948. Pp. 354, with index. $4.00. Der Glaube bei Emil Brunner. By LoRENZ VoLKEN. Fribourg, Switzezrland : Paulusverlag, 1947. Pp. 242. Fr. 10.20. The Religion of Philosophers. By JAMEs H. DuNHAM. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1947. Pp. 314, with index. $4.00. Protestant theology has held little attraction for the contemporary intellectual . His speculative interest, when he has it, moves much more to philosophy and to theoretical science than to genuine theology, and Belloc was standing on historical fact when he said that there is not enough intellectualism left in modern man to formulate a genuine heresy. Maritain has recently remarked that he did not see how the philosophical spirit of modern man can develop any further in the direction it has been pursuing. Meanwhile, in direct opposition to the naturalist belief that the acceptance of the ultimate stifles the spirit of inquiry, traditional philosophy and theology continue to grow. Nothing is more inexhaustible than the ultimate. Protestantism began as a protest. The philosophical counterpart of this fact would probably be translated as a Kritik. Kant and later Kierkegaard were typical expressions of the Protestant spirit, and the one by his formalism , the other by his polemic against Speculation, have given a deeper dye to the subjectivism latent in Protestant theology since its origin, shrinking the area of genuine intellectual discussion until religion has come to mean l).Othing in the way of dogma but simply Kantian " good will " or Kierkegaardian " passion." It is not startling that there are few original intellects in modern Protestantism and that the intellects which are most prominent are anti-intellectual. Religion without dogma is like a frame without a picture. Paul Tillich, an exile from Nazi Germany, has been on the faculty at Union Theological Seminary, New York. One of the most prolific of Protestant theologians, he represents Evangelical Theology and is broadly associated with its dialectical wing, whose most prominent spokesman is Karl Barth. The Protestant Era is a collection of his essays and speeches over a period of almost a quarter century, translated from the German by James Luther Adams who supplies a concluding essay on what Tillich is trying to say. _ Like Niebuhr, Tillich is gravely concerned with cultural and social problems , but it is not exactly clear just how this social-consciousness is born of his more fundamental principles. He is fascinated by the movement of history, by fate, necessity, and freedom, and yet he nowhere alludes to the historical underpinning of his own Protestant message. He envisions a BOOK REVIEWS kind of Christian socialism as an ideal and even possible society emerging from the present world crisis, but at the same time his theological background must foment radical individualism among men rather than a public landscape of social agreement. If there is any theme threading through this book, it is the application of the so-called Protestant principle, justification by faith alone, but it is never quite clear just what kind of faith it is, what are its contents, and how it is grounded. Faith on Protestant premises ought to be just an act, without specification by an object, and a principle that is simply a protest ought not to be called a principle. It really has nothing to enunciate. The present is part of the Protestant era, Tillich holds, but when and if the era passes, the Protestant principle will remain, adapting itself to the new historical situation. But where, as Plato said, does this argument lead? It certainly makes man the servant of history and the so-called timeless, a toy of time. Even in the matter of morals which is about all that is left of Protestantism, it makes religion an affair of circumstance more than a subscription to unchanging principle. There is a note of Barth in such an analysis-the same kind of reasoning, or lack of it, which led Barth to take a stand against Hitler but to refuse a similar protest against Soviet barbarism in Eastern Europe. It is pragmatism; it is atomism; it is even...