Ultimate Concern and Finitude: Schelling’s Philosophy of Religion and Paul Tillich’s Systematic Theology

Abstract

ly represented in bygone forms of Christian belief. McGrath sees the consumerism of late capitalist societies as an inversion of Schelling’s hope, with love and sharing replaced by self-improvement and accumulation (McGrath 2014, 69-78). 4 Tillich’s early essays emphasized the dramatic tension (the inclusion in and self-separation from divine being) between human consciousness and God, while Systematic Theology speaks of the groundless divine nature as the impossibility of nonbeing overcoming being. The former approach is epitomized in the 1809 Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, where a ‘fall’ (or self-separation) from the absolute precipitates a cleavage between spirit and nature, which humankind henceforth takes to be its habitat, while the latter expresses the culmination of the philosophy of identity, as expressed in the 1804 Würzburg System (see Vater 2014, 135-43).