Are Christian Symbols Necessary?
Student: Dr. Tillich, one difficulty I have is in seeing how we are going to combat secularism with a symbol-less and apparently content-less religion as compared with the old creeds, which admittedly may have gone too far in the other direction and become narrow. How are we going to combat a vibrant faith with plenty of content in it, like Communism, with a highly abstract, highly intellectualized sort of Christian theology in which the old symbols have been destroyed? It seems to me that you do make a distinction between signs and symbols, and that you admit that symbols, especially the central symbols of faith, do not simply point to the divine reality but in some degree participate in that reality. This is especially true of the symbols pertaining to Christ. And certainly the traditional religion of Christianity has not been a religion of the symbol. It has been the religion of a person, very much so, and in this respect is quite different from the mythical religions of the East. T
