On the Philosophy of Religion

Reading Paul Tillich's book 'What is Religion' recently brought a lot of new insights. Of course one can regard Heidegger and Husserl as phenomenologists searching for essents or primal cores of being, yet Tillich wrote that metaphysics is fundamentally a religious act.Tillich differentiated a greater physics of the unknown from the transcendent mysticism or metaphysics that one might find in' The Cloud of Unknowing' or even contemplations of monism as a manifestation of God.

The philosophy of religion is a philosophical activity-intensely so, and Tillich explains very well  how that is so. Jesus Christ as a transcendent human being is obviously philosophically relevant, since philosophers search for the truth in what exists. In some regards true religion is one with the deeper philosophical insights into reality. The cultural manifestations of religion in some instances have more in common with culture than with the mystic or rational philosophical insights that one may have.

One example is that of the great neo-Platonist named Plotinus who wrote the Enneads on The One. Like other neo-Platonists he had an awareness of the mystical heyschasm of direct insight into the nature of The One transcending experience. The Orthodox authorities of course eventually declared heyschasm to be heresy on the premise that one cannot have a direct revelation of God.

That is a different problem than the philosophy of religion of course. Yet I can imagine driving a car through Utah and suddenly experiencing a different Universe where the profound Spirit of Truth has a presence before descending back into the integrated beingness of 'this world'. That kind of experience could be described as direct revelation  yet possible not for The Spirit is a presence yet not directly perceived even in a paranormal space-time context that is itself something of a revelation something like Swedenborg might have described.

Tillich's delineation of the philosophy of religion in an ontology different from the critical-analytical paradigm for science, the phenomenalism of philosophers such as Hegel and  Kant and the pragmatists does afford the opportunity to select for-oneself the sort of worldview to develop. Well, there may be some danger in writing about Jesus Christ in a philosophical area I suppose-atheists can make their way into such places perhaps from the background of the pragmatist sect of secularists regarding thought as a temporal manifestation without significance except as it serves to perfect human existence. There were and are philosophers that are simply cognitive nominalists wiithout a trace of Platonism.

Philosophically minded people should tolerate opinions including mentions of Jesus Christ affirmatively even if they don't rise to the level of 'preaching'. It might have been fun to do some preaching as did Ralph Waldo Emerson part-time of course. That opportunity doesn't arise in the humble writings of some philosophers. One can consider the party line, the thought police, the C.P.S.U. caliber media or the cynics and discern existential modes of behavior that it is possible to be philosophical about, yet a philosophy of religion has a deeper human interest since it transcends our own grounds of existence as physics beings with a mind thinking in-the-world.