Negation in Mahayana Buddhism and in Tillich: A Buddhist View of ‘The Significance of the History of Religion for the Systematic Theologian’

Abstract

In his final lecture, ‘The Significance of the History of Religions for the Systematic Theologian’, Paul Tillich clearly expressed a hope to write a new Systematic Theology in dialogue with the whole history of religion. Toward the end of that lecture he stated:

My own Systematic Theology was written before these seminars [joint seminars with Mircea Eliade] and had another intention, namely the apologetic discussion against and with the secular. Its purpose was the discussion or the answering of questions coming from the scientific and philosophical criticism of Christianity. But perhaps we need a longer, more intensive period of interpenetration of systematic theological study and religious historical studies.