Paul Tillich och Verkligheten : Är Bibelberättelserna "bara" symboler

Sammanfattning: In this essay I have aimed to examine how the theology of Paul Tillich relate to modern views of reality, both the way it was expressed in his contemporary time and the way I see it today. Reality I have defined as an entirety of the physic- and metaphysic reality. A so called panentism where God is reality and the world is a part of this reality. With Tillichs Systematic Theology as my principal material, I have first made a brief presentation of his theology, of its construction and main concepts. Then I have chosen to further examine the way he describes being, reason and revelation to see how this particular concepts of Tillich agree with my definition of reality. In this I have consulted the books Tillich in Dialogue by Mackenzie-Brown and Natural Theology Versus Theology of Nature, a book edited after the forth international Tillich symposium 1992, which had "Tillichs thinking as impetus for a discourse among theology, philosophy and natural sciences" as a theme. I have tried to point out the possibilities opened up by the ontology and epistemology of Tillich for the dialogue between theology and natural sciences. I have also claimed that his model of being as a unit of physics and metaphysics and his description of the human mind and existential premises, do fit well together with our contemporary scientific descriptions of these territories, thereby suggesting that his theology can function as a bridge between theology and other sciences. In my examination of the way Tillich see the concept of revelation I have, with the help of Avery Dulles Models of revelation, compared him with some other modern theologians and found that his view in emphasizing the symbolic interpretation follows the main theological school of today. Nevertheless I have criticised this view of Tillich because it, in my opinion, to much marginalize the historicity in the biblical stories.