Abstract

The famed author of Systematic Theology, the vast synthesis of philosophy of culture and existentialist anthropology, of the history of religions and of the Christian Churches’ dogmatics, often acknowledged his debt to the philosophy of F. W. J. Schelling. With the translation of these his Schelling dissertations, his philosophy thesis at Breslau in 1910 and his theology thesis at Halle in 1912 respectively, the American scholar will be able to better assess Tillich’s rehabilitation of the post-Kantian idealists’ notion of ‘philosophical religion.’ In these early works, one sees Tillich formulating notions that will remain central to his thought, viz. revelation as an historical process, mediated through mythology and the history of religions; being and revelation as a progression of stages or ‘potencies’; and the concept of human spirituality as a dialectic of freedom and being, in which freedom is meant to definitively win out over the unfreedom of nature and take command over being.