I52 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
old as the problem of the relation of lived experience to conceptualized experience. In our religious tradition it is the relation of Jerusalem to Athens, the relation of the living God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Jesus, and Paul to the God of the philosophers. Philosophy of religion has been more of a philosophy of God, in fact, a theology in the literal sense, namely a logic of God, than a philosophy of religion -more a philosophy of essence than of existence.
Plato divided the world, on the one hand, into the world of essences, forms, the world of permanence, the real world and true object of knowledge, and on the other, into the world of flux, the sensory space-time world, the world of appearance which could only yield opinion. In spite of Plato's persistent desire to bring the world of forms and the world of lived experience together, he left us with the primacy of the world of essence and forms and drew us into a philosophy of essentialism. And thanks to Aristotle, whatever our criticisms may be of his general philosophy, the forms, as we say, were brought down to earth, to the world of existence. Unfortunately, although he brought the forms down into the space-time world, God became farther removed from human existence than was the case in the thought of Plato. Both Plato and Aristotle draw us into a philosophical tradition in which God is met at the end of a line of argument as an allegedly necessary part of a metaphysical system. This has had a strong influence on the philosophical tradition and I think Tillich is right in saying there are especially two different ways of doing philosophy of religion, the ontological and cosmological, and that in the latter, arguing from the effects in nature, we meet a stranger, not the living God of the human situation. Dramatically, but also very provocatively, he says the one way is the way of overcoming estrangement, and the other the way of meeting a stranger. 1
The challenge from existentialism is not whether the existence of God can be demonstrated but how the human situation gives rise to religious consciousness. It is not so much the "that" of God as an abstracted supreme entity or principle, but the "how" of God related to man's concrete existence. The challenge is once again, in a new way, to look at the relation of lived experience and the conceptualized world and show how this leads us to the role of symbol and 1 Tillich, P., Theology of Culture, New York, I959, p. Io.