Georg Raatz

Why is religion vulnerable to fundamentalism? This question plays no significant role in the current empiric and historical rather than religio-theoretical research. At first the article reconstructs structures of Tillich’s concept of religious fundamentalism in his later works. In a second step it scrutinizes elements of Tillich’s Religionsphilosophie (1925), which are relevant to a theory of the conditions of the possibility of religious fundamentalism, even to the present debate. The central thesis is: Religious fundamentalism grounds on the confusion of absoluteness with relativeness.