This book presents Paul Tillich at his very best--brief, clear, stimulating, provocative. Speaking with understanding and force, he makes a basic analysis of love, power, and justice, all concepts fundamental in the mutual relations of people, of social groups, and of humankind to God.

The thesis of the book is that modern man, freed from the bonds of pre-individualistic society, which simultaneously gave him security and limited him, has not gained freedom in the positive sense of the realisation of his individual self.

Freedom, though it has brought him his independence and rationality, has isolated him, and made him anxious and powerless.

This isolation is unbearable and the alternatives he is confronted with are either to escape from the burden of this freedom into new dependencies and submission, or to advance to the full realisation of positive freedom which is based on the uniqueness and individuality of man.

Berdyev's life was nothing but a triangular struggle against the aristocratic environment in which his family belonged and lived in it, against the revolutionary Marxist environment in which he lived during his first youth and against the orthodox environment in which he lived a mature period in a certain sense.

Reidar Thomte's Kierkegaard's Philosophy of Religion is an excellent read for students beginning their study of one of the "greats" of the nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy. Thomte directly appropriates Kierkegaard's insightful language and discussion of theological and philosophical issues that stimulated him, all of which are still alive and well today. 

The world houses people equally with natural things. When the world is thus treated as a gathering or even a gathering of natural things, it is not conceived as nature, and we do not understand that it is something that is in itself a holistic system, a system of regulations and arrangements, especially laws.