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The New Being is Tillich's replacement for the old symbol of "salvation," and he can take off his theologian's mortarboard and write about it with evangelical passion. "We should not be too worried about the Christian religion, about the state of the Churches, about membership and doctrines, about institutions and ministers . . . [These] are of no importance if the ultimate question is asked, the question of a New Reality . . . We should worry more about [this] than about anything else between heaven and earth. The New Creation—this is our ultimate concern; this should be our infinite passion . . . In comparison with it everything else, even religion or non-religion, even Christianity or non-Christianity, matters very little . . .
"The message of Christianity is not Christianity, but a New Reality. A New state of things has appeared, it still appears; it is hidden and visible, it is there and it is here. Accept it, enter into it, let it grasp you."
System of Correlation. In his three-volume Systematic Theology Tillich fits these ideas together into a kind of working model of the universe. He calls the structure, the method of "correlation," by which he means the correlation of human questions arising from the conditions in which man finds himself, with divine answers provided by the symbolism of Christian revelation.
The great questions arising from man's "ultimate concern" he groups under three headings: Being, Existence, and Life. Man's Being is his essential nature, from which he is estranged as Adam was estranged from Eden. Existence encompasses the situation in which estranged man finds himself. Life is the combination of Being and Existence.
The theological answers to these existential questions are: (to problems of Being) God, (to problems of Existence) the Christ, and (to problems of Life) the Spirit. The three answers correspond with the triune God of Christian dogma—Father, Son and Holy Spirit, just as Being, Existence and Life may be combined to form a picture of man.
Preceding the central pairing of three questions and three answers is a preliminary correlation of Reason and Revelation, to deal with the epistemological (i.e., how-do-you-know) problem. And following the central grouping is the correlation dealing with the earthly consequences of the divine-human encounter: the question of History, answered by the Christian symbol of the Kingdom of God.
Content & Form. The varieties of specific questions that can be asked within the three categories of Being, Existence and Life determine the form the answers will take, but not their content. The content of the answer is established by the data of Christian revelation. But the form in which the revelation is expressed derives from the form of the question asked.