A Quick Jump into The Deep End of the Pool with Jim Palmer and Paul Tillich

Bill Trench is a colleague and online friend who’s about as Retired as some others of us. He recently wrote and shared this, and it’s simply too good not to share with you —

Now there abide three great twentieth century theologians, Barth, Niebuhr, and Tillich, but the greatest of these is Tillich.

When I read our United Methodist debates about Doctrine in the United Methodist Church, I keep wishing that our discussions could focus more on theology and less on doctrine. The great twentieth century theologians did sometimes speak of doctrine (Barth did it a lot), but they did not see it as something you have to believe in order to be called a Christian. They argued for their perspective because they believed it offered the best explanation of life as we experience it.

Jim Palmer writes with what seems to me to be an unfortunate tendency to focus most on the things he doesn’t believe. But his brief summary of Paul Tillich’s theology is reasonably accurate and I think it provides a useful counter to many of our more doctrinaire discussions of doctrine. Tillich opens up a whole new way of understanding Christian faith.

Jim Palmer explains Tillich:

Paul Tillich (August 20, 1886 – October 22, 1965) was a German-American Christian existentialist philosopher and one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century. His writings were useful to me in the early stages of my deconstruction journey because of his conception of God outside traditional Christian theism.

Tillich said that human beings are infinitely concerned about their being. “Being”, meaning not only our existence, but the meaning, purpose or aim of our existence. Tillich believed that the most fundamental human problem is the threat of non-being. This often manifests itself in our existential angst or fear about death. The “Heaven” of Christianity addresses this threat of non-being by postulating the idea of bodily resurrection and eternal existence in Heaven.

Tillich rejected the view that God is a supreme/supernatural being among other beings. Rather, Tillich held the view that “God” is “being-itself”. Tillich used words such as “absolute”, “unconditional”, “ultimate”, “infinite”, “eternal” as synonyms of “being-itself”. Tillich got in a lot of trouble by stating that “God does not exist”, which means God is being-itself beyond essence and existence. To give contrast to the common image of God as presence/being, he used the term “God Above God”.

Two of Tillich’s points about God as being-itself are:

– Being-itself is not a being.

– Everything participates in being-itself and depends on it for its existence – it is the source of ground of everything that is.

If this is true, your being is never “threatened” and non-being is not possible. Tillich’s identification of God with being-itself is an attempt to provide a doctrine of God that resolves the tension in the religious idea of God.

Some might say, Tillich’s “God” is very impersonal. Right? “Ultimate reality” and “ground of all being” fall a little flat if you are accustomed to thinking about God as a supreme personal being that you could relate to like a friend. Tillich held that God doesn’t have to be a “person” to be “personal”. As being-itself, God is the ground of everything personal, which is experienced as a “divine-human encounter”.

Tillich criticized theological theism because it placed God into the subject-object dichotomy. God cannot be made into an object, that is, an object of the knowing subject. God is the inexhaustible ground which empowers the existence of beings. We cannot perceive God as an object which is related to a subject because God precedes the subject–object dichotomy.

Traditionally Christian theology has always understood the doctrine of creation to mean precisely this external relationality between God, the Creator, and the creature as separate and not identical realities. But Tillich holds that being-itself (God) is creative.

Tillich saw the root of atheism as rejection of the traditional image (of God as presence/being) and he thought that an alternative symbolic image (“being-itself”) could potentially be seen as acceptable.

I’ll stop there. I need more coffee.

Why do I even post this kind of philosophical/theological mumbo jumbo, other than it interests me personally?

A few reasons:

The idea that it’s either the God of Christian Theism or no God at all is a false choice. You could make the argument that Christian Theism is the least defensible view of God.

The existential threat and anxiety about death and non-being is not necessary because it’s impossible. Being-itself (God) is infinite and eternal, and we are a temporary human expression of being-itself. I can’t tell you what exactly being-itself is after the transition out of the mind-body expression or symbol, but it isn’t non-being. In other words, death is not real in the way we think it is.

One could think of the resurrection of Jesus in this way, namely that death is a symbol that marks a transition in being-itself from mind-body expression/symbol to being-itself beyond mind-body expression/symbol.

-Jim Palmer