A LITTLE TILLICH
February 17, 2008
Carolyn R. Brown

My sermon today is entitled “A Little Tillich” which says more about me than about him.  Tillich was a monumental figure in theology during the 20^th century and affected most of those who wrote and studied theology during the past 60 years. 

His influence remains today and those who study him still question his motives and his meaning.  Some ask whether he was in fact an atheist.  Some credit him with pulling together the separate disciplines of religion and science.  If you take time to read commentaries on Tillich, you will find a great diversity of views on his message.

His legacy includes much written material, a three volume Systematic Theology, from which I have included a few quotes included, but which I have only read sections.  Two of his books, The Dynamics of Faith and The Courage to Be are popular because most of us can read them and get something out of them that we can apply to our spiritual or life journeys.  He was very popular as a preacher and lecturer and most critics say his thinking was more accessible in these venues.

Tillich was important in my theological development, even though I make no claim to be an expert in his thought.  As we Unitarian Universalists tend to do, I took from his writing something that gave me comfort at a time when the faith I grew up with was seriously challenged both by people and events.

Living in New York City in the sixties, my former husband was studying at Union Theological Seminary and I was working and attending night classes at NYU Washington Square Campus.  My favorite teacher was a Catholic priest who thought outside the traditional Catholic box and offered insights to Tillich and others in a wonderful class called “20^th Century Theology.  Tillich offered me a new way of thinking about the transcendent, the holy, and he called it “the ground of being.”   

He described faith as “Ultimate Concern” rather than my Evangelical church’s conversion experience. His view of religious transformation challenged me to seek something new, which I have been working on since that time.

Many of us know that Tillich’s ashes lie nearby at New Harmony, Indiana.  If you are interested in his life story, it is outlined on the New Harmony website.  Suffice it to say he was born in Germany in 1886 and became a Lutheran minister and teacher of theology in universities in Germany until 1933 when he was deprived of his profession by the Nazis. 

He was invited to America and taught at Union Theological Seminary, Harvard and the University of Chicago until his death in 1965.  His life story includes a somewhat scandalous side, publicly revealed after his death.

To set the stage for Tillich’s theology, let’s look at what was happening when he came on the scene.  The last third of the nineteenth century witnessed a movement in religion and philosophy that presaged the death of God theology of the post world war generation.  Existentialist writers and theologians were expressing modern humanity’s struggle with the meaning of being as seen from a framework that no longer included traditional views of sin, God, and salvation.  Humanity seemed estranged from God, and in this estrangement we developed anxiety as we struggled with self acceptance, with finding a sense of meaning to life.  This was seen in the development of several movements, the religious fundamentalist movement which was and still is resisting modernity, and communism and fascism which created cultural absolutes.

Tillich saw much of this himself during his ministry.  Early on he found himself teaching a confirmation class.  Trying to communicate the Christian faith to his students, he found the word “faith” itself to have little meaning and the meanings that still remained to be totally inadequate.  Charles Henderson writes that Tillich saw with stunning clarity the futility of a faith which provides answers to questions no one is asking.  Theism Rewritten for an Age of Science

Tillich developed a Systematic Theology for the modern and post-modern world, one which answered the 20^th century questions about what is sin, what is God and how do we find the courage to be.  For Tillich, sin was not breaking God’s commandments, but rather living in separation from the idea of God, which had been developing in the ivory towers and with the two world wars had filtered down to the person on the street. 

Our sin included our separation from our selves, our anxiety about living and not being able to participate fully in being.  We developed an inordinate concern with non-being, with the threats to being itself.  Men and women no longer had their hands in the production of our daily goods, for industrialization had even separated us from the means of production.  We became cogs in wheels.  Pressures of living in cities created the death of community for many people, no longer involved in the land, in the life of the village, our separation from our neighbors added to our anxiety, our estrangement, our sin. 

Where is God in this landscape of despair and anxiety?  Tillich’s writing about God brought a radical shift from the old Theism to a God beyond the God of Theism. 

What I find important in Tillich’s writing about God and what has sustained me over the past forty years is the idea of the “ground of being.”  Tillich writes in The Courage to Be about the God beyond God.  He says those who say they don’t “believe” in God are on the right track.  He tells us that when we give certain properties to God, when we anthropomorphize God, we are guilty of idolatry. 

God is being itself, and every ontological being, you and I, have our power to be in being itself, and we participate in the ground of being.  Tillich says one can’t “believe” in God, for when you do, you are denying God.  In The Courage to Be he writes: “There are no valid arguments for the “existence” of God, but there are acts of courage in which we affirm the power of being, whether we know it or not.” p. 181

In being-itself, in God, in the ground of being, we can invest our ultimate concern, which gives us the courage to be.  An ultimate concern can be one of many spiritual concerns, cognitive, aesthetic, social or political.  When we make something our ultimate concern, it is an act of our total personality, including our unconscious.  

Too often we make something our ultimate concern which is not ultimate, as in those who follow scripture and creeds literally.  Surrendering to an ultimate concern is not only an act of the will, which is an element, but not the cause.  In my interpretation, we are driven toward faith, toward the ultimate ground of being by our awareness of the infinite to which we belong.  Tillich writes that the human heart seeks the infinite because that is where the finite wants to rest.

Tillich rejects Theism in all its forms because it ultimately creates a subject/object relationship “The God Nietzche said had to be killed because nobody can tolerate being made into a mere object of absolute knowledge and absolute control.” C2B p. 185.

He writes instead of “absolute faith.” “It is the accepting of the acceptance without somebody or something that accepts.  It is the power of being-itself that accepts and gives the courage to be.”  Further, Tillich writes that the acceptance of the God above the God of theism makes us a part of that which is not also a part but is the ground of the whole.” C2B P. 187…If the self participates in the power of being-itself it receives itself back.  And best of all from my point of view is the following:  “[Courage] returns as absolute faith which says Yes to being without seeing anything concrete which could conquer the nonbeing in fate and death.”  C2BP. 189

These words lead us to the quote on your order of service this morning, which may be a little more clear at this point. 

And this is the good part:  doubt is necessary because faith is neither scientific nor skeptical, and doubt is a confirmation of faith.  Creeds with no doubt become static, something created by humans and deemed ultimate even though they are not indeed ultimate.  To be useful, creeds must include statements that they are not ultimate.  They may point to the ultimate, but creeds are only symbols, and worn out symbols indeed.

In the middle of the 20^th century, Tillich found us in disarray.  Existential anxiety over being was a theme running through our culture, and indeed through many cultures.  His theology of acceptance, of finding the courage to be in spite of the threat of non-being was based on our taking seriously participation in the ground of being, in being-itself.  We have courage in spite of the vagaries of life.  To have the courage to be in the face of the end of our lives requires that we acknowledge our participation in all being, that we have always been and will always be.

I could end here but I want to share an epiphany this week that surprised me.  Reading Tillich’s Dynamics of Faith for the third time, I struggled with page 92 where he wrote that we must accept Jesus as the crucified Christ.  I have rejected the supernatural parts of this story and knew that Tillich certainly did not acknowledge a physical resurrection of Jesus.  But I was confused.  Then I came to see the importance of the crucified Jesus as a symbol for new life, for surrender to being and participation in the ground of being.  Tillich writes much about symbols and the many levels of operation of symbols.  They point beyond themselves to something else.  They participate in the reality of that to which they point.  They open up a level of reality otherwise closed.  The open up parts of ourselves. 

Symbols cannot be produced intentionally, but grow out of the collective unconscious.

The passage that bothered me is:

The event which has created this symbol has given the criterion by which the truth of Christianity, as well as of any other religion must be judged.(DofF-o2)

The crucifixion has become so intertwined with the resurrection that I had let this symbol fall out of my theology.  What I now realized is that the crucified Christ as a symbol points to the possibility of my finding the courage to be, finding new life, finding the holiness of my being and what ought to be. Tillich is bold enough to say that any other religion must offer at least as much.

The ground of being has been my ultimate concern since I read Tillich in college. 

I experience life as acceptance by a benevolent universe which upholds me. 

While ego gets in the way of my living my life as it might be, I have through Unitarian Universalism followed a spiritual path that has brought me here this morning.  I am indeed unacceptable, as Tillich says we all are.  Yet I am able most of the time to accept the acceptance of the ground of being, which I cannot pray to or talk to or even imagine.  I participate in being on a cellular level and accept that all of the rest of us do this as well.  We are all part of the ground of being and need not be threatened by non-being, which according to Tillich just can’t be. The symbol of the crucified Christ points me to the possibility of new life, of optimism, of giving power to the here and now, where we all find our being.

Tillich offered us the courage that upon our awareness of being here and now and always, we might each find the new life, life beyond the anxiety over non-being, beyond the grasping of ultimate concerns that are indeed not ultimate.  The symbol he pointed us to can help us experience a way to transcend our selves and live more fully. Tillich says that the new always comes at a time when we least expect it.

My final word is to quote Tillich:

"The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being is God…That depth is what the word God means. And if that word has not much meaning for you, translate it and speak of the depth of your life, of the source of your being, of your ultimate concern, of what you take seriously without any reservation. Perhaps, in order to do so, you must forget everything traditional that you have learned about God, perhaps even the word itself. For if you know that God means depth, ... You cannot then call yourself an atheist or unbeliever... (Those) who know about depth know about God." (from notes)