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Tillich: The Architect of Faith
By: Seyed Javad Meynagh Copyright: LONDON ACADEMY OF IRANIAN STUDIES
It is the transcendent necessity in which freedom is entangled. Tillich
Abstract As modern disciplinary sociology is an epistemological pursuit in a horizontal sense the very question of human existence in its vertical dimension could not but be neglected in academia. Although sociology claims to be a study of human relations but this claim is denied practically once sociologists attempt to, firstly, neglect, and, secondly, reduce the complex vertical reality of human existence into other indices than the dynamics of horizontal versus vertical dialogue. Tillich is one of those intellectuals who viewed the dialogue essential for the understanding of self, culture, society, religion and God and called the interaction between horizontal and vertical dimensions as the real unfolding of faith individually as well as communally. This essay is a brief venture into the world of Tillich as the architect of Faith. Introduction Paul Johannes Tillich was born 20 August 1886 in Starzeddel, Brandenburg, Germany. His father was a Protestant pastor and the district superintendent for the Prussian Protestant Church. Tillich embraces the Protestant religion and Christian faith in general. His philosophical works were primarily of theological origin, reflecting his upbringing and education. Studying at Konigsberg, Berlin, Tubingen, and Breslan, Tillich received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Breslan in 1911. A year later, at Halle-Whittenberg, Tillich received his theology certificate as a pastor within the Protestant Church. From 1914 through 1918, Tillich served in the German army as a chaplain. He was deeply affected by the loss of faith he witnessed among soldiers — and the German people. Following the war, Tillich taught in Berlin, Marburg, Dresden, and Leipzig. By 1929, Tillich as was a full professor of philosophy at Frankfurt-am-Main. In 1933, following the rise of Hitler, Tillich was removed from his teaching post. He relocated to the United States of America, leaving the Nazi Third Reich behind; he opposed all they represented and feared what might happen in Europe. From 1933 through 1955, Tillich was a professor of theology at Union Theological Seminary, in New York City. He retired in 1955, but quickly assumed a professorship at Harvard University. Tillich remained at Harvard until 1962, then he accepted the Nuveen Chair of Theology at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School. Tillich, who died in 1965, possessed a rhetorical genius in addressing Schleiermacher’s “cultured despisers of religion”. His proposed “correlation” between man’s questions and religion’s answers (which may sometimes, somehow, be God’s answers) may end up with the answers trumping the questions.
The variety of Tillich’s interests is reflected in his prolific literary output, not to speak of his many corresponding practical activities. His larger literary productions published in Germany between 1910 and 1933 include two treatises on the philosopher Schelling and one on eighteenth-century theology; Masse und Geist (1922), a work treating modern mass movements and using representative works of art as symbols of changing attitudes; Das System der Wissenschaften (1923), a study of the classification, methods, and objects of the sciences; Religionsphilosophie, published in Max Dessoir’s Lehrbuch der Philosophie, Vol. 11(1925); Die religiöse Lage tier Gegenwart (1926), a critical survey of major aspects of contemporary culture; and Die sozialistische Entscheidung (1933), a study of philosophical, economic, and political aspects of religious socialism. He also edited and contributed to two symposia on Protestantism, entitled Kairos I (1926) and Kairos II (1929), and he published in German and English over a hundred pamphlets and articles dealing with art, philosophy, theology, economics, sociology, political theory, education, and technology. A volume of collected essays, Religiöse Verwirklichung (‘Religious Realization"), appeared in 1930. Two volumes of translations of his writings have been published in English, The Religious Situation (1932) and The interpretation of History (1936) as well as his essay, "The Religious Symbol," translated by James Luther Adams and Ernst Fraenkel for the Journal of Liberal Religion, II (1940), 13—33. In 1933, Tillich, who was a leader of the religious-socialist movement in Germany was deprived by the Nazis of his position as professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfort; he then came to the United States, where he taught in various Universities. Since 1934 he became professor of philosophical theology at Union Theological Seminary, New York City. Many of the themes that occupied his attention are dealt with briefly in, "The World Situation," in the symposium, The Christian Answer (1945), edited with an Introduction by H. P. van Dusen.
Finally Tillich’s religious existentialism was an attempt to advance the concept of the “Protestant Principle” in contrast to what he called "the bourgeois principle" by aiming at a correlation of the questions arising out of the human condition and the divine answers drawn from the symbolism of Christian revelation.
The Core of Tillich’s Philosophy 1. Anxiety Anxiety has been considered as one of the most important themes in existentialist discourses. Although different existentialists handle the theme in different ways, Tillich’s discussion of anxiety in his Systematic Theology gives a very thorough discussion of the subject from an existential point of view. Accepting the familiar description of the post-war era, both for Europe and America, as an "age of anxiety," Tillich describes anxiety as fundamentally the "existential awareness of nonbeing," the "awareness that nonbeing is a part of one's own being". The awareness of one's own transitoriness and of one's own having to die produces a natural anxiety, an anxiety of ultimate nonbeing. Naked anxiety, which belongs to the nature of being as such and is an experience of unimaginable horror, strives vainly to convert itself into fear, because fear has an object and can therefore be met and overcome by courage. But anxiety itself has no object. He approaches the question of anxiety in relation both to subjective and objective as well as individual and collective dimensions of humanity: The Anxiety of Fate and Death Anxiety appears in three forms, dependent upon the direction in which "nonbeing threatens being." The anxiety of fate and death proceeds from the threat of nonbeing against man’s "ontic" affirmation. It is basic, universal, and entirely inescapable. The contingency of man, that the causes which determine him are without any rationality or ultimate necessity, yields the relative anxiety of fate. The fact of death, present with man during every moment of life as well as at the moment of dying, produces an absolute anxiety of nonbeing. The basic question of courage is whether there is a courage to be in the face of this absolute threat against being. The Anxiety of Emptiness and Meaninglessness The second type of anxiety is in its relative form the anxiety of emptiness and in its absolute form the anxiety of meaninglessness. Emptiness is the product of a threat to participation in creativity Meaninglessness, which lies always in the background of emptiness as death lies always behind fate, is the loss of a spiritual center for life, the loss of an ultimate concern, of the meaning fundamental to all meanings. This anxiety is the threat of nonbeing to the spiritual life, a threat that follows from man's finitude and estrangement and leads to despair. To escape it, one attempts an escape from his own freedom and thereby sacrifices his genuine existence. The Anxiety of Guilt and Condemnation The third type of anxiety issues from the threat of nonbeing against man’s self-affirmation, in its relative form, the anxiety of guilt; in its absolute form, the anxiety of condemnation. Man as finite freedom is free to determine himself in the fulfillment of his destiny. The anxiety of guilt and condemnation is produced by the failure to realize one's potentiality. It is a self-rejection, a despair in the loss of proper identity. Despair is the product of the three anxieties, interrelated to foster and support one another. Despair is the complete absence of hope. By suicide one might escape the anxiety of death, but he would be caught in the anxiety of guilt and condemnation. Anxiety and Cultural History Life, Tillich holds, is largely an attempt to avoid despair. From it there is no escape, yet most people experience it in its intensity only infrequently if at all. In the history of western culture the three types of anxiety have always been present, but each has dominated one of the three major eras. The classical era, the era of absolutism and tyranny, was characterized by the anxiety of fate and death, and ended with the attempt to achieve the Stoic courage. The Middle Ages, under the influence of the Judeo-Christian (Moral) religion, was brought to a close under the domination of the anxiety of guilt and condemnation, induced by the breakdown of the unity of religion. Today it is the anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness that casts its shadow over a world that has lost its spiritual content. (Fuller, 1955. pp 609-610) Tillich’s definition of God was much broader than that of evangelical Christianity or the Bible. In fact, Tillich’s concept of God was not even first and foremost personal. God for Tillich was "the ground of all being;" "the source of your being;" "your ultimate concern". As such, Tillich saw no room for atheists or agnostics, for he believed that it was impossible for one to have no ultimate concerns. In his The Shaking of the Foundations he stated:
Tillich not only redefined the traditional view of God, but he also put an existential interpretation to the concept of grace. His grace is universal, subjective, and flows from and to each individual. When he talks of the "acceptance" of grace, he is not talking about the forgiveness of God made possible by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ upon the cross. He is talking about the subjective experience of acceptance that one feels during a crisis. Grace … strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness ... It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life, a life which we loved, or from which we were estranged. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us.... Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: "You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later.... Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!" In the light of this grace we perceive the power of grace in our relation to others and to ourselves .... We experience the grace of being able to accept the life of another, even if it be hostile and harmful to us, for, through grace, we know that it belongs to the same Ground to which we belong, and by which we have been accepted. (ibid., pp 161, 162)
Generally one could state that Tillich was dissatisfied with organized religion and in particular with Christian organization of running the affairs of faith in a bureaucratic fashion which denied what he saw as the only valid emblem of religion in modern context. He was of the view that at present organized religion is, on the whole, a pretty dreary affair, and as a religious radical he could not be so much concerned with crying woe as with reorganizing society, and turning up a soil into which religious institutions would be able to sink their roots gradually. As an architect of faith Tillich's doctrine of "justification through faith" involves a re-definition of "the religious", namely it is no longer a belief in a supernatural being but rather a state of "ultimate concern," a sense of something ultimate, unconditional, and all-determining-and this may express itself in secular as well as in religious forms. Although it should not be forgotten that he has his own vehement critics who argued that it is possible to consider the strident intellectualism of Tillich’s religious thought as only the last gasp of religious futility as well as those who contended that there was no sign of Christianity in his religious thought where the distinction between sacred and secular was completely erased off. Tillich's work was firmly in the tradition of ‘mediating theology’ - that is, theological thinking which begins with the premise that Christian faith and modern thought are not, by their most fundamental natures, mutually exclusive. His rearchitecturing of faith was therefore not triumphalist in that he refused to adopt a position which, for example, talked of theology as the ‘Queen of Sciences’. Nor did he embrace a position adopted by some famous 20th century theologians. They based their work on the proposition that modern analytical rationality is valid only up to a point - at which something called ‘faith’ takes over (Karl Barth epitomizes this school of theology). A key element in ‘mediating theology’ approach was that Tillich did not regard religion as a separate discipline. Rather, theology is related to other disciplines just as form is to content. In that sense, theologians such as Karl Barth were Tillich's polar opposite. Whereas the latter's theology strove to unify modern thinking with Christian tradition, the Barth's lead to the isolation of Christian thinking from cultural life in the eyes of liberal theologians who strove to accommodate Christianity within modernist frame of reference and not vice versa or even assume a critical stance towards modernism/humanism/secularism. However it should be reemphasized that Tillich did not move in his lifetime to a more recent theological standpoint, one which holds that the body of human knowledge and wisdom is a whole and that theology cannot therefore be separated out from anything else. Rather, he, like Wittgenstein who saw different game patterns as relevant to different domains of life, perceived theology and Christianity as one set of answers to universal human questions. In this mode his main aim was to make Christianity comprehensible to a modern secular culture, an approach often termed ‘dialectical theology’. Tillich himself would have rebuffed that he was attempting to in any way subvert tradition. He was nonetheless labeled ‘radical’ and to him is attributed the upsurge in the 1960s of the so-called ‘death of God’ theology. (Bulman, 1981) This was true only in the sense that he did not stop with tracing Christian meaning back to near the beginning tradition, but in a systematic way tried to trace doctrine and Christian concepts back to the very nature of being itself. His approach fitted his early decision not to work as much with pure theology as with theology as an aspect of culture. To him, the Bible all the same remained our principal spring of revelation. He saw his task as proclaiming the kerygma (the good news or "gospel") in an apologetic and explanatory way. This is the nub of his project as the architect of faith in contemporary social theory which has been deeply neglected where religion is equivalent to irrationalism and secularism tantamount to rationalism and the most heinous acts as well as beautiful deeds are ascribed respectively to religion and liberalism (as the best example of secularism). His insistence on explaining the religious issues based on a very intelligible method is one of the best heritages of religious thinking of Tillich, which is needed today very urgently. Tillich called his method one of ‘correlation’. That is, Christian answers were to be offered in response to questions asked by modern man. Over against this stood (and still stands) the traditional method by which the kerygma is regarded as derived from a process of revelation. It therefore stands in its own right as universally applicable truth, independent of any specific questions. It is unrelated to a time or any situation. It doesn't respond to current need so much as dictate the channels in which the streams of such needs must flow. The correlation method can only work, said Tillich, as long as the theologian keeps in the forefront the concerns of his life situation and the cultural milieu of his times. In this sense, Tillich's theology was truly existential. He thought that pure abstract theorizing was neither relevant nor appropriate. But the responses to questions should, said Tillich, be derived from the kerygma. He thought that the best answers would come from those who had experienced most of life, who had thought, reasoned and suffered ‘brokenness’ - and then moved on through revelation to a more complete and healing set of responses. (Clayton, 1980) Finally Tillich was clear that we should not try to identify the Ground of our Being with any part of the universe. To do so would be to initiate a kind of idolization in which the being itself becomes the Ground upon which it essentially stands. A significant feature of this stress was that he thought we should not think of God as personal. In fact, said Tillich, God is the Ground of that aspect of being we call "personal". (Thompson, 1981)
Reference Bulman, Raymond F. A blueprint for humanity: Paul Tillich's theology of culture. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1981. Clayton, John Powell. The concept of correlation: Paul Tillich and the possibility of a mediating theology. Berlin; New York: W. de Gruyter, 1980. Fuller, B. A. G. A History of Philosophy. NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1955. Tillich, Paul. The Shaking of the Foundations. NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953. Thompson, Ian. Being and meaning: Paul Tillich's theory of meaning, truth and logic. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981. |