Tillich

Theology

Tillich's approach to Protestant theology was highly systematic. He sought to correlate culture and faith such that "faith need not be unacceptable to contemporary culture and contemporary culture need not be unacceptable to faith". As a consequence, Tillich's orientation is highly apologetic, seeking to make concrete theological answers such that they become applicable to an ordinary day's course of events. This contributed to his popularity by the virtue of the fact that it made him highly accessible to lay readers. In a broader perspective, revelation is understood as the fountainhead of religion. Tillich sought to reconcile revelation and reason by arguing that revelation never runs counter to reason (affirming Thomas Aquinas when he said that faith is eminently rational), but both poles of the subjective human experience are complimentary.
In his metaphysical approach, Tillich was a staunch existentialist, focusing on the nature of being. Nothingness is a major motif of existentialist philosophy and so Tillich included this concept as a means of reifying being itself. Tillich argued that anxiety of non-being (existential anguish) is inherent in the experience of being itself. Put simply, people are afraid of their own non-existence, ie, their death. Following a line similar to Kierkegaard and almost identical to that of Freud, Tillich says that in our most introspective moments we face the terror of our own nothingness. That is, we "realize our mortality", that we are finite beings. The question which naturally arises in the mind of one in this introspective mood is what causes us to "be" in the first place. Tillich concludes that radically finite beings (which are, at least potentially, infinite in variation) cannot be sustained or caused by another finite being. What can sustain finite beings is being itself, or the "ground of being". This Tillich identifies as God.
Another name for the ground of being is essence. Essence is thought of as the power of being, and is forever unassailable by the conscious mind. As such it remains beyond the realm of thought, preserving the need for revelation in the Christian tradition.
Opposed to essence but dependent upon it is existence. Existence is that which is finite. Essence is the infinite. Since existence is being and essence is the ground of being, then essence is the ground or source of existence. But because the one is infinite and the other not, then existence (the finite) is fundamentally alienated from the essence. Man is alienated from God. This Tillich takes to be sin. To exist is to be alienated.
Tillich's radical departure from traditional Christian theology is his view of Christ. According to Tillich, Christ is the "New Being", who rectifies in himself the alienation between essence and existence. Essence fully shows itself within Christ, but Christ is also a finite man. This indicates, for Tillich, a revolution in the very nature of being. The gap is healed and essence can now be found within existence. Thus for Tillich, Christ is not God per se in himself, but Christ is the revelation of God. Whereas traditional Christianity regards Christ as a wholly alien kind of being, Tillich believed that Christ was the emblem of the highest goal of man, what God wants men to become. Thus to be a Christian is to make oneself progressively "Christ-like", a very possible goal in Tillich's eyes. In other words, Christ is not God in the traditional sense, but reveals the essence inherent in all existence, including mine and your own. Thus Christ is not different than you or I except insofar as he fully reveals God within his own finitude, something you and I can also do in principle.
"God does not exist. He is being itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him."
This statement of Tillich's summarizes his conception of God. We cannot think of God as a being which exists in time and space, because that constrains Him, and makes Him finite. But all beings are finite, and if God is the Creator of all beings, God cannot logically be finite since a finite thing cannot be the sustainer of an infinite variety of finite things. Thus we must think of God as beyond being, above finitude and limitation, the power or essence of being itself.
A final major point of Tillich's theology is this: since things in existence are corrupt and therefore ambiguous, no finite thing can be (by itself) that which is infinite. All that is possible is for the finite to be a vehicle for revealing the infinite, but the two can never be confused. This leaves religion itself in a place where it cannot be taken as too dogmatic, because of its conceptual and therefore finite and corrupt nature. True religion is that which correctly reveals the infinite, but no religion can ever do so in any way other than through metaphor and symbol. Thus the whole of the Bible must be understood symbolically, and all spiritual and theological knowledge cannot be other than symbol. This is often seized upon by theologians to utilize as an effective counterpoint to religious fundamentalism.