Justified True Belief

(●) The theologian who told a doubting century that God is not a being among beings but being itself, and who was read by people who had stopped reading theology. + In the middle of the twentieth century, a German refugee with a heavy accent became one of the most widely read Protestant theologians in America. Paul Tillich’s sermons sold in ordinary bookshops. His phrases got loose from the seminaries and into common speech: the ground of being, ultimate concern, the courage to be. On 16 March 1959 his face was on the cover of Time, which is not a thing that usually happens to a man who writes three volumes of systematic theology. He is on a Christian apologetics site for a reason that has two sides to it. On one side, nobody in his century worked harder at the problem of how to say "God" to people for whom the word had gone dead. He took the doubt of his readers seriously rather than scolding it, and he gave the church a vocabulary for talking with people who could no longer use the church’s own words. On the other side, what he handed back was in several places not what the church had sent him out with, and the places where it differs are worth naming plainly. He is the last great system-builder of liberal Protestant theology, and both halves of that description matter. Here is the fact about him that is easiest to remember. He was forty-six years old, a full professor at Frankfurt, when the Nazis took his chair away in April 1933. He arrived in New York that November, forty-seven by then, with almost no English, on a salary the faculty of Union Theological Seminary had scraped together by each taking a five per cent pay cut. Everything he is famous for, every book an English-speaking reader knows, he wrote afterward, in his second language.

(●) 1886 AD: He was born in a Prussian village parsonage, the son of a pastor who ran his house the way he ran his parish. + Paul Johannes Tillich was born on 20 August 1886 at Starzeddel, a village in the Prussian province of Brandenburg, now Starosiedle in western Poland. His father Johannes was a Lutheran pastor of the strict old school, later a church superintendent; his mother Mathilde Dürselen came from the Rhineland and was the warmer and more open of the two. When Paul was four the family moved to Bad Schönfliess, a small town still ringed by its medieval wall, with the church at the center and the gate towers standing where they had stood for centuries. He wrote later that the shape of that town stayed in him: an enclosed world, ordered, beautiful, and one you eventually have to walk out of. At about twelve he was sent away to school at Königsberg in der Neumark and boarded with strangers, and he was lonely there in a way he remembered for the rest of his life. The family moved to Berlin in 1900, and he finished his schooling there. Two things from the parsonage went with him. The first was an argument. His father held authority the way his generation did, and young Paul discovered that philosophy was the one ground on which his father would meet him as an equal, so he learned to argue there and never stopped. The second was a grief: his mother died in 1903, when he was seventeen, and the sense that the ground can give way under a settled world arrived early and did not leave.

(●) 1904 AD: He went up to university to study theology and found a philosopher he would never put down. + Tillich studied at Berlin, then Tübingen, then Halle, moving from one faculty to another in the ordinary German fashion of the day. At Halle he sat under Martin Kähler, and that classroom mattered more than any other in his life. Kähler had argued in 1892 that the Jesus reconstructed by historians is not the Christ the church preaches, and that Christian faith must rest on the Christ of the apostles’ witness rather than on whatever the next generation of scholars decides about the man from Nazareth. Put it in ordinary terms: a church that rests its faith on the current reconstruction has built on a foundation somebody digs up and relays every twenty years, and Kähler thought the apostles’ preaching was the ground instead. Tillich took that distinction, held it for sixty years, and built a great deal on it, including a conclusion Kähler would not have drawn, that faith has no stake at all in what happened at the tomb (†3). He wrote two dissertations, and both were on Friedrich Schelling, the German idealist philosopher who had tried to think God and the world together as one living process. Two, because the German universities of the time ran theology and philosophy as separate faculties with separate degrees, and Tillich wanted the pair of them. The philosophical one went to Breslau, where he defended it in the summer of 1910, although the doctorate itself is usually dated to 1911. The theological one went to Halle, where he passed the licentiate examination in December 1911 and received the licentiate in theology in 1912. A licentiate in theology was the research degree the German divinity faculties gave in place of a doctorate, so the two pieces of work together are roughly what a modern reader would call a double PhD, both of them done in his twenties. What he got out of Schelling was not a doctrine but a habit of mind, and it shaped everything after: the conviction that God is not one item in the inventory of things but the depth in which every item stands. Hold on to that sentence. It is (T1) in embryo, decades before he wrote it out. He was ordained into the Lutheran church of the Prussian Union in 1912 and went to work as a curate in the working-class districts of Berlin, where for the first time he met people for whom the church was simply irrelevant. Not hostile to it, which he could have argued with. Simply uninterested, the way a man is uninterested in a building he walks past on the way to work. He was in his middle twenties, ordained, doctored, and about two years away from everything he believed about the world being taken apart.

(●) 1914 AD: Four years as an army chaplain in the trenches took apart the world he had been taught. + He married Margarethe Wever at the end of September 1914 and went into the German army as a chaplain a few weeks later, expecting, as nearly everyone did, a short war. He served on the Western Front for the whole of it. His work was to bury the dead, write to their families, and be present at field dressing stations where the wounded came in faster than anyone could treat them. He was at Verdun in 1916, the battle that ground up something close to seven hundred thousand men on the two sides together. He broke down under it more than once and was hospitalized three times for what would now be named combat trauma, and he came out of the war decorated with the Iron Cross. The philosophy he had been raised on taught that reality is fundamentally rational and that history is going somewhere good. He watched the educated nations of Europe spend four years feeding their young men into artillery, and he came home unable to believe it. He did not lose his faith in God in the trenches. He lost his faith in the comfortable synthesis of God, culture and progress that his teachers had handed him, and the rest of his working life was an attempt to say something about God that could be said standing in a field hospital. He came home to the second wound. His wife had a child by another man, a friend of his, and she left him in 1919, though the divorce did not come through until February 1921. He was thirty-three, without a settled job, in a country that had lost a war and a government in the same year.

(●) 1919 AD: He began teaching in Berlin and argued that a theologian who only studies religion will miss where God is actually being sought. + On 16 April 1919 Tillich read a paper to the Kant Society in Berlin called "On the Idea of a Theology of Culture," and it is the seed of everything else. His claim was that religion is not one department of human life sitting alongside art, politics and science, with its own building and its own hour on Sunday. Religion is the dimension of depth in all of them: whatever a person or a society treats as unconditionally serious is that person’s religion, whether or not it has a steeple. So a theologian ought to be reading the poets and looking at the paintings, because that is where a culture says what it actually believes. He kept coming back to one formula for it, printed in Theology of Culture in 1959 and again in the last volume of the system: culture is the form of religion and religion the substance of culture. He lived this out. He joined the religious socialists of the Weimar years, a circle of Christians who held that the collapse of 1918 had opened one of those rare moments when a society can be turned, and he wrote about German expressionist painting with the same seriousness he gave to doctrine. He taught at Berlin as a Privatdozent, an unsalaried lecturer paid directly by the students who chose to come, so that a bad term meant a thin month. Then he moved to Marburg in 1924, where a young colleague named Martin Heidegger was working out the philosophy of existence that Tillich would borrow from for the next forty years. That phrase is worth slowing down on, because it governs a great deal of what follows. A philosophy of existence starts not with what things are in general, the way most philosophy since the Greeks had done, but with what it is actually like to be one particular creature who knows that it will die and has to decide what to do this afternoon anyway. At Marburg he also began drafting his system, meaning a system in the theologians’ sense: the whole of Christian teaching laid out in one connected order, so that what is said about God on the first page still has to hold on the last. He would finish it in America. His private life turned over in the same year. He married Hannah Werner in March 1924, and that marriage lasted the rest of his life, whatever else is true of it (†3). The promotions came steadily after that: a chair at Dresden in 1925, lecturing at Leipzig alongside it, and then in 1929 the move to Frankfurt as professor of philosophy, where the students and assistants around him included Theodor Adorno, later one of the century’s best known social critics. In the middle of all that he published The Religious Situation in 1926, a reading of the spiritual state of the age, which H. Richard Niebuhr translated into English six years later and which is how America first heard of him. By 1930 he was one of the more visible academics in Germany. He was visible in exactly the wrong way for what was coming.

(●) 1933 AD: The Nazis took his chair, and at forty-seven he started over in New York, in a language he could barely speak. + In the first weeks of 1933, with Hitler about to take power, Tillich published The Socialist Decision, a book that argued that the movement then sweeping Germany drew its force from a pagan longing for blood and soil and that Christians could not go with it. The book was suppressed. On 13 April 1933, ten weeks after Hitler became chancellor, Tillich was suspended from his Frankfurt chair in the same sweep that removed Karl Mannheim and Max Horkheimer. He was not Jewish, and he was on the list anyway, which in 1933 was still unusual enough to be noticed. Reinhold Niebuhr of Union Theological Seminary in New York was in Germany that summer and put the invitation to him. The seminary had no money for another salary, so the faculty voted to give up five per cent of their own pay to create one. Tillich landed in New York in November 1933 with his wife and daughter and a working vocabulary of perhaps a few hundred English words. He prepared his first lectures by writing them out in German, translating with a dictionary, and reading the result aloud to students who were kind about it. He became an American citizen in 1940. He did not go quiet about Germany. Between March 1942 and May 1944 he wrote one hundred and twelve addresses for the Voice of America, broadcast in German into the country he had left, arguing with his own people about what was being done in their name and what it was costing their souls. They are not the work of a man hedging. The first of them, on 31 March 1942, took up the question of the Jewish people, and in it he repeated what a friend had said to him in the spring of 1933 as the persecution began, that their blood would come upon the Germans and upon their children, and told his listeners that it had already become fact. By December 1942 he was describing the death trains and the shooting of Jewish women and children, while the crime was being committed.

(●) 1948 AD: A book of sermons made him famous, and the system he had been drafting since Marburg finally began to appear. + The book that broke him out was not the technical one. The Shaking of the Foundations, published in 1948, is a collection of sermons preached mostly in the Union chapel, and it reached readers who would never have opened a work of doctrine. People who could not follow a page of his theology could follow a sermon about grace arriving when you are least able to earn it, and the book found a readership his systematics never would. Then the system came. Systematic Theology, volume one, appeared in 1951, twenty-six years after he began drafting it, which is a long time to carry a manuscript through two countries and a war. The following year brought the unlikely success. The Courage to Be, given as the Terry Lectures at Yale and published in 1952, became a genuine bestseller, and that is a strange fate for a book about anxiety and non-being. Non-being is his word for the nothing that presses on the edges of anything finite: the plain fact that you did not have to exist, that you will stop, and that the same is true of everything you love. Readers evidently recognized the subject when they saw it named. The invitations followed the sales. He gave the Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen in 1953 and 1954, the Scottish lectureship on natural theology, which is about as high as an invitation goes in his field, and in 1955 Harvard took him as a University Professor, a rank with no departmental duties, where he lectured to halls that filled early. Volume two of the system and Dynamics of Faith both came in 1957, the fat book and the thin one in the same year. By the end of the decade he was a public figure in a way theologians are not. Time put him on its cover on 16 March 1959. He was asked what the country should think about anxiety, about art, about the bomb, and he answered at length, and people read the answers.

(●) 1965 AD: He finished the system, turned toward the other religions of the world, and died ten days after his last lecture. + In 1962 he moved to the University of Chicago as the John Nuveen Professor of Theology. The third and final volume of Systematic Theology came out in 1963, nearly four decades after the first draft, and with it the work of his life was complete. What he did with the years he had left is the interesting part. He fell in with Mircea Eliade, the historian of religions at Chicago, taught a seminar with him, and began to think that his system had been built too narrowly, with Christianity and modern Western doubt as the only conversation partners. In Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religions (1963) and in lectures afterward he asked whether a Christian theology could be written that had genuinely listened to Buddhism and the rest, and in his last lecture he said that his own system had been built for a different argument, the one with the secular critics, and that the theology worth writing now would have to be worked out in company with the history of religions. Very few men produce three volumes and then say aloud that the foundation may need widening. On 12 October 1965 he gave a lecture at Chicago on what the history of religions should mean to a systematic theologian. He suffered a heart attack shortly afterward and died on 22 October, at seventy-nine. His ashes were interred the following year in a small park laid out for him at New Harmony, Indiana, among the evergreens. The stone over them carries the third verse of the first Psalm: "He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither." (Psalm 1:3)

What He Taught

(T1) God is not one being among the others, however great, but being itself, the ground on which everything stands. + Suppose someone asks you to make a list of everything that exists: the chair, the dog, the moon, the Prime Minister, the number seven if you think numbers exist. Now, says Tillich, where does God go on that list? If you write him in at the top, as the biggest and oldest and strongest item, you have made him a member of the club. Notice what has just happened. Something now contains him, namely the category "things that exist," and a category is a kind of box. Whatever that box is, and whatever holds the box open, is more ultimate than the God you have put inside it, which means the thing on your list is not God after all but the largest of the creatures. The word for treating a creature as though it were the Creator is idolatry, and Tillich thought a great deal of ordinary religious talk about God was doing exactly that without noticing. So he refuses the list. God is not on it, because God is what the list is standing on. His term is being-itself: not a thing that has being, but the power of being in which every thing that has being participates. His other term, the one that traveled, is the ground of being. Both are attempts to say that God is more like the floor than like the furniture. None of that is new with him. When Moses asks for a name at the burning bush, the answer he gets is not a name on a list but "I am who I am." (Exodus 3:14) Thomas Aquinas, the greatest theologian of the Middle Ages, taught that God’s essence simply is his act of being, so that God does not have existence the way a creature has it but is subsistent being itself, and Christians have said for centuries that God does not exist the way a rock exists. Tillich’s way of putting it is harsher than theirs, and the way he pushed it is what got him into trouble. A floor holds the furniture up and never says a word to it, and a ground is not obviously something that can speak, choose, forgive or become flesh. That his God could do none of them is the charge his critics pressed hardest, and it is the one that costs him most (†3).

(Q) "God does not exist. He is being-itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore, to argue that God exists is to deny him." + Source: Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, volume 1, part 2, "Being and the Question of God," section on human finitude and the question of God, p. 205 (University of Chicago Press, 1951). The sentence has been quoted against him for seventy years, usually without the paragraph it sits in. Tillich has just said that the medieval theologians were right that in God essence and existence are not two different things, and that they went wrong the moment they started arguing for the existence of God as though God were the kind of item whose existence is in question. He is not denying God. He is denying that "exists" is the right verb, and saying that to use it is to have shrunk God into a candidate for the list (T1).

(T2) Faith is not believing improbable things; it is the state of being grasped by whatever you treat as unconditionally serious. + Ask most people what faith is and you get some version of believing things on insufficient evidence. Tillich thought that definition was a disaster, and not only for believers. It makes faith into a weak form of knowing, a guess with its chin up, and it means that the moment the evidence improves faith becomes unnecessary. His alternative starts from something everyone can check in themselves. Every human being is concerned about many things: lunch, rent, the children’s schooling, whether the test came back clear. But underneath the many concerns there is usually one concern that outranks the rest, the thing a person would sacrifice the others for. That is what he calls ultimate concern: not merely the thing you care about most, but the thing that has a total claim on you, that demands everything and promises everything. Faith is the state of being gripped like that. The word is taken from the great commandment, which asks for the heart and soul and might, all of them, and leaves nothing over. Two consequences follow, and they cut in opposite directions. The first is that atheism in the ordinary sense is much rarer than it looks, because almost nobody is actually without an ultimate concern; the question is never whether you have one but what it is. The second is more uncomfortable for religious people. A man can attend church every Sunday of his life with his real ultimate concern fixed on his nation, his career, or his own respectability, and on this definition that man has faith. He just has it in the wrong thing (T3).

(Q) "Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned: the dynamics of faith are the dynamics of man’s ultimate concern." + Source: Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, chapter 1, "What Faith Is," section 1, "Faith as Ultimate Concern" (Harper, 1957). The opening sentence of the book, and the most quoted line he ever wrote. A few pages on he says where the term comes from: the command to love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and might (Deuteronomy 6:5), which he reads as the description of a concern that leaves no remainder.

(T3) Anything finite that is treated as ultimate turns destructive, and the church’s own possessions are not exempt. + Tillich had watched a nation do this. In the Germany he left, an entire people had taken something real but limited, the life and blood of a folk, and given it the total claim that belongs to God alone; and he noticed that the result was not merely wicked but self-consuming, because a finite thing cannot carry an infinite weight and breaks under it, taking its worshippers down. He called the pattern idolatrous faith, and he insisted it is still faith. That is what makes it dangerous. It has all the devotion and none of the object. From this he drew what he named the Protestant principle, and by it he did not mean the Protestant denominations. He meant the protest, running back through Luther to the prophets, against any claim of ultimacy for anything less than the ultimate: not for a church, not for a creed, not for a pope, not for a nation, and, he added deliberately, not for a Protestant church either. He was willing to include the Bible in the warning, on the ground that its human witnesses wrote in their own time and language and that a book can be made into an idol as easily as a statue. Christians will divide on how far he took that last step, and many will say he took it too far, that the Protestant principle in his hands corrodes the very authority that lets a church say anything at all. But the core of the thing is not liberal invention. It is the second commandment, and it is Jeremiah standing in the gate of a temple whose worshippers had made the building itself their security: "Do not trust in these deceptive words: This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord." (Jeremiah 7:4) The church has needed the reminder in every century including the ones it did not enjoy hearing it.

(Q) "In true faith the ultimate concern is a concern about the truly ultimate; while in idolatrous faith preliminary, finite realities are elevated to the rank of ultimacy." + Source: Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, chapter 1, "What Faith Is," section 3, "The Source of Faith" (Harper, 1957). He has just described the man who gives a nation or his own success the total claim, and noticed that such a faith never stops being something its believer can stand outside and calculate about. The next sentence names where it ends: the inescapable consequence of idolatrous faith is "existential disappointment," a collapse that goes all the way down into a person. A page later his summary of the danger runs to six words: the danger of faith is idolatry.

(T4) Theology’s job is to answer the questions that human existence is already asking, and that is what he called the method of correlation. + A doctor who begins a consultation by announcing the treatment has skipped a step. He has to find out what is wrong first, and the diagnosis and the cure have to be about the same thing, or he is treating a patient who is not in the room. Tillich thought a good deal of theology was doing exactly that: delivering answers, accurate ones, to questions nobody in the pews was asking. His method of correlation is the fix. A theologian first analyses the human situation and draws out the questions built into simply being a finite creature: the fear of death, the sense of guilt, the suspicion that nothing means anything. Those are not questions the church invents; philosophy, novels and the visual arts are full of them. Then the theologian shows that the Christian message answers precisely these. Existence asks, revelation answers, and the two are held together. His system is built in that shape from end to end: being and God, existence and the Christ, life and the Spirit. The obvious worry, and his critics made it loudly (†2), is that whoever gets to frame the question controls the answer. If the analysis of the human situation is done with borrowed philosophical tools, the gospel may find itself allowed to say only what those tools have left room for. Tillich’s reply was that the alternative is worse: an answer thrown at someone who has not asked is not received as an answer at all, but as noise, and the preacher who refuses to learn the question has simply decided to be ignored.

(Q) "In using the method of correlation, systematic theology proceeds in the following way: it makes an analysis of the human situation out of which the existential questions arise, and it demonstrates that the symbols used in the Christian message are the answers to these questions." + Source: Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, volume 1, introduction, section on the method of correlation (University of Chicago Press, 1951). Two words in that sentence are carrying weight. "Existential" is the easy one: it simply means arising out of the fact of existing, the questions a person runs into by being alive and knowing they will not always be. Tillich is careful to add that these analyses are far older than the existentialist philosophers who gave them the name, and are as old as human thinking about the self. "Symbol" is the heavy one, and it is his term of art, worth getting straight because everything he says about Christian doctrine runs through it. A symbol, in his usage, is not a sign. A sign is arbitrary and swappable: a red octagon means stop only because somebody decided it would, and a blue triangle would have done the job just as well if the vote had gone the other way. A symbol cannot be swapped, because it takes part in the very thing it points to, the way a flag is not a coded message about a country but a piece of cloth people will stand up for and die holding. Creation, the fall, the cross, the resurrection, the kingdom of God: on Tillich’s account these are all symbols in that strong sense, pointing into what no literal sentence can reach. He means it as the highest compliment language can pay. Whether calling them symbols honors them or quietly hollows them out is the argument his readers have been having ever since (†2).

(T5) The courage to go on living is the courage to accept that you are accepted when you are not acceptable. + This is the teaching that made him a household name, and it is the most pastoral thing he wrote. The problem he starts from is not doubt but what he calls the anxiety of guilt and condemnation: the ordinary, grinding awareness that you have not become the person you meant to be, that the same failures keep coming round, that if anyone saw the whole of it they would turn away. Advice is no use against this, because the trouble is not that you do not know what to do. The trouble is that you are the one who has to do it. What Tillich says, and here he is straightforwardly Lutheran, is that nothing you can perform will touch it, and that the only thing that touches it arrives from outside as a gift. He calls it a stroke of grace, and he describes it the way it actually happens to people: not in a moment of religious uplift but in a dark stretch, when the thing you have been carrying becomes intolerable, and something breaks in and says that you are accepted. Not that you were not so bad after all. Accepted, with the whole account still open. The instruction he gives is not to make yourself better, and not even to believe anything in particular. It is to accept the acceptance. That is the root of the courage in The Courage to Be. The book’s last sentence puts it at its bleakest and most hopeful: the courage to be, he writes, is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt. He means that when every picture of God a person had has been stripped away, something holds them up anyway, and that something is God, arriving under none of the old names.

(Q) "Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!" + Source: Paul Tillich, "You Are Accepted," in The Shaking of the Foundations (1948). The sermon is on Romans 5:20, where sin increased, grace abounded all the more. The lines just before these are the ones people remember: grace strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life, when our disgust at our own indifference and weakness has become intolerable, when year after year the longed-for perfection does not appear. Then, he says, it is as though a voice were saying, "You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know."

(Q) "The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being is God. That depth is what the word God means." + Source: Paul Tillich, "The Depth of Existence," in The Shaking of the Foundations (1948). This is the sentence that carried his thought out of the seminaries and into ordinary reading, and the sermon goes straight on to the reader who has no use for the word: "And if that word has not much meaning for you, translate it, and speak of the depths of your life, of the source of your being, of your ultimate concern, of what you take seriously without any reservation." Whether that is an open door or a trapdoor is the argument that followed him, and follows him still.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) He gave pastors and counselors a way of talking with people who could no longer use the church’s words. + Think of a hospital chaplain sitting with a man who has just been given a diagnosis and who says, flatly, that he does not believe in any of it. The older training gave the chaplain a doctrine to state. Tillich gave him a question to ask: what do you actually take with total seriousness, and how is it holding up tonight? That is a conversation the man can have, and it is not a trick, because on Tillich’s account the question is already a theological one. This is why he was read so far outside the academy. Rollo May, one of the founders of American existential psychotherapy, was his student and his friend, and the language of acceptance and of courage went from Tillich’s sermons into a generation of pastoral counseling. Campus ministers used him because he could get a conversation started with students who had written the whole thing off. And a young doctoral candidate at Boston University named Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his 1955 dissertation comparing the conceptions of God in Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman, working through the ground of being at length before concluding against it: an impersonal being-itself, he argued, cannot be rational or good or in fellowship with anyone, because those belong to persons, and the God of religious experience is personal. His widest public reach came through another man’s book. In 1963 John A. T. Robinson, the Anglican bishop of Woolwich, published Honest to God, which took Tillich’s "ground of our being" together with ideas from Bultmann and Bonhoeffer and put them in front of the general reader. It sold more than a million copies and started an argument in the English-speaking churches that ran for a decade.

(†) His critics answered that a question is not allowed to dictate the answer, and that his God was too thin to pray to. + The first objection went to the method (T4), and it came from the neo-orthodox side. Neo-orthodoxy is the movement Karl Barth had launched in 1919 against exactly this kind of theology, and its founding conviction is easy to state: theology has to begin with what God has said, not with what human beings are wondering, because a God arrived at by examining ourselves will always turn out to be roughly our own size. So the complaint writes itself. If the questions are set by an analysis of the human situation, and that analysis is carried out with philosophical tools chosen in advance, then the gospel is permitted to speak only in the spaces those tools have left open. Revelation stops being the thing that overturns our questions and becomes the thing that satisfies them. Barth’s whole career was a protest against a theology that begins with the human situation, and he did not change his mind for Tillich. The evangelical and confessional critics pressed the same point about content rather than method. Kenneth Hamilton’s The System and the Gospel (1963) argued that Tillich’s system is coherent, impressive, and not finally about the God of the gospel, because everything particular in the Christian message has been converted into a symbol of something general. In Christianity Today in July 1958, with the third volume of the system still five years off, David H. Freeman put the charge at its bluntest: a God described only as being-itself is not the God who made the world and speaks in it but an abstraction, and a God like that cannot do the things the Bible says God does, which are to choose, speak, send and forgive. The sharpest blow came from the other direction. Sidney Hook, an atheist philosopher at New York University, published an essay called "The Atheism of Paul Tillich" in Religious Experience and Truth (New York University Press, 1961), arguing that Tillich had emptied the word God of everything that would let anyone believe or disbelieve in him, and had then kept the word. That is the pincer Tillich lived in for the rest of his life: too orthodox for the atheists, too thin for the church. He accepted both charges as evidence that he had positioned himself correctly, which his critics thought was not an answer.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a God who cannot act, a resurrection that needs no tomb, and a life that did not match the sermons. + Tillich was an ordained Lutheran minister who preached the gospel for fifty years, and the ledger has to record both columns. Three entries belong on the second one, and all three come from his own writing and his own record rather than from what anyone later did with him. - A ground that cannot speak. Saying that God is being itself rather than a being is old and defensible (T1). Tillich goes further: God is not a person, he writes, though not less than personal, and "personal God" is a symbol meaning that God is the ground of everything personal and carries the power of personality within himself. The God addressed in prayer is the God of that symbol. Scripture does not read as though the personal language were a concession to our weakness. God names himself and keeps appointments, he is grieved and he relents, and the whole of it turns on his being able to say I to someone who can say you back. "Then he said to Thomas, Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe." (John 20:27) A ground of being does not say that. - A resurrection that does not need a tomb. In the second volume of the system Tillich sets out what he calls the restitution theory, and two of his terms have to be unpacked before it can be judged. The New Being is his name for human life healed: existence with the estrangement between God and man taken out of it, which is what he says appeared in Jesus as the Christ and is the point of the whole story. And ecstatic he uses in the old sense of standing outside oneself, a mind carried past its ordinary working, rather than in the modern sense of feeling wonderful. With those in hand, the theory is this: the event behind the symbol of the resurrection is an ecstatic experience in which the picture of Jesus of Nazareth became indissolubly united with the New Being in the minds of his followers. He says the theory dismisses physical and spiritualistic literalism alike, and he treats the empty tomb as a late and rationalizing story. He does insist that something happened, that if the factual element in the Christian event were denied the foundation of Christianity would go with it, but he also writes that faith cannot even guarantee the name "Jesus" for him who was the Christ, and must leave that to the incertitudes of historical knowledge. Paul is working the other way round. He hands on the burial and the third day as received tradition and names the living witnesses, and he draws the line that Tillich’s theory cannot hold: "And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain." (1 Corinthians 15:14) The risen Jesus in the Gospels goes out of his way to be touched, and eats a piece of fish to prove the point: "See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have." (Luke 24:39) - A life that did not match the sermons. Hannah Tillich’s memoir From Time to Time (1973) made public what his circle had known, that her husband had conducted affairs throughout their forty-one years of marriage, and the biographers who worked through the papers afterward confirmed the pattern. He wrote about grace as well as anyone in his century and about the brokenness under a respectable surface with unusual honesty, and the honesty did not reach as far as amendment. The standard he fell short of is not one his critics invented for him: "Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous." (Hebrews 13:4) None of that cancels the first column. He kept the question of God open for people who had closed it, and he was right that a church which cannot hear the question will not be heard giving the answer. But his own most famous sentence turns out to cut both ways. If God is the depth of existence and nothing more, a man may find that depth and still never meet anyone there; and the gospel is the news that there is someone, who has a name, and who came looking first.