***************************** From Karen Armstrong’s ‘A History of God’ ( Vintage; London:1993) pp. 438 – 439 …..

Paul Tillich (1868 -1965) was convinced that the personal God of traditional Western theism must go but he also believed that religion was necessary for humankind. A deep-rooted anxiety is part of the human condition: this is not neurotic, because it is ineradicable and no therapy can take it away. ….

Instead we should seek to find a ‘God’ above this personal God. There is nothing new about this. … it said ‘thou’ to a God who, as Being itself, was nearer to the ‘I’ than our own ego. Tillich preferred the definition of God as the Ground of being. Participation in such a God above ‘God’ does not alienate us from the world but immerses us in reality. It returns us to ourselves. human beings have to use symbols when they talk about Being-itself: to speak literally or realistiocally about it is inaccurate and untrue. …

When Tillich was speaking to lay people, he preferred to to replace the rather technical term ‘Ground of all being’ with ‘ultimate concern’. He emphasised that the human experience of faith in this ‘God above God’ was not a peculiar state distinguishable from others in our emotional or intellectual experience. You could not say: ‘I am now having a special “religious” experience’, since the God which is being precedes and is fundamental to all our emotions of courage, hope and despair. It was not a distinct state with a name of its own but pervaded each one of our normal human experiences.

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from Paul Tillich ‘The Courage To Be’ (Collins Fount, London:1962)

‘… encountering God means encountering transcendent security and transcendent eternity. But in order to participate in him you must be accepted by him and you must have accepted his acceptance of you.’ p.165

‘Faith is the state of being grasped by the power of being-itself. …Faith is not a theoretical affirmation of something uncertain, it is the existentail acceptance of something transcendiong ordinary experience. Faith is not an opinion but a state. It is the state of being grasped by the power of being which transcends everything that is and in which everything that is participates. He who is grasped by this power is able to affirm himself because he knows that he is affirmed by the power of being-itself. In this point mystical experience and personal encounter are identical. In both of them faith is the basis of the courage to be.’ pp. 167 – 168

‘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. if we know it, we accept acceptance consciously. if we do not know it, we nevertheless accept it and participate in it. And in our acceptance of that which we do not know the power of being is manifest to us. Courage has revealing power, the courage to be is the key to being-itself.’ pp.175-176

‘The God of theological theism is a being beside others and as such is a part of the whole of reality … and as a part is subject to the structure of the whole. He is supposed to be beyond the ontological elements and categories which constitute reality. But every statement subjects him to them. He is seen as a self which has a world, as an ego which is related to a thou, as a cause which is separated from its effect, as having a definite space and an endless time. He is a being not being-itself. As such he is bound to the subject-object structure of reality, he is an object for us as subjects. At the same time we are objects for him as subject. And this is decisive for the necessity of TRANSCENDING THEOLOGICAL THEISM For God as a subject makes me into an object which is nothing more than an object. He deprives me of my subjectivity because he is all-powerful and all-knowing. ….. This is the God which Nietzsche said had to be killed … ‘ p. 178 -179

‘Theism in all its forms is transcended in the experience we have called absolute faith. It is the accepting of the acceptance without somebody or something that accepts. It is the power of being-itself which accepts and gives courage to be. … IT CANNOT BE DESCRIBED IN THE WAY THE GODS OF ALL THEISM CAN BE DESCRIBED. It cannot be described in mystical terms either. It transcends both mysticism and personal encounter, as it transcends both the courage to be as a part and the courage to be as oneself.’ p. 179

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‘ To believe in a god means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning.’ – Wittgenstein’s Notebook July 8 1916

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Mark