“Mark and Bev Tindall” <> wrote in message news:<>… I don’t believe that God exists.

An existent God is on the same level as us – a mere being.

I believe God is beyond existence.

Paul Tillich explained God as the Ground of all being.

I believe God is ultimate reality … our ultimate concern.

######################################

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.

****************

The following from John A T Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, ‘Honest To God’ (SCM, London: 1963)

For in place of a God who is literally or physically ‘up there’ we have accepted, as part of our mental furniture, a God who is spirtitually or metaphysically ‘out there’. p. 13 [Robinson argues against this theistic concept.]

After it had been discredited scientifically, it continued to serve theologically as an acceptable frame of reference. p. 16

But suppose such a super-Being ‘out there’ is really only a sophisticated version of the Old Man in the sky? Suppose belief in God does not, indeed cannot, mean being persuaded of the ‘existence’ of some entity, even a supreme entity, even a superior entity, which might or might not be there, like life on Mars? p. 17

God, [Paul] Tillich was saying, is not a projection ‘out there’, an Other beyond the skies, of whose existence we have to convince ourselves, but the Ground of our very Being. pp. 22

God is, by definition, ultimate reality. And one cannot argue whether ultimate reality really exists. One can only ask what ultimate reality is like … Thus, the fundamental theological question is not in establishing the ‘existence’ of God as a separate entity but in pressing through in ultimate concern to what Tillich calls ‘the ground of our being’.. p. 29

In Tillich’s words: The phrase deus sive natura, used by people like Scotus Eriggena and Spinoza, does not say that God is identical with nature but that he is identical with the natura naturans, the creative nature, the creative ground of all natural objects. p. 31

God is not ‘out there’. He is in Bonhoeffer’s words ‘ the “beyond” in the midst of our life’, a depth of reality reached ‘ not on the borders of life but at its centre’, not by any flight of the alone to the alone, but, in Kierkegaard’s fine phrase, by ‘ a deeper immersion in existence’. For the word ‘God’ denotes the ultimate depth of all our being, the creative ground and meaning of all our existence. …Tillich warns us that to make the necessary transposition, ‘you must forget everything traditional that you have learned about God, perhaps even that word itself.’ p. 47

Belief in God is the trust, the well nigh incredible trust, that to give ourselves to the uttermost in love is not to be confounded but to be ‘accepted’, that Love is the ground of our being, to which we ultimately ‘come home’. … And the specifically Christian view of the world is asserting that the final definition of this reality, from which ‘nothing can separate us’, since it is the very ground of our being, is ‘the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’. p. 49

… Bonhoeffer insists … ‘The transcendent is not infinitely remote but close at hand.’ p.53

The question of God is the question whether this depth of being is a reality or an illusion, not whether a Being exists beyond the bright, blue sky, or anywhere else. Belief in God is a matter of ‘what you take seriously without any reservation’, of what for you is ultimate reality. p. 55

… the beginning is to try to be honest – and to go on from there. p. 141

**************

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

‘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 existential acceptance of something transcending 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 h as 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

***********************

‘ 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

********************************