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

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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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