Subject:  Paul Tillich on Christ, God, and Bible |
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Liberal for 天力
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Date Posted: 23:54:45 03/14/05 Mon
I have found a very brief introduction to the theology of Paul Tillich.
1.On Christ:
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.
2.On God:
"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.
3.On Bible:
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 it's 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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Tillich#Theology
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