Human Experience of God & Paul Tillich

earth in this regard, in favor of an interpretation of how the human experience of God, as manifest in the life of Jesus, can be made meaningful and relevant to the human condition.

�IP5,0�Unqualified omnipotence cannot be attributed to any creature of time. Thus Tillich's view of God does not involve the idea of God as a being, even the most perfect being, for while that would put God at the extreme of a continuum of perfection, human beings would be on that same continuum. Accordingly, God is characterized as being-itself or the Ground of Being, which means that God is the power of being in everything that is.

This formulation has been seen as an analytical difficulty. Griffin says that Tillich's "language about God cannot avoid equivocation" (Griffin, 1990, p. 32). Griffin's analysis is that while equating God with the unconditional and not "limiting" divine being to the status of "a" being, Tillich departs from the Biblical tradition that "did assume that God was a self and hence a being in relation to other beings" (Griffin, 1990, pp. 37-8), even as he uses the vocabulary of Biblical tradition to elaborate a special interpretation of divinity. The result, according to Griffin, is that Tillich uses traditional Christian diction to come up with a nontraditional view of what Christianity means.

Tillich has rejected the charge, made by those who dislike his use of ontological terms' that he has surrendered the substance of the Christian message because he has u

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onception as "the participation of a god in human destiny, in suffering and death [unique properties of the human experience of finitude], in spite of the ultimacy of the power he wields and with which he conquers guilt and death" (Tillich, ST I, 1951, p. 228). But this problem is not easily disposed of by way of declaration, for Tillich has also explained that God participates in human destiny. How God can be both the abyss of ultimate concern (the God-concept) and a participant in history is the fundamental paradox of Christian faith and the Christian conception of how the tension between human history and what could be called eternal life is mediated. The Christian solution to whether this is monotheism, polytheism, or anthropomorphism is, according to Tillich, "founded on the paradox that the Messiah, the mediator between God and man, is identical with a personal human life, the name of which is Jesus of Nazareth" (Tillich, 1951, pp. 229-30). An identification of the name that Christianity gives to the solution to the problem of God and the problem of evil in the human world is, however, not the same as explaining why it has theological standing. The theological standing of the Christ for Tillich inheres in the fact that Chr

Category: Philosophy - H