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 used terminology that deviates from Biblical and ecclesiastical language. But the problem is really that his continued use of Biblical language partially conceals the degree to which his theology departs from the substance of the Christian faith. For his writings are filled with terms that, if the preceding analysis is correct, can have no meaning whatsoever beyond the purely metaphorical (Griffin, 1990, p. 36).
«IP0,0»On this view, Tillich's approach c...