Paul Tillich and the Church of 2016

I just finished reading, The Irrelevance and Relevance of the Christian Message, by Paul Tillich. This small book is a collection of lectures Tillich delivered in 1963, but he might as well have delivered them last week. The themes he presented are issues we face here and now, particularly and specifically the issue of why the church, the religious embodiment of Jesus, struggles so mightily to engage people in the life of faith.

I.

Tillich starts by defining relevance. Relevance is the ability of a theology or religion to answer the existential questions of a given time and place. Those questions are—

What does existence mean?

What does being human mean in a depraved world?

Where does the courage to live arise?

How do I retain my value in a world that devalues the individual?

Where does hope arise? Hope for what?

How do I transcend my own conflicted nature?

How can transformation of the world arise?

Look at those questions. If you spend enough time with them, you begin to gain an insight into why this year’s presidential election has run off the rails. These questions are at the core. Folks struggle to find answers to those questions, and as answers become harder and harder to come by, angst begins to rise. If we cannot make sense of our lives or our world, then stability vanishes. Being unstable is terrifying. There is no security. Strangers become dangerous shadows. People who stray from a norm of ordinariness come under fire because they are seen as implements of disorder—Blame them! They refuse to conform! They must be after what we have! They must be denounced, denigrated, and denied access to regular society… The inverse, though, remains true—if someone can offer real and true answers to those questions, then they can provide lasting stability as they ground existence with what is valuable, meaningful, and intentional. What Donald Trump offers is false. He asks that his followers give him control, he will rid them of any and all who threaten them, but there is nothing there beyond that—no meaning, no value, and no intention for living life as it should be. That which is actually true in answering the questions will make everyone better, allowing for a universal rise into hope. This message is the core of the Gospel. Jesus offers stability by answering each question—

Life has meaning because it flows from God

Being human is to be the image of God, working for the transformation of a created order that is out of kilter through the love by which we were made

The courage to live comes through communion with God

You always and forever have value as a child of God

Hope comes through knowing God is with us; what we hope for is the realization of our being as children of God

We transcend our own nature by aligning thoughts, words, and actions with Christ

Transformation comes through resurrection—the new life, new order that comes through the full embodiment of love as it is God—other- centered, self-emptying

Tillich, though, argued that Christianity became irrelevant, unable to answer any of these questions. We see that irrelevance in six ways—

Christian language is essentially incomprehensible by our world

Our message has no content that answers anyone’s questions

Fearfulness fixes our tradition in a historically dated mode of being

The prophetic has fallen silent

Christianity has become the religion of the comfortable

There is no passion in its pursuit

What Tillich says here may be hard to hear, but we need to hear it if we are to recapture the power of our gospel. Looking at Points 2 & 3 above, we need to see what we have done with Christ’s message. The two main divergences are reducing the gospel to moralism and somehow turning its spirituality into yet another statement of the pervasive materialism of our context. Scripture is complicated. Anyone who strives to make sense of the Torah as it is actually written in Leviticus and Deuteronomy will quickly realize that those records are contradictory and dated—it’s been a long time since we took a smart-mouthed teen and stoned them to death as Leviticus mandates. Moreover, Jesus reworks the Torah into another standard of practice—routing all obedience through the fuzzy filter of love; i.e., meaning obedience becomes relative to whom you are with, what you are doing, and what will benefit all. So, to simplify the complexity, we reduce it all to set of moral codes and rules that make everything yes-no, right-wrong, and in-out. That means winners and losers, victors and vanquished, etc. So, uncomfortable with that, we turn salvation into something we can readily understand—if we behave ourselves, then God’s going to give us the Christmas bonus to end all Christmas bonuses! Salvation then becomes simply material reward. The result of both of these divergences is that an increasingly large number of our numbers find the church and its message offensive. To declare prejudice faith or to simply be yet another voice of “Greed is good” satisfies no one.

Tillich then considers a cure to what ails us. There are two main ways for Christianity to engage the world with relevance—

mediation— bridging the gospel to the best of human mores as an entrance into Christ’s transformative transcendence

opposition—allowing love to counter the prevailing cult of Self that dominates our culture

In other words, if the church is to recapture its relevance, it needs to embrace completely the love Jesus reveals and embodies. Tillich argues that the church needs to emphasize that the way of Jesus is possible for regular human beings. We can love our neighbor. We can work for justice. We can work for the communion of all souls. We see that when someone practices altruism just because. We see it in the kindness of strangers to strangers. We see it in the generosity of one for another just because the other is in need. We need to show that such moves are not signs of weakness, but actually tap into the greatest strength we have as human beings. To simply retreat into a fortress of self saves no one, not even ourselves. 

II.

Tillich then analyzes how we are human. The modern mind can be defined by four basic principles—

To explore the cosmos, outwardly and inwardly, stepping into every aspect of space

To gain control over nature

To objectify all that is

Limiting reason to scientific analysis, devaluing philosophy of any kind

The result is a divergence from the development of human inquiry as the quest to understand both the tangible and the transcendent. As humanity was removed as the center of all existence, there came an almost total focus on gaining control of the cosmos through materialism. Christianity aided its own irrelevance by abandoning its transcendent nature, instead making all its proclamation materialistic (literalism is nothing less than reducing the divine to material terms). 

While Tillich sees only fundamentalism as the main component of materialism in religion, I would add a couple of other pieces to our loss of relevance. One is fixing what we declare true and good in antique values. What I mean by that is the rejection within the church of the deeper understanding of what it is to be human brought to us by scientific inquiry. A key example is our understanding of homosexuality which medical science now knows to be simply one spot on the spectrum of human sexuality. Another is somehow trying to refute evolution as the means by which the world and living things become—it is not a refutation of God’s creation, it is a recognition that creation comes through the process of an evolving cosmos. Still another is rejecting the evidence of global warming on religious grounds—that somehow accepting that human interaction with the created order has consequences, some good, some devastating is a refutation of our destiny outlined in Genesis is absurd. Following Christ, we can actually accept our responsibility, repent, and redeem ourselves and creation through grace. We cannot deny the development of human knowledge; we must adjust to it.

Tillich saw the rise of existentialism offering Christianity a possible avenue into regaining the relevance of its message. Existentialism is the recognition of the limits of materialism. The cosmos remains stridently beyond human control. Moreover, materialism’s effort included human control of humanity, reducing human beings to existence only as objects. Both materialistic developments left the human heart empty, meaningless, and hopeless. Christianity, with its gospel of love, can counter the emptiness of materialism. Interestingly, Tillich sees the possibility of blending Buddhism and Christianity, even though he does not and would not ever suggest such a compatibility—Buddhism with its emphasis on release through loss of self in total compassion is actually the endpoint for Christian practice, too.

Here, is one place where we have moved beyond Tillich’s world of 1963. Then, French Existentialism was still a dominant way of seeking understanding of a world that was quickly becoming post-modern after WWII. We have since abandoned the mindset of Camus, Sartre, etc., but I am unsure that we have settled on any new mindset (cf. above—the denigration of philosophy in general), perhaps because we are in a world that trusts no one who claims any real or deep understanding of anything. 

III.

Tillich concludes by examining what the church actually does have to offer that is timelessly relevant. The relevance of the Christian message is that it is grounded in an event in time and space—it happened—it is not simply a construct of ideology and symbol.

What he means by this assertion is that there is a concrete core to our gospel. It is not something that someone dreamed up as a theological construct (e.g., Plato’s cave). There is the story of a human being at its center. 

However, Tillich continues, the church creates a paradox, for it receives this historical event as it is (pure, true), but filters it through its own being (human, distorted). Scripture is finally the human record of a human experience of God’s interaction with humanity. As such, the record remains as human as the authors of it. It is the old accident report conundrum—ten people witness an auto accident, and in evidence, give ten different accounts of a concrete event that are contradictory, confused, and convoluted. Every writer and compiler of scripture ran things through their own filters of their time, running things through their own prejudices, presumptions, and assumptions. Hence, Joshua and Judges completely contradict each other on the account of Israel’s taking of the Promised Land. As Paul enters the fray, for example, with the Corinthians, we learn an awful lot about what Paul considered good, right,and proper, as well as finding the nuggets of applied compassion as he outlines a communal expression of Christ. All of us do this same thing. It is how we make sense of the world. 

Tillich, though, says the church solves the paradox when it practices self-negation—we know our gospel to be a human response to a divine event—coupled with self-affirmation—however, the core of our gospel remains true, regardless—we are ALL children of God. Directly, what Tillich means is that we lose the need to have everyone focus on us, but instead direct that focus to God in Christ. Basically, he mandates that we know the difference between religion and faith—religion is a human system to express what we know of God; faith is simple acceptance of God. 

Tillich ends with this hope—the solution to the paradox ensures the relevance of the Gospel. It breaks the stranglehold of materialism by forcing us to see the intervention of the transcendent into our existence. That intervention, in turn, provides meaning, value, and purpose to our existence, answering the questions existentialism poses, allowing us to reclaim the core essence of being human as the image of God.