The Ark

No one did more to bring existentialist philosophy and Christian belief into a harmonious relationship than Paul Tillich. Renowned New Zealand theologian Lloyd Geering discusses Tillich's legacy.

Transcript

Rachael Kohn: In the 1950s, when the West was recovering from a terrible war and an unprecedented Holocaust, a lot of people thought faith in God was passé.

Hello, I'm Rachael Kohn, and this is The Ark on ABC Radio National.

It took a German theologian who'd fled his homeland, to give back to the West a dynamic faith, with a new language. Paul Tillich was a Lutheran minister, who became the most influential theologian of his day. New Zealand theologian Lloyd Geering, who was himself tried for heresy by the Presbyterian church, remembers the radical thinker, Paul Tillich.

Lloyd Geering: Well he was a liberal of the turn of the century, who during the Great War, realised that the liberal theology of the previous 20 or 30 years didn't work any more. In fact I think it was he who said (he was a chaplain you see in the German army) that he saw liberalism crumbling before his eyes, simply because of these two Christian nations I think at war. And so when he continued his theological career, he began then to think things through afresh. But he hadn't got very far when of course he was deposed from his chair by Hitler. When that happened, he was invited to New York to teach in New York, by a theologian who already saw his importance.

Rachael Kohn: And that was Reinhold Niebuhr?

Lloyd Geering: That's right, that was Niebuhr.

This was a tremendous challenge for Paul Tillich, because he really had to start a career all over again in what was really a foreign language to him. But such was his capacity for creativity that within ten years or so, he was becoming widely known as a theologian who was attempting to express the Christian faith in terms which were much more relevant to the world in which we live today.

Rachael Kohn: Some people have described Paul Tillich's theology as a secular theology. How would you describe it?

Lloyd Geering: Well he described it as an answering theology, namely that the culture in which you live is asking questions, and you have to express the Christian faith in a way which genuinely answers those questioners.

Rachael Kohn: Is that why he said doubt was not the opposite of faith, but an element of faith?

Lloyd Geering: Yes. He would argue that unless you have experienced doubt, you cannot really have faith, because faith really is the response to genuine doubt. Faith is not to be confused with certainty of conviction. Faith is really the leap, using the term of Kierkegaard of course, it's the leap into the dark, the leap into the unknown when you are feeling far from certain that you're on the right path.

Rachael Kohn: Well he was really part of that movement initiated by Rudolf Bultmann, also German, away from a literal reading of the New Testament, and toward a symbolic one. Jesus Christ became the new being. What does he mean by that?

Lloyd Geering: Instead of attempting to expound the Christian tradition as presenting Jesus as a saviour, he rather wanted to show that what Jesus was really on about was enabling us humans to reach out to our full human potential, and that of course he expressed in this term, the new being.

Now Jesus himself was the first, as it were, of the new being. But because it was Christian tradition that the whole Christian community were in Christ, then those who became Christian began to share in this new being.

Rachael Kohn: That's a very present-looking theology. It's not looking backward, is it?

Lloyd Geering: No, it is aware that the Christian faith and the Christian path of faith, has to be something which speaks to people just where they are, not at some distant point either in the past or in the future, but in the present.

Rachael Kohn: Well Paul Tillich gave us some great concepts, and I'd like you to describe some of them. Here's the first one: ultimate concern.

Lloyd Geering: Yes, really following the first modern theologian, Friedrich Schleiermacher, he took Christian thinking back into experience. That's where it really begins.

Instead of trying to say in some dogmatic fashion who God is or what God is, he was starting with 'Where do we start and appoint a faith, and what is it which concerns us?' Well, God becomes a symbol then for whatever concerns us in an ultimate way. He was a Lutheran of course, and indeed Martin Luther had himself said something very similar to this at the time of the Reformation, though he hadn't used the word 'ultimate'. Whatever is God for us, is that in which we look ultimately (he didn't use the word 'ultimately') for our faith, what concerns us.'

Rachael Kohn: One of the really important philosophical movements was Existentialism and one thinks of Jean-Paul Sartre and so forth. But I think I see it in Tillich's notion of the 'ground of being'.

Lloyd Geering: When he was asked if he was an Existentialist, he denied it and said he was half-and-half. Half an Existentialist, and the other half was Essentialist. The opposite of Existentialism is Essentialism. That is, the belief that you can analyse all reality into essences of things.

In many ways, this really is the legacy of Plato, who in his concern for eternal ideas or forms, left a great impression of course on Christian thought, and so God was the ultimate reality. But Tillich was moving away from that towards Existentialism but only went half-way. And that is why he talked about God as being the 'ground of our being', or sometimes he said 'being itself', but that is a very essential way of looking at things.

On the other hand, he showed his Existentialism in other terms such as The Courage To Be. Now this was the book which came out in 1952. The Courage To Be is really the new language for faith. Faith is having the courage to be, the courage to go forward in life, the courage to meet all the problems in life, that is really faith.

Rachael Kohn: Well in 1956 Paul Tillich was probably writing The Dynamics of Faith, which came out in 1957. I read that, and also read The Courage to Be, and I must say it struck me as a kind of language that was universalist, it appealed no matter what tradition you were in. Was this actually the language of ecumenism?

Lloyd Geering: Well it was. It had the effect of being ecumenical, indeed more than ecumenical, it could actually speak to people who were outside the church or the Christian tradition at all.

I first became interested in Paul Tillich in 1957, just after I'd come here to Queensland to my first teaching position. I hadn't known anything about him before that. And when I returned to New Zealand in 1960-'61, I was interested to find that many people say in university, particularly in the medical college and who had been reading Paul Tillich, indeed, he was more well-known amongst more secular thinkers than he was in the clergy I thought at that time.

Rachael Kohn: Well I guess that accounts for why he was so influential in his time, because he wrote in a way that the lay person could understand.

Lloyd Geering: Yes, you didn't have to have a theological education in order to know the terminology that had been traditional. He was using new terminology which was using everyday language as it were, in order to express faith as he saw it. That I think was his great strength. And so books like The Dynamics of Faith, The Courage To Be, The Shaking of the Foundations is a book of his sermons, and his sermons also were like that. When he began to write his great theology in its three volumes, he used such basic terms as 'being itself', 'ultimate concern' and so on, but they would not have spoken to the person outside quite so much as these other smaller books did.

Rachael Kohn: Lloyd Geering, you're here in Australia for the Sea of Faith Conference, and I guess the Sea of Faith could be described as perhaps the most progressive, the most liberal expression of Protestant faith. Is Paul Tillich's theology still relevant?

Lloyd Geering: I think it's still relevant, but you don't hear so much talk about Paul Tillich today. It's after all 50 years have gone by since the time we were talking of, and other thinkers have progressed and become even more radical than Paul Tillich was.

So that I still regard Paul Tillich as a very great, positive foundational, creative thinker, but no religious thought can ever stay the same, because the culture is changing, the world is changing, and so others such as Don Cupitt from Britain, who's also here for this conference, wouldn't be regarded as a Tillichean, but he would also appreciate what Tillich did in his time, just as he in his day now, is attempting to take on that same task.

Rachael Kohn: In the last couple of Sea of Faith conferences I attended, the term 'ground of being' came up a lot.

Lloyd Geering: Yes, well I think his terms would still resonate really with people. 'Ultimate concern' is one that I use a good deal.

See I've been teaching religious studies generally now for quite a few years, and 'ultimate concern' is something which applies to every religious tradition, even humanism. What is it that you are ultimately concerned about? Well, that indeed is your religion, or indeed that is your responsive faith to the demands of human existence.

Rachael Kohn: I think Paul Tillich used the illustration of the difference between Mary and Martha. Martha was doing the dishes, as it were, and complaining, whereas Mary had turned her attention entirely to Jesus.

Lloyd Geering: Yes, and indeed insofar as one takes life seriously at all, one is taking the first steps on one's own religious path.

See one of the things which Paul Tillich did for example in his book, The Courage To Be - this is a very general thing to say, but he said, In the ancient world, the majority of people were concerned with death and mortality, so they were looking for something which defeated death, or overcame it. Eternal life was the answer.

But by the Middle Ages, no-one doubted for one moment that they were going to survive death, the real problem was where they were going to survive death. So the thing that concerned them then was how were they to find forgiveness for the terrible things they'd done during life?

But he says it's changed again. In the modern world, we have come to accept our mortality. This is the only life we have, and consequently the first two answers no longer work. Our problem today is, is there any meaning in life at all? And if so, what is it and where can I find it?

Rachael Kohn: Well Paul Tillich died in America in 1965, and one might think that Christianity continued to become more liberal, more progressive. But your experience would indicate that Tillich's universalism was short-lived in some circles.

Lloyd Geering: You see the problem with Christianity is that as it has become more liberal, and more adapted to the secular world in which we live, it has also become less rooted in the church. And consequently the churches have become more conservative. They have moved backwards into a literalism which of course they would reject Paul Tillich altogether, indeed they tend to regard Karl Barth as their great theologian because Karl Barth really said 'You cannot arrive at any truth by reason, you simply just have to accept it on faith. The revelation is there, you simply respond to the revelation.' Which of course for the fundamentalist is in the Bible.

Rachael Kohn: A lot of people think of the '50s as a very conservative decade. Does Paul Tillich show that that was certainly not the case in theology?

Lloyd Geering: Oh no. I think we live in the conservative times today so far as organised religion is concerned.

The 20th century was much more liberal, and as that liberalism began to decay, particularly as the result of the First World War, but even more in the Second World War, there's a sense in which Paul Tillich was trying to save liberalism by giving it a new face, giving it a new language. Latterly as we move towards the end of the 20th century, conservatism has taken over.

Rachael Kohn: That was Lloyd Geering, who is 88, and has just published his 11th book, [actually, Wrestling with God - the Story of my Life]. Maybe it's the struggle that keeps him so young.

Next week, a visiting Professor from China explains why the Chinese are learning about Judaism. That's on The Ark, with me, Rachael Kohn.

Guests

Lloyd Geering
is the Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at Victoria University, Wellington, in New Zealand. Geering is an internationally renowned liberal theologian and Presbyterian minister.

Further Information

Paul Tillich (1886-1965)
Essay with links for further reading from Faithnet.

Tomorrow's God, with Lloyd Geering
Transcript of an interview on The Spirit of Things from 4 March, 2001.

The Big 56 - 1956 on Radio National
From 18 to 24 September many of ABC Radio National's regular programs will look at the events of 1956 - in politics, the arts, science, music, religion and society.

Presenter

Rachael Kohn

Producer

Geoff Wood and Rachael Kohn