Paul Tillich
Paul Tillich, Alfred North Whitehead, and Hans Jonas point to a God whose being is linked with our own. 1,331 words
For centuries, most of the western world accepted God’s total authority over the world. Disease, slaughter in war, and natural disasters were all part of God’s will, inscrutable but not often questioned. Prayer and contrition might bring blessings in this life or the next, but only as God willed.
Although God’s will was not questioned, the nature of the world was increasingly the subject of human inquiry. In the late 16th Century, this inquiry led Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler to conclude that the world created by God was not the center of the universe, but existed in reliance on the sun.
A century later, Newtonian physics suggested a well-ordered universe, compatible with the purposeful design of the Creator. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, along with other intellectuals of the succeeding century, saw Newton’s God as compatible with reason, if not with orthodox Christianity.
But then came publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, leading to a 150 years of scientific research affirming the theory of evolution and its basic hypothesis of random natural selection of species.
Natural selection, along with genetic and behavioral changes, became the key to understanding the natural world. God’s creation of discrete species in one singular act only 6,000 years ago became untenable for almost all scientists and intellectuals.
Then physics contributed theories on Relativity and Quantum Mechanics in the early 20th Century, and the operations of matter, apparently so rational and orderly in Newton’s time, appeared much more uncertain. In the meantime, two world wars and the horrifying realities of the Holocaust and Stalinism seemed to shatter any connection that a controlling God could have with the world.
A Caring God Who is Not Omnipotent
Now shift to a universe in which the nature of God is intimately connected to human beings, but does not direct them. This is not a God of dogma and rules, nor a God who controls the destiny of humanity. A caring and a loving God who desires the best for us, he is the source of unlimited possibility. For this reason, he is also a God who cannot or does not constrain human freedom.
For people who want a God that controls their lives, this God is not appealing. He likewise is not appealing to those who want to blame or question God for allowing sadness and suffering into the world. These are inevitable in a world of unlimited possibility, where God is not omnipotent. But this God reveres our experience and makes it his, and by doing so makes it eternally valuable.
In the 20th Century, three men, among many other men and women, elaborated brilliantly on such a God.
Paul Tillich
One of the greatest theologians of the 20th Century, Paul Tillich believed that during our worldly “estrangement” from God, we should strive to reach our potential as spiritual beings. All that we do on Earth is of critical importance—actions, thoughts, emotions—not only to us, but to God, the ground of all being.
Although we are estranged from God, we are not separate from God. What we do is taken up by God, and our positive achievements augment the loving and supportive nature of God. Tillich, especially in his later work, came to see a process whereby the spiritual realm of “Eternal Life” would “include the positive content of history, liberated from its negative distortions, and fulfilled in its potentialities.”
The fate of our negative experience is to be “present in the eternal memory as that which is conquered.” Thus powerless, the negative yields to a sense of “blessedness” in God, a profound gratitude for the enlargement of Eternal Life. The positive essence of what we have achieved becomes eternal, to the glory of God, and so our part lives on, but we do not, as individuals.
“From the eternal everything comes,” Tillich concluded, “and to it everything goes, in every moment of time and history, in every moment of our planet and the universe to which it belongs.”
Alfred North Whitehead
Tillich in his later work took up some of the themes of the great philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Partly in reaction to the jolts of uncertainty introduced by quantum physics, Whitehead, a great mathematician as well as a philosopher, realized that logic and strict analysis were not sufficient to understand humankind’s relation to ultimate reality.
In his most influential work, Process and Reality, Whitehead developed the idea of a “contingent God,” whose identity and reality are linked inseparably with our own. God is complete possibility, allowing us creative freedom to achieve or destroy. As in the case of Tillich, who follows Whitehead’s thought to some extent, our experience is shared with God, and then in the “process” is combined with other experiences to create a new context for the next dynamic interaction.
Whitehead famously said that “The many become one, and are increased by one.” This describes what may be thought of as an ever-rotating exchange in which the individual experiences something of what the many have contributed, and then makes an individual contribution back to the many, which now is “increased by one.”
What is creative, positive, and valuable in these continually augmenting experiences resides eternally, also in much the same way Tillich later described. An important difference, however, is that the “negative” in our relation with God is more present in God, more “felt” by him, than in the Tillich framework.
For Whitehead, God is more at risk as a result of being so involved in our experiences, positive and negative. But this greater risk attaches him more profoundly to us in our suffering and in our hope.
Hans Jonas
“In the beginning, for unknowable reasons, the ground of being, or the Divine, chose to give itself over to the chance and risk of endless variety in becoming.” These are the words of the late Hans Jonas, philosopher, theologian, and soldier on behalf of freedom in World War Two and the Jewish state thereafter.
A student of Martin Heidegger who broke with his better-known mentor when Heidegger embraced Nazism in the 1930s, Jonas’s principal works are The Phenomenon of Life and The Imperative of Responsibility. In these he argues for an inherent tendency in living organisms to reach beyond themselves toward some form of transcendence, whether that reach is no more than a molecular compulsion to grow, or as much as humanity’s longing for God.
Jonas is clearer about the nature of God than either Tillich or Whitehead. The God he puts forward is, first, a suffering God. Second, he is “a becoming God…emerging in time instead of possessing a completed being that remains identical with itself throughout eternity.”
“Bound up with the concepts of a suffering and becoming God is that of a caring God—a God not remote and detached and self-contained but involved with what he cares for…this is not an omnipotent God.”
For Jonas, humanity can have divine omnipotence together with divine goodness “only at the price of complete divine inscrutability.” Like Tillich and Whitehead, Jonas understood that for modernity to know a good and loving God, omnipotence could not come between God and humanity.
Sources
Donald R. Weisbaker, “Process Thought in Tillich’s Eschatology,” International Journal for Philosophy and Religion, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1974.
Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. 3, University of Chicago Press, 1963.
Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963.
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, Cambridge University Press, 1929.
Victor Lowe, Understanding Whitehead, The Johns Hopkins Press, 1962.
Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology, Harper and Row, 1966.
Lawrence Vogel, ed., Mortality and Morality, a Search for the Good after Auschwitz, Northwestern University Press, 1996, a collection of Jonas’s writing, accompanied by an excellent introductory essay. See especially Jonas’s “The Concept of God after Auschwitz: a Jewish Voice.”
For centuries, most of the western world accepted God’s total authority over the world. Disease, slaughter in war, and natural disasters were all part of God’s will, inscrutable but not often questioned. Prayer and contrition might bring blessings in this life or the next, but only as God willed.
Although God’s will was not questioned, the nature of the world was increasingly the subject of human inquiry. In the late 16th Century, this inquiry led Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler to conclude that the world created by God was not the center of the universe, but existed in reliance on the sun.
A century later, Newtonian physics suggested a well-ordered universe, compatible with the purposeful design of the Creator. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, along with other intellectuals of the succeeding century, saw Newton’s God as compatible with reason, if not with orthodox Christianity.
But then came publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, leading to a 150 years of scientific research affirming the theory of evolution and its basic hypothesis of random natural selection of species.
Natural selection, along with genetic and behavioral changes, became the key to understanding the natural world. God’s creation of discrete species in one singular act only 6,000 years ago became untenable for almost all scientists and intellectuals.
Then physics contributed theories on Relativity and Quantum Mechanics in the early 20th Century, and the operations of matter, apparently so rational and orderly in Newton’s time, appeared much more uncertain. In the meantime, two world wars and the horrifying realities of the Holocaust and Stalinism seemed to shatter any connection that a controlling God could have with the world.
A Caring God Who is Not Omnipotent
Now shift to a universe in which the nature of God is intimately connected to human beings, but does not direct them. This is not a God of dogma and rules, nor a God who controls the destiny of humanity. A caring and a loving God who desires the best for us, he is the source of unlimited possibility. For this reason, he is also a God who cannot or does not constrain human freedom.
For people who want a God that controls their lives, this God is not appealing. He likewise is not appealing to those who want to blame or question God for allowing sadness and suffering into the world. These are inevitable in a world of unlimited possibility, where God is not omnipotent. But this God reveres our experience and makes it his, and by doing so makes it eternally valuable.
In the 20th Century, three men, among many other men and women, elaborated brilliantly on such a God.
Paul Tillich
One of the greatest theologians of the 20th Century, Paul Tillich believed that during our worldly “estrangement” from God, we should strive to reach our potential as spiritual beings. All that we do on Earth is of critical importance—actions, thoughts, emotions—not only to us, but to God, the ground of all being.
Although we are estranged from God, we are not separate from God. What we do is taken up by God, and our positive achievements augment the loving and supportive nature of God. Tillich, especially in his later work, came to see a process whereby the spiritual realm of “Eternal Life” would “include the positive content of history, liberated from its negative distortions, and fulfilled in its potentialities.”
The fate of our negative experience is to be “present in the eternal memory as that which is conquered.” Thus powerless, the negative yields to a sense of “blessedness” in God, a profound gratitude for the enlargement of Eternal Life. The positive essence of what we have achieved becomes eternal, to the glory of God, and so our part lives on, but we do not, as individuals.
“From the eternal everything comes,” Tillich concluded, “and to it everything goes, in every moment of time and history, in every moment of our planet and the universe to which it belongs.”
Alfred North Whitehead
Tillich in his later work took up some of the themes of the great philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Partly in reaction to the jolts of uncertainty introduced by quantum physics, Whitehead, a great mathematician as well as a philosopher, realized that logic and strict analysis were not sufficient to understand humankind’s relation to ultimate reality.
In his most influential work, Process and Reality, Whitehead developed the idea of a “contingent God,” whose identity and reality are linked inseparably with our own. God is complete possibility, allowing us creative freedom to achieve or destroy. As in the case of Tillich, who follows Whitehead’s thought to some extent, our experience is shared with God, and then in the “process” is combined with other experiences to create a new context for the next dynamic interaction.
Whitehead famously said that “The many become one, and are increased by one.” This describes what may be thought of as an ever-rotating exchange in which the individual experiences something of what the many have contributed, and then makes an individual contribution back to the many, which now is “increased by one.”
What is creative, positive, and valuable in these continually augmenting experiences resides eternally, also in much the same way Tillich later described. An important difference, however, is that the “negative” in our relation with God is more present in God, more “felt” by him, than in the Tillich framework.
For Whitehead, God is more at risk as a result of being so involved in our experiences, positive and negative. But this greater risk attaches him more profoundly to us in our suffering and in our hope.
Hans Jonas
“In the beginning, for unknowable reasons, the ground of being, or the Divine, chose to give itself over to the chance and risk of endless variety in becoming.” These are the words of the late Hans Jonas, philosopher, theologian, and soldier on behalf of freedom in World War Two and the Jewish state thereafter.
A student of Martin Heidegger who broke with his better-known mentor when Heidegger embraced Nazism in the 1930s, Jonas’s principal works are The Phenomenon of Life and The Imperative of Responsibility. In these he argues for an inherent tendency in living organisms to reach beyond themselves toward some form of transcendence, whether that reach is no more than a molecular compulsion to grow, or as much as humanity’s longing for God.
Jonas is clearer about the nature of God than either Tillich or Whitehead. The God he puts forward is, first, a suffering God. Second, he is “a becoming God…emerging in time instead of possessing a completed being that remains identical with itself throughout eternity.”
“Bound up with the concepts of a suffering and becoming God is that of a caring God—a God not remote and detached and self-contained but involved with what he cares for…this is not an omnipotent God.”
For Jonas, humanity can have divine omnipotence together with divine goodness “only at the price of complete divine inscrutability.” Like Tillich and Whitehead, Jonas understood that for modernity to know a good and loving God, omnipotence could not come between God and humanity.
Sources
Donald R. Weisbaker, “Process Thought in Tillich’s Eschatology,” International Journal for Philosophy and Religion, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1974.
Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. 3, University of Chicago Press, 1963.
Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963.
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, Cambridge University Press, 1929.
Victor Lowe, Understanding Whitehead, The Johns Hopkins Press, 1962.
Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology, Harper and Row, 1966.
Lawrence Vogel, ed., Mortality and Morality, a Search for the Good after Auschwitz, Northwestern University Press, 1996, a collection of Jonas’s writing, accompanied by an excellent introductory essay. See especially Jonas’s “The Concept of God after Auschwitz: a Jewish Voice.”