Thinking of God
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dimension of human experience which satisfies the expectations aroused by the name God. Theologies in this metaphorical cluster attempt to unite while distinguishing extreme forms of religious consciousness, on one hand, and critical consciousness, on the other.
Paul Tillich. He labored to transcend the opposition between the personal God of Christian theism and the nothing of nihilism in his idea of the “God beyond the God of theism.” Theology for him is the systematic One twentieth-century theologian in this last metaphorical cluster is correlations
between two independent and distinct approaches to ultimate meaning and reality. On one hand, Tillich identifies existential questions – such as “what is the meaning of being?” – which are based on the shock of possible non-being. These existential questions are analyzed in order to show how they
are rooted in the “structure of being,” which is the “self-world ontological structure.” Existential questions manifest the self-transcending nature of human experience as both aware of a potential infinity in its striving toward ultimate truth and goodness and yet at the same time aware of its finitude,
death. In asking the question of the meaning of being, humans ask about the ultimate ground of the self-world structure, but they find the question to be unanswerable. “Reason looks into its own abyss ... Only revelation can answer this question.” 39
bols of God as heavenly deity or as light of the world, as having been coined in response to a revelation of the holy and preserved within the religious communities. Religious symbols “participate” in their referents when they On the other hand, Tillich describes religious symbols, such as the sym-
evoke ultimate concern. The symbol “God” participates in its referent – the same referent which is asked about in the existential question – namely “being-itself,” the ground of being and non-being, the depth and abyss of the self-world ontological structure. As Tillich says, “The being of God is
Being-Itself,” i.e., the meaning of being.existential question “what is the meaning of being?” when it empowers the questioner with the courage to be in spite of the threats of non-being. Faith is the state of being grasped by “God” as a matter of ultimate concern.^40 The symbol “God” answers the 41
regression to the “sunken Atlantides.” The criterion for truth in religious symbols is whether or not the symbol expresses the ultimate ( by enabling faith) and expresses its own lack of ultimacy ( by recognizing that as a finite Theology finds then a way beyond the “desert of criticism” without a
entity, it is tively as well as subjectively true. Jesus is the Christ only through the cross, as the “defeated Messiah.” This reflexive symbol successfully unites religion and critique when it empowers the courage to be in the face of the threat of not God). For Tillich, the Christian symbol of the cross is objec-