DID YOU KNOW?

This week’s Did You Know is taken from a soon to be released book, “God and Spirituality,” by Glenn Chesnut:  Paul Tillich, one of the great spiritual teachers of the 20^th century believed in an “Impersonal Ground of Being,” but in a later chapter I will talk about reasons for regarding the ground of being as a fully personal God. But given the peculiar situation that has developed at this point in history, where the rise of atheism during the 1830s still casts its dark shadow over the western world, it seems useful to begin by explaining some of the ways that many of the thinkers, over the past thousand years, have linked a personal spirituality to an impersonal ground of being. It has been demonstrated repeatedly through the ages that we do not need to regard the ground of the universe as a highly personal God-figure in order to create a method for dealing with the sacred and the infinite which will enable us to handle the traumas of life and heal the overpowering burden of resentment and fear that can otherwise build up and destroy our happiness and satisfaction. I am going to start at this point in particular, because I want to get the scientifically minded on board first, before going any further.

I remember what it was like in my twenties and was scientific minded myself, working in university research labs and atomic facilities when I was a young man who would have been delighted to have some of these ideas explained to me. I had been brought up believing in a warmly personal God, and never truly let go of that at the bottommost level of my heart, but it no longer seemed to make any sense in terms of all of the physics and chemistry I was learning. So if you like, perhaps you can understand this and the immediately following chapters as myself at age sixty-seven talking respectfully and helpfully to myself at age twenty-two. It is a debt, if you will, which an old man needs pay to a younger man, and the other young people who think today as he thought then, because there was nothing mean hearted or trivial about that young man. I was thirsty and seekng knowledge about the ultimate nature of things. That was why I went into the field of science in the first place.

And I can still remember the thrill which I felt in the summer of 1961, right after I turned 22, when I first opened Paul Tillich’s books, The Dynamics of Faith and The Courage to Be, and then the book Charles Hartshorne wrote with W. L. Reese, called Philosophers Speak of God.  That was the first time I had ever read anything by people who knew and understood about the world of modern science, who were talking intelligently about God and the ground of being, instead of simply uttering pious platitudes. The ideas they discussed were as sophisticated and complex as anything that the theoretical scientists investigated, and I discovered that philosophical theology could be as intellectually rigorous a discipline as nuclear physics or physical chemistry.

Both Tillich and Hartshorne had helped take care of the wounded soldiers in the First World War, the one was a military chaplain on the German side and other a stretcher bearer on the American side, and neither man tried to prettify or deny the enormous evil and suffering that can be encountered in this world. When I read Tillich describing “The God beyond the God” who appears when we have lost all faith in the personal God of conventional western theism, I found his vision an extraordinary frightening one. In fact, the first time I read The Courage to Be, I found that it dug so deeply into our fundamental human existential (relating to existence; space and time) anxieties that I ended up having to put it down before I was finished. But eventually I built up my nerve and picked it up again, and learned that even a totally impersonal ground of being—even if we recognize its true sacredness and its implications for the way we need to live our lives—can provide a spiritual basis that can enable us to deal with anything that life throws at us.

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The story of Tillich’s own life, including not only his World War One experiences, but also later what happened to him after Adolph Hitler’s rise to power fifteen years later, made it clear that he was not just talking words but laying the structure of a faith that we could actually live by, no matter what happened to us. And in fact the best way to get to the heart of Tillich’s teaching is to explain it in the context of his own life story. Next issue: Tillich’s childhood and youth.