symbolic religious language

Question 1

Paul Tillich

Answer 1

• german christian extitentionalist theologian but brought up protestant
• military chaplain to German forces in WWI led him to question Lutheran theology
• his theology sought to match up existential questions people ask about life and its meaning with symbols offered in christianity
• known for argument that god is ‘being it-self’

Question 2

main features of symbols according to Tillich

Answer 2

• symbols point to a reality beyond themselves
• open up levels of reality which would otherwise be closed to us
  also open up levels of soul which correspond to those realities
  symbols cannot be produced intentionally they grow out of human unconscious

Question 3

signs & symbols

Answer 3

sign: conventional way of using an image/word to point to something other than itself
symbol: points beyond itself but also participates in power of which it points

Question 4

for tillich there’s two essential features for god to appear through religious experience/symbol

Answer 4

1: god is ‘being-itself’ rather than a being. in other words, an experience of god isn’t an experience of something that just happens to be there: it isn’t an experience of one object among others but is an experience of life itself
2: god is our ‘ultimate concern’ for the religious believer, god demands total attention and commitment covering all other aspects of life. this sense of god as the most important concern in life is seen in nature of religious experience

Question 5

being-itself

Answer 5

we cannot use literal language to describe ‘being-itself’ because asking the question ‘what is being-itself’ isn’t a question about particular being but examine question of what it means to be

Question 6

symbol as ‘self-transcending’

Answer 6

means something in itself but also points beyond itself to some higher or greater reality

Question 7

tillich concluding ideas

Answer 7

• able to take conventional religious language and show the way in which it addresses the personal needs and questions that people have about reality and meaning
• it doesn’t give factual info about another world but shows profound religious significance of features of this world

Question 8

strength of symbolic language

Answer 8

• allows us to make only one literal statement about what we mean when speaking of god - that god is ‘being-itself’ god isn’t a being who exists within the universe or in some transcendent realm so we don’t have to try to say something meaningful about such a being either through analogy or via negativa
• reflects what’s known through religious experience through which we can gain insight into issues that are central to our lives such as guilt, sin, love etc

Question 9

weakness of symbolic language

Answer 9

• many Christians don’t share tillich’s vies of god as ‘being-itself’ for tillich god as a separate being doesn’t exist & what we call god is ‘being-itself’ - ground upon which all beings exist. doesn’t sit well with christians who see god as separate and transcendent being who is ground of our experience
• hick rejects tillich’s view that a symbol ‘participates’ in the reality to which it points and complains that tillich doesn’t clarify what this means. for example, if we take symbolic statement ‘god is good’ is the symbol in this case the proposition ‘god is good’ or concept of ‘the goodness of god’