Tillich’s Paradigm for Uncertainty and Faith

The theologian Paul Tillich was one of the most interesting philosophers of religion of the 20^th century. It is reasonable to decide that his paradigm explaining the ontology of faith continues the work of the Protestant reformers Luther, Zwingli and Barth while anticipating the work of Sartre’s existentialist inquiries into the subjective nature of human experience.

Tillich’s book ‘What is Religion’ edited by Luther Adams is a summary of the complex worldview of Tillich on religion. Rather than being simply an apologetic for Christian faith that explains the circumstance of faith, election and salvation from a solely Biblical perspective as would Barth, Tillich’s thought encompasses a philosophy ground for human existence and thought in their relationship to the Creator-the Unconditional.

Evidently, and just evidently for I am learning what Tillich’s ideas are just now for-myself, and with Adam’s intro ideas about Tillich, Tillich considers the reason for the possibility of faith and uncertainty by the conditional (mankind) in regard to the Unconditional (God) this; if man had absolute certainty of God man would have the possibility of being like or thinking of himself as a little god regarding God as the conditional. Mankind could regard God as the subjective other instead of the all-encompassing, transcendent Unconditional.

It is useful for me at least to consider some of these theological paradigms in light of what is known in contemporary cosmology of the construction of the Universe or Universes even in case they branch out forming a contiguous vast right and/or left wing Multiverse with read and blue shifts in space-time independence. One must wonder how red and blue shift-the Doppler effect, would apply to time dilation when time exists inherently within a particular Universal field and its own thermodynamic configuration. Inter-Universally as between several branched Universes the time dilemma would be a significant challenge for causal explanation.

At any rate, if the steady state mass-energy of the apparent visible Universe has some Unconditional foundation transcending the Higgs field or virtual particles from a non-dimensional origin the human experience of being is still what it is-phenomenal and yet contingent and conditional subject to whatever the true and theoretically non-temporal origin is. For Tillich the immediate transcendence of the Unconditional is the basic paradigm to relate a description of additional social categories of faith and governance.