Word: tillich
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...Tillich's term for God is the "Ground of Being" or "Being-Itself," and "every act of courage is a manifestation of the ground of being, however questionable the content of the act may be . . . There are no valid arguments for the 'existence' of God, but there are acts of courage in which we affirm the power of being, whether we know it or not . . . Courage has revealing power; the courage to be is the key to being-itself...
...traditional questions of theology, such as the existence or nonexistence of God, take on a bafflingly unfamiliar quality in Tillich's thought. For he sees such terms as "God," "the Christ," and "the Resurrection" as symbols. To Tillich, symbols (as opposed to signs, which merely point to something) are living, growing and sometimes dying things, which participate in the power of what they symbolize. But they are not to be mistaken for the real and unknowable thing behind them. God, therefore, cannot be spoken of as "existing" or "not existing," for this would imply the limiting of the unlimitable...
...Hope. Man approaches the ineffable reality that lies behind the symbol through the combination of longing and frustration, which Tillich calls "ultimate concern." Man's hope is the "New Being," a conception Tillich has derived from St. Paul's second letter to the Corinthians (II Corinthians 5:17): "Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold all things are become...
...Being is Tillich's replacement for the old symbol of "salvation," and he can take off his theologian's mortarboard and write about it with evangelical passion. "We should not be too worried about the Christian religion, about the state of the Churches, about membership and doctrines, about institutions and ministers . . . [These] are of no importance if the ultimate question is asked, the question of a New Reality . . . We should worry more about [this] than about anything else between heaven and earth. The New Creation-this is our ultimate concern; this should be our infinite passion . . . In comparison...
System of Correlation. In his three-volume Systematic Theology Tillich fits these ideas together into a kind of working model of the universe. He calls the structure, the method of "correlation," by which he means the correlation of human questions arising from the conditions in which man finds himself, with divine answers provided by the symbolism of Christian revelation...