If this is true then theological statements are not a description of “the highest Being” but an analysis of the depth of personal relationships—or rather, an analysis of the depths of all experience “interpreted by love” . . . A statement is “theological” not because it relates to a particular Being called “God” but because it asks ultimate questions about the meaning of existence; it asks what, at the level of theos, at the level of the deepest mystery, is the reality and significance of our life.92
For Tillich the question of God is the question of whether life has depth to it, whether the seemingly deep experiences of life are real, what we find in them, and what they tell us about life itself. If they are real then materialism is not all there is to life, there is what Tillich calls spiritual presence, moments in which our spirit relates to that beyond itself, that we can only call the experience of transcendence.
This is not a simple idea. Perhaps the most famous Tillich quote of all is from one of his sermons when he says,
For if you know that God means depth, you know much about Him. You cannot then call yourself an atheist or unbeliever. For you cannot think or say: Life has no depth! Life itself is shallow. Being itself is surface only. If you could say this in complete seriousness, you would be an atheist; but otherwise you are not. He who knows about depth knows about God.93
This goes too far. It is unwise to tell atheists they have no right to be so. But the central point is fundamental. In the bloody mess of the trenches it was hard to see any point, meaning, or wonder in life. But there are moments, experiences, which point to something deeper about us, and about life itself. To believe in God is to find in life’s depth, ultimate meaning, spiritual presence. As Robert Browning says,
This world’s no blot for us,
Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good:
To find its meaning is my meat and drink.94
Despite the horrors Tillich chooses what to him must seem a desperate throw of the dice, that art, poetry, human relations, the depths within our lives, suggest it is not pointless to look for meaning. “God” is the word we use for that which makes such meaning possible, for the transcendent other.
Death is given no power over love. Love is stronger . . . It is at work where the power of death is strongest, in war and persecution and hunger and physical death itself . . . It rescues each of us, for love is stronger than death.95
It is quite a thing to say that if you were at Verdun.
Tillich’s achievement is to clarify what the question of God is. It makes no credible sense to believe in a God who is an external arbitrator of life, who manipulates life and overrides the natural processes of causation and human free will. This is the God who is directing life, ordering what happens to us, making it rain on some and not on others, pulling strings so that human puppets reflect his (definitely his) will. Such a God is unbelievable and morally disgusting not only in the trenches but in any understanding of life. A God who intervenes periodically to reward or punish, choosing good fortune for one and cancer for another is morally objectionable. A God who, if there is a car crash, chooses who lives and who dies is a defunct concept we are better without. The God who is a greater version of us, periodically intervening to pull out a plum, like Jack Horner for one of his special favorites, does not exist. Marcus Borg says that, when one of his students tells him they don’t believe in God, he “learned many years ago to respond, ‘Tell me about the God you don’t believe in.’ It is always the God of supernatural theism.”96 If that God is dead, we are better off without him.
This once came home to me very personally. Margaret and I had three children, of whom the first, our beloved son Mark, died after a few days of what could hardly be called life. People tried to help as best they could, but one attempted line of comfort I found particularly unfortunate. As my parents were setting out to come from Norfolk, on hearing the news, their next-door neighbor said to them, “You know, sometimes ‘God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform.’” And writing to Margaret and myself one fellow minister said something very similar: “God does work in strange ways,” he wrote, but “next time you pray ‘thy will be done’ I will be there helping you. The Lord giveth and the lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord.” It is beyond my imagination how anyone can believe that God’s will was done when little Mark was born in the way he was. What do these people really believe? That God looks down and says I’ll strike down a few babies, that’ll shake their moral complacency! Let a drunken driver knock down a mother of four or someone die horribly of cancer, or a baby be born brain-damaged, and some idiot can be relied upon to say that God’s will is hard to understand, as if God was a cross between Adolf Hitler and one of the Moors murderers. One of the things which helped me cope with Mark’s death is that I never had believed in such a God. Thank you liberal Congregationalism!
But the death of that kind of God is not the end of the matter. There is still the question that Tillich puts to himself as he compares Botticelli’s Madonna and Child with Singing Angels to the carnage of the Western front. Which is the deepest truth about life? This is the conversation that goes on at some level in every human heart. Is there a meaning or purpose to my life? Is reality confined to what we can rationally analyze, weigh, and observe, or is there more to it than that? Is there a reality bigger than and not always accessible to human reason? Is there a deeper love which alone can make sense of it all, and us?
In the Flanders trenches it looked as if there was no answer to the question. Nor is such an answer always obvious in our lives.
And if the world were black or white entirely
And all the charts were plain
Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters,
A prism of delight and pain,
We might be surer where we wished to go.97
Nietzsche may be right in his assessment of human life. “In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of ‘world history’—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.”98 Significant voices in modern science, such as Francis Crick, are not very far away from this.
Looked at in this light our mind is simply a puppet on a string and so are we. You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve-cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice [in Wonderland] may have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’99
All this fits in popular culture, with Bojack Horseman’s conviction that disillusionment inevitably comes when you look beneath the surface of life.
Tillich in the Berlin art gallery gives another answer. Such a view is not adequate to what we experience of life. Tillich says,
The moment in which we reach the last depth of our lives is the moment in which we can experience the joy that has eternity within it, the hope that cannot be destroyed, and the truth on which life and death are built. For in the depth is truth; and in the depth is hope; and in the depth is joy.100
What an answer to throw back, in the face of life’s blood, death, and pain! To be able to do that is what it means to believe in God. I think of Beethoven, by then deaf, but in his Ninth Symphony returning a triumphant “yes!” to life, “Freude, schöner Götterfunken.” Are we “nothing but a pack of