The New Being

What is sin? Until relatively recently, American Protestant thought might be expected to give a simple and traditional answer to that question: sin, staining all men since the Fall, is the willful disobedience of God's law. After the theological battle between fundamentalism and liberalism, that answer was no longer sufficient --at least not to the liberals. The adherents of the social gospel were concerned with sin as a social fact, manifested in hunger, .disease, crime. The cure, in substantial part, was progress through social reform. With the momentous entrance in the '30s of Reinhold Niebuhr and neo-orthodoxy sin once again became real and personal for U.S. intellectuals--but in a new way. The moral or social emphasis was replaced by a psychological emphasis. Niebuhr saw the tension between man's fallen, finite nature and his transcendent nature producing anxiety. In other words, because of Original Sin man is anxious, and because he is anxious he sins. Thus Niebuhr diagnosed man as maladjusted in the universe.

Paul Tillich, 70, University Professor at Harvard,* and now the most discussed Protestant theologian in the U.S., is saying something similar, with an even stronger psychological and existentialist accent. Tillich's word for Original Sin is estrangement--man's estrangement "from the ground of his being, from other beings, and from himself."

Tillich develops this idea in his latest book, Existence and the Christ (University of Chicago; $4.50), published last week as Volume II of his massive work-in-progress, a three-volume Systematic Theology. Apart from his lighter writing and lecturing on everything from modern art to depth psychology, Harvard's Tillich is attempting to construct a modern Protestant "system"--fitting all aspects of the Christian faith together in a single intellectual whole. To this titanic task German-born Paul Tillich brought a Teutonic ponderosity in Volume I, published six years ago. It was constructed on a plan called "correlation" (existential question paired with theological answer), with such brain-busting results that even many of his fellow theologians were hard put to follow him.

The new volume shows the effect of Tillich's longer stay in the U.S. (he came at the age of 47 speaking virtually no English) as well as the services of his Harvard colleague, the Rev. John Dillen-berger, 38, who, says Tillich, "did the hard work of 'Englishing' my style." Existence and the Christ is written clearly and cleanly enough to make Tillich's theology accessible to any serious reader.

From Essence to Existence. "I am an existentialist," Tillich is fond of telling people, and he writes: "Immanuel Kant once said that mathematics is the good luck of human reason. In the same way, one could say that existentialism is the good luck of Christian theology. It has helped to rediscover the classical Christian interpretation of human existence."

Tillich's existentialism has nothing in it to remind one of Paris in the spring. For him the word existential refers to man's existence as he is--engaged and involved in life, subjective and suffering. Man's greatest cause of suffering is estrangement from his God-given essential nature. "Existence is estrangement and not reconciliation; it is dehumanization and not the expression of essential humanity. It is the process in which a man becomes a thing and ceases to be a person." And the richest expression of this estrangement is, for Tillich, the Biblical symbol of the Fall.

Man's essential nature cannot be known by existential man, but myths and dogmas have symbolized it as paradise or a golden age. In psychological terms Tillich calls this a state of "dreaming innocence." Both dream and innocence are words that "point to something that precedes actual existence. It has potentiality, not actuality. Dreaming is a state of mind which is real and non-real at the same time." The fall of man is the lapse from this state--"the transition from essence to existence." Both Catholic and Protestant popular usage has so limited the Biblical word "sin" to mean deviation from moral laws, says Tillich, that he feels the word "estrangement" is a valuable "reinterpretation of sin from a religious point of view."

Salvation on Mars? To break through his estrangement, reconciling essence and existence, man always and everywhere has looked for what Tillich calls the New Being. The quest for the New Being changes its character from religion to religion and culture to culture, but Tillich distinguishes two main types: "The New Being can be sought above history, and it can be understood as the aim of history."

Brahmanism, Buddhism and the religions of classical Greece look for divine rescue from history, not in it. Such nonhistorical salvation is only for individuals, never for groups. The West looks for the New Being in the historical process itself, as in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Tillich sees the Christ of Christianity, however, as including both historical and nonhistorical types.

Tillich meets head-on the problem of salvation in outer space. The Incarnation Christianity preaches is for mankind only, he says, but there may be other incarnations for nonhumans in other worlds. "The manifestation of saving power in one place implies that saving power is operating in all places. The expectation of the Messiah as the bearer of the New Being presupposes that God loves the universe, even though in the appearance of the Christ he actualizes this love for historical man alone."

Shaking & Healing. Tillich's analysis of the layers of meaning in the chief dogma of Christianity, that of the Resurrection, lays bare the trend of his unorthodox thought. Where the physics-minded 19th century sought to "explain" the Resurrection and the miracles by means of physical phenomena, Tillich looks again to a psychological interpreation. The Resurrection is for Tillich ) both reality and myth--a myth that has always been present in what Jung calls nan's collective unconscious. The resurrection of gods and half-gods is a familiar mythological symbol, says Tillich, and he Jews of Jesus' time believed in the future resurrection of martyrs. Thus "the application of the idea of resurrection to the Christ was almost unavoidable."

But "a real experience made it possible for the disciples to apply the known symbol of resurrection to Jesus." What was that experience? A kind of psychological phenomenon, "an ecstatic experience" of the New Being "indissolubly united" with the concrete picture of Jesus of Nazareth. "This event happened first to some of his followers who had fled to Galilee in the hours of his execution; then to many others; then to Paul; then to all those who in every period experience his living presence here and now."

In good orthodox style, Tillich sees Christ as the center of history, preceded by a line of preparatory revelation and followed by a line of later revelation. "Further . . . where there is revelation, there is salvation. Revelation is not information about divine things; it is the ecstatic manifestation of the Ground of Being in events, persons and things. Such manifestations have shaking, transforming and healing power. They are saving events in which the power of the New Being is present. On these healing forces the life of mankind always depends; they prevent the self-destructive structures of existence from plunging mankind into complete annihilation."

*A special post (held by some half dozen others) enabling Tillich to work on "the frontiers of human knowledge" without limitation as to schools or departments.

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