Paul Tillich and the Death of God

Abstract

Paul Tillich once confided to Thomas J. J. Altizer, the most famous of the radical “death of God” theologians, that “the real Tillich is the radical Tillich.”1 This confession is puzzling, especially insofar as Tillich openly criticized radical theology shortly before he died.2 The comment is all the more curious given the apparently conservative nature of Tillich’s understanding of God. As Keith Ward observes, when orthodox Christians deride “views like those of the twentieth-century theologian Paul Tillich for saying that God is not a person, but is ‘being-itself’, the depth and power of being”—the nature of which remains unaffected by temporal processes—“they are in fact attacking the classical Christian doctrine of God.”3 Any attempt to explore the connection between Tillich’s perspective and radical theology must accordingly circumvent some of what Tillich says explicitly about God and consider the deeper layers of his thought. It must show how Tillich unnecessarily restricts the opposition he posits in God between being and nonbeing to eternity instead of allowing the conflict to play itself out historically as it does for Altizer—the Hegel-inspired radical to whom Tillich confessed the secret ground of his own theology.