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The Shaking of The Foundations

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I picked up this book by the great Twentieth-Century philosophical theologian Paul Tillich and was pleasantly suprised. Being familiar with Tillich's rather dry systematic theology, I was expecting more of the same. However, I was greeted by an immensely readable collection of sermons which I found both inspirational, thought-provoking and masterful. If Tillich's dogmatic theology is now regarded as out-moded, this sample of his devotional literature marks him out as insightful and relevant: he speaks as much to our generation as to the one he was speaking to.

While the opening sermon 'The Shaking of the Foundations' is a little anachronistic in that it is couched in the terms of a by-gone debate (critiqueing mid-Twentieth-Century liberal theology)its message is an enduring one: that humanity must recognise its dependence on God and trust in him rather than in humanity's own inadequate ability. What follows this sermon is pure delight. The remainder of the collection testifies to Tillich's honesty and profound insight into the human heart and the tensions of human existence. 'You are accepted' is probably the best of the rest, expounding on the frustrations of life, and being unable to live up to your own expectations, let alone God's. Furthermore, it sounds a confident note of grace. It certainly stirred up a few emotions in me, I can tell you.

On the negative side, those of a more conservative Christian persuasion may be troubled by the implications of Tillich's Christology. The question I was left asking, however, concerned Tillich's eschatology (the 'last things'). It seemed to me that Tillich either didn't believe in an ultimate overcoming of evil, or he simply wanted to emphasise the present reality of God's victory over it. I suspect there is some truth in both alternatives: Tillich was a complicated man, with an ambiguous relationship to the Christian faith, almost, it seems, of a love-hate quality.

Nevertheless, don't let this, or anything else you might hear of Tillich, deter you from reading The Shaking of the Foundations. It truly deserves to be regarded as a modern classic of devotional literature.

Tillich is by no means the most accessible of contemporary theologians. However, this collection of his sermons speaks immediately to everyman. He speaks perceptively of the dilemmas and anxieties of human existence, pointing emphatically to God as the source of salvation from human frustration and guilt. He delivers poignant critiques of modernistic attitudes, distancing himself firmly from the old liberal school of the 19th century and destroying the enlightenment illusion of progress, directing our hopes to God instead.

I must confess that it was against my better judgment that I allowed this little collection of sermons to affect me: I am an evangelical, whereas Tillich belongs to a decidedly more liberal stream of theology to say the least! This is not to say he does not speak like an evangelical, just that I couldn't escape the feeling of intellectual dishonesty as I enjoyed Tillich's writings with the nagging suspicion that he didn't mean anything like the same thing by his use of particular theological terms as I mean. A read of Tillich's far less digestable Systematic Theology will enlighten you as to his philosophy of symbolism in religious language. He clearly maintains that the Christian faith alone can exclusively lay claim to truth; yet the language of Christian doctrine, whilst irreplaceable, is only symbolic, participating in what it represents yet, nevertheless, incapable of objectively describing what it represents. The evangelical might well benefit from reading 'Shaking of the Foundations' if he can overlook this tension; the non-conservative will not need to.

Tillich was a bundle of contradictions, in a sense. He argues passionately for the truth of the Christian gospel, yet he was hardly ever known to go to church, except to preach, perhaps. He is also reputed to have had a string of affairs. I suppose the greatest comfort one can draw from that is that Tillich certainly knew what he was talking about when, along with St. Paul, he affirmed the pervading despair and tension that characterizes human existence.

The most impressing sermons contained in the book are: 'Shaking of the Foundations' in which the preacher lambasts the naive optimism of the enlightenment and prophetically challenges modernism with the warning of a 'shaking of the foundations' which will expose the bankruptcy of confidence in modern progress, leaving the (E)ternal standing; 'The Witness of the Spirit to the Spirit' on the subject of the Christian's assurance; and 'You Are Accepted', a life-giving exposition of Paul's thought on sin and grace in Romans 5:20: here also is Tillich at his most perceptive and penetrating.

This is a masterpiece.

The writings of Paul Tillich contain truths that touch us at the deepest level. Tillich was no perfect saint in his lifetime - far from it - but he had a quiet wisdom to discern the deepest truths of our human condition.

This quote has stuck with me for more than 40 years....

"Sometimes at that moment [of despair] a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: 'You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you..."

This is how faith really is: not something taught but something discerned when you least expect it, in the still quiet moments of our lives, in those moments when we feel most troubled and alone. Then, the light breaks through for what may only be a few moments and we realise that there is a love beyond our comprehension holding and caring for us if we only open our hearts to it.

Tillich deserves to be read.

Paul Tillich's The Shaking of the Foundations was a perception-changing book when I first read it as a 19-year-old. Tillich's God as the Ground of All Being is both obvious and shaking, since many of us have some sort of projection that we see as "God." When we, like Job, are still and listen to the Voice in the Whirlwind, and when we listen to the Logos in the Gospel of John, we realize that the creative life force that informs the universe and all that it includes is greater than human logic can encompass.

This book is the companion piece to The Eternal Now and The New Being. This is the most profound and important book of the three. Very readable (in contrast to acedemic theology) because these sermons were delivered live. Definitely Spirit-guided ministry. This work is very important in helping us to understand the difference between small spirit and large Spirit. Also very important for those interested in Christology, soteriology, and ontology, and the ways in which God, Christ, and the Spirit pave the way for self-conscious being. Also quite useful for those interested in a Christian concept of pantheism > mysticism and harmony.

Paul Tillich (1886-1965) was a German-American theologian and Christian existentialist philosopher. He published three volumes of his sermons (many given at chapel at Union Theological Seminary), of which this is the first, to be folllowed by The New Being and Eternal Now (scm classics).

He states in the Preface, "Many of my students and friends outside the Seminary have told me of the difficulty they have met in trying to penetrate my theological thought. They believe that through my sermons the practical or, more exactly, the existential implications of my theology are more clearly manifest." He added "A large part of the congregation at the Sunday services came from outside the Christian crcle in the most radical sense of the phrase. For them, a sermon in traditional Biblical terms would have had no meaning. Therefore, I was obliged to seek a language which expresses in other terms the human experience to which the Biblical and ecclesiastical terminology point."

Here are some representative excerpts:

"The name of this inexhaustible depth and ground of all being is God... 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!... 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."
"Jesus does not tell us that He will ease the labors and burdens of life and work... Jesus does not and cannot promise more pleasure and less pain to those whom He asks to come to Him. On the contrary, sometimes He promises them more pain, more persecution, more threat of death---the 'cross,' as He calls it."
"Man's knowledge that he has to die is also man's knowledge that he is above death. It is man's destiny to be mortal and immortal at the same time."

The psychologist Rollo May wrote a sympathetic biography of him (Paulus), and Tillich's wife Hannah wrote a less-friendly account (From Time to Time). Tillich's major work was his three-volume Systematic Theology, vol. 1, Systematic Theology, vol. 2: Existence and the Christ, and Systematic Theology, vol. 3: Life and the Spirit: History and the Kingdom of God.

I read this book by Tillich many years ago and had problems reading any Tillich years ago. He still is complex but his work is very fesh indeed for us today. I was a great book.

J. Robert Ewbank author "John Wesley, Natural Man, and the 'Isms'"