Written by Andrew
  Questions, comments, or just pissed off?  Send us an email

This is straight from Tillich.  If you don’t know who he is, don’t feel bad, not many people do.  If there is one good way to describe Tillich’s writings, it is to say he will either make you mad as hell or forever impact your spiritual life.  Anyways, the idea I’m going to talk about, I first read in his book “Dynamics of Faith”.

Symbols.  They are normally something that points to an idea past itself.  Take a stop sign for example.  It points to the idea that you should stop your vehicle at that point, however it cannot/will not physically stop your car.

Tillich talked about the symbols we see every day in Christianity.  Most of them we have borrowed from the Pagan tradition and attached new Christian meanings to them.   To some, this idea that we use Pagan symbols in Christianity can be quite upsetting.  The question is why?

In a crowded church, if I were to take the Bible, throw it on the floor, spit on it, step on it, and grind it into the floor, how many people do you think I would piss off?  My guess is a lot.  And this is because of a far too common distortion in religion- attaching holiness to symbols.

The symbol unto itself is not holy, but it is the idea that it points to that is.  The bible, the cross, a church, they are all symbol that point higher to a more ultimate concern.  All of these symbols point to God, but the symbols themselves are probably produced in a factory somewhere and hold no holy value themselves.  This is an important distinction.  We must be able to see symbols for what they are and not put faith into them, but only into the idea they point… God.

Oh, for the curious - Paul Tillich was a highly respected theologian and ordained minister who was awarded an appointment to Harvard Divinity School.  He also taught theology at Union Theological Seminary and University of Chicago before his death in 1965.