Original Sin: The Divergent Doctrines of Augustine and Tillich Richard Oxenberg Introduction Augustine's theology might be called 'a tale of two cities' in more than one respect. There is, of course, the story he tells of the two cities of humankind, the Godly and the earthly, the one destined for eternal blessedness and the other for perdition. But this duality bespeaks another, a duality in the heart of God's very self, whose tendencies to mercy and judgment are never truly reconciled. And there is another division in Augustine's writings, that concerns the very nature of his theological thinking. His thought exists on two different planes, which intersect and enfold one another while being, nevertheless, distinguishable. We might call the one the 'horizontal' dimension and the other the 'vertical' dimension of Augustine's thinking. On the horizontal dimension is a story played out in time: a story of Creation, Fall, Redemption, Final Judgment, and Final reward and punishment. On the vertical dimension is a story played out in the human soul: a story of spiritual yearning, frustration, error, and joy in the pursuit of the soul's own good. These two stories are one story for Augustine. The problematic of the human soul, the problem of sin, is a consequence of the problematic of the historical Fall, the problem of inherited guilt. The final victory of the human soul, the enjoyment of God, is one that can only be fully realized at the end of history, as the reward of the 'justified.' There are times when Augustine even seems to have two different Gods for each of his different stories. On the vertical plane is a God of eternity, a God who is 'Truth itself,' 2 immutable, atemporal, transpersonal, ontological. On the horizontal plane is a God of history, a God of judgment and punishment, grace and redemption, action and will. To what extent are these two stories compatible? We can ask this question itself in two different senses: to what extent are the stories logically compatible, and to what extent are they spiritually compatible? It is the second question that is the more important one – for although we can, perhaps, overlook a certain amount of logical incongruity in recognition of our own cognitive limitations, spiritual incongruity pulls us in two different directions, placing us at odds with ourselves. In my view, the two stories, if held to be equally true, are not in fact compatible. The horizontal overwhelms the vertical and changes its character dramatically and disastrously. This has created a confusion, spiritual and conceptual, that has marred the face of Western religion for almost two thousand years, and continues to do so to this day. Modern theology has endeavored to resolve this conflict by regarding the horizontal story as a 'mythological' expression of the vertical story. This endeavor reaches its apex, I believe, in the theology of Paul Tillich. In the following I would like to explore two interpretations of the doctrine of Original Sin, one presented by Augustine and the other by Tillich. The first might be called the 'Horizontal/Juridical model' of sin and the latter the 'Vertical/ Ontological model.' But we must not suppose that the contrast between the two is simply that between ontological and juridical language. Indeed, this contrast itself serves to obscure a far more significant one. The difference in language conditions a difference in conception of the nature of God and the meaning of Christ. Serious God-talk, even when recognized as metaphor, is always also more than metaphor, it is path. Spiritual myth does more than tell a story, it evokes a spiritual atmosphere into which 3 we enter to encounter the holy. The nature of the myth conditions the nature of that encounter. Thus, the myths we accept are as spiritually vital as the facts we accept, perhaps moreso. Which of these models is more true to the Christian tradition, and which is more true to the message of Christ, are two different questions. Before either question can be addressed we must first clarify where the differences in these models lie. To make some headway in this is the goal of this paper. The Augustinian Model Let us begin by looking closely at the juridical doctrine of sin presented by Augustine. We begin with a God who is wholly good and creates the world and human beings as an expression of this goodness. God places Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, a place where all their physical and spiritual needs are fully satisfied; a place of unending fulfillment, peace, and joy. 1 They are given one prohibition. They must not eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The point of this prohibition has nothing to do with the nature of the fruit itself which is, as all things are, good. 2 But God wishes to bestow upon them the further good, through this prohibition, of obedience. For reasons undiscoverable in principle 3 (since they were created wholly good), Adam and Eve choose to disobey God and eat the forbidden fruit. Satan, alias the serpent, has promised them that upon eating the fruit they will become 'like gods themselves.' The gravity of this offense against God is so great that it merits for Adam and Eve and all their descendants everlasting punishment of the most extreme severity. But because God is merciful as well as just, God chooses to spare a minority of human beings 4 and bestow upon them the free and unmerited gift of eternal blessedness. 5 In the meantime, generations of men and women will 4 be born, live, and die. As an additional punishment for the transgression of Adam and Eve, these generations will be born in a physically, mentally, and spiritually decrepit condition. 6 They will be physically vulnerable to a host of maladies, sicknesses, and privations, including physical death. 7 They will be mentally deprived of the capacity to apprehend the truth about God and themselves in any clear or direct manner. 8 They will be spiritually unable to prevent themselves from committing further offenses against God and each other. 9 Upon death, the vast majority will be tortured forever. Such is the sorry state of humankind. 10 How are we to begin to unravel the essential elements of this story? Perhaps the first thing to note is that for Augustine it is not a mere story; it is a claim, it is history. We shall fail to understand its significance for Augustine if we attempt too quickly to unveil its 'mythological' character. Augustine's doctrine of original sin is not presented as a mythical expression of unconscious tendencies or metaphysical relations. It is proposed in the full light of considered reason as a claim about an event that takes place in time and space, at the beginning of human history. But Augustine speaks in two dimensions, which interact in a complex way. We shall be unable to understand the significance of this historical moment without delving into the vertical dimension of Augustine's notion of sin; for the historical moment is not only historical moment, it is also emblematic of the human spiritual predicament. What, then, is sin for Augustine? In Eden, Adam and Eve's sin is one of disobedience to God. We are not privy to the inner workings of the will that led to this first disobedience, but we participate in this sin, nevertheless, 5 through an inheritance of the perversity at its core. What Adam and Eve were by choice and punishment, we are by nature. Thus all human beings are intimately familiar with sin – for it is inherent in their most basic inclinations. How, then, does this sin manifest itself? Our great sin, according to Augustine, is in putting ourselves in the place of God. The name Augustine gives to this sin is 'Pride.' Augustine writes that there are two principle attitudes that one can take toward oneself and things in the world. The first is the attitude of 'use' and the other the attitude of 'enjoyment.' 11 All things of use are worthwhile only insofar as they lead to that which is enjoyable. That which is enjoyable is worthwhile in itself. Thus far Augustine has said nothing that a prudent hedonist would not agree with. For Augustine, however, the only thing that can be truly, fully, and legitimately enjoyed is God. The truth of this is seen in the fact that only the joy of God endures forever. All other enjoyments, by their finite nature, must inevitably fade and thus are bittersweet at best. Indeed, their bitterness is in direct proportion to their sweetness, for it is harder to lose a great joy than a small one. But the one who enjoys God experiences a joy without qualification or compromise, an eternal joy – the only sort fully deserving of the name. God, thus, is the ultimate Good because God confers the ultimate happiness. 12 Sin, for Augustine, is precisely the failure to understand this and live in accordance with it. It is to put finite goods in the place of the one true good which is God. This failure is not primarily a matter of choice for us, however. Our very nature is mistakenly driven to seek enjoyment in finite things. The drive for sex, power, wealth, personal glory, are all instances of the pursuit of finite enjoyments. It is fairly easy to see how this evolves, in certain branches of Christianity, into the notion that all forms of pleasure are sinful. But for Augustine the sin is not in the 6 pleasure itself, but in the status we accord it. 13 The nature of our desire itself is sinful--not because it directs us toward pleasure, but because it directs us away from God. In our pursuit of finite enjoyments is manifest our desire to find final satisfaction within ourselves – which is, for Augustine, to put ourselves in the place of God as our supreme value. 14 It is a futile effort, and a deadly one. The only cure for our natural perversity is the grace of God. We do not have the power within ourselves to change ourselves in any fundamental way. Because of sin we are not only naturally disinclined to seek God, but our knowledge of what to seek is itself abysmally flawed. But even were this not the case we would still be unable to lift ourselves from the depths of our morass. True sanctification entails more than a mere suppression of inappropriate behavior, or desire. The fully sanctified person is one for whom God is recognized and desired as the sole Good – so fully that no other desire need be suppressed. Sanctification, thus, entails a transformation in the core of our being, which we can neither initiate nor consummate ourselves. To this point, the problem of sin may be seen as essentially a problem of psycho-spiritual welfare. We are like the child who craves and consumes sweets despite their detrimental effects. The craving for sweets may make us sick, but it is not a moral fault. Augustine's theology takes a sharp turn, however, when he begins to consider the causes of our predicament. Augustine's doctrine of inherited sin becomes inseparable from his doctrine of inherited guilt, in the sense of blameworthiness. The problem of guilt and punishment so overshadows the problem of sin that the primary significance of sin ceases to be that it makes us sick, and becomes that it makes us blameworthy and deserving of punishment. The logic behind this turn is simple and catastrophic. It may be seen as a resolution to a theodicean problem: Given that God has the power to accord us the grace necessary for 7 sanctification, what possible reason could God have for withholding this grace? The answer would seem to be that, all things being equal, there could be no reason. If we find ourselves without this blessedness today it can only be because God has willfully denied it. We seem caught between two alternatives: Either the grace of God ought to be universally disseminated, in which case God is unjust to refuse it, or God is justified in denying us this grace, in which case we must be somehow undeserving of it. God cannot be unjust, hence our condition must be justly deserved. We shall see that Tillich manages to find a third alternative, which allows him to return to the problem of sin as a problem of spiritual malaise. But for Augustine, the human problem has ceased to be one of spiritual illness and has become one of offense and punishment. Every human malady, including our very sinfulness, is interpreted as a punishment for the disobedience of Adam and Eve at the beginning of history. 15 The vertical problem of the human relation to God is understood as rooted in the horizontal problem of an historical event beyond our control. Any possible solution to this problem, then, is also going to be beyond our control. In this eclipse of the vertical by the horizontal the very face of God changes. The problem is no longer an inner failure of love on our part, it has become an outward exercise of power on God's part. God as Savior has given way to God as Prosecutor. And God, far from being humanity's supreme Good, becomes humanity's supreme Threat. The concept of justice is at the very crux of Christianity. The reasons for this lie deep within its Judaic roots, grounded in the Sinaic pact with God. As Paul interprets it, the Jewish Law's demands are so burdensome that none are capable of adequately fulfilling them. Its principle function, then, is to reveal to us our sinfulness, a sinfulness which makes us radically 'unjust' in the eyes of God and which, left uncorrected, must lead to spiritual death. Jesus' death on the 8 cross somehow redeems our sinfulness and allows us to be 'justified' in the eyes of God. For Paul, this is God's loving response to the dilemma of humanity's 'carnal' weakness. But the Pauline parallel between Adam and Christ celebrated in Romans 5:18 16 is not maintained in Augustine's theology. Whereas Adam's sin corrupts all human beings, Christ's sacrifice is not offered for all. 17 Only a select few are to be saved. The consequence of this is to change the affective meaning of the crucifixion. It can no longer be viewed as an act of love on the part of God. Given that all human beings are made equally and radically unjust by Adam's sin, there is no basis for God's saving grace to favor some as opposed to others. If God acts out of love he would act to save all, as all would stand in equal relation to this love and in equal need of God's grace. The fact that he saves only some implies that his motivation is not love, but something else. What is this something else? "Mankind," writes Augustine, "is divided between those in whom the power of merciful grace is demonstrated, and those in whom is shown the might of just retribution" (my emphasis). 18 The issue has become power, not love. The divine Potentate displays his awesome might by condemning most and sparing some (it remains always unclear who the display is for). This is the catastrophic blunder of Augustinian theology. Augustine sees power, not love, as God's principle attribute. The spirit of domineering pride, the very pride Augustine identifies as at the core of human sinfulness, is now projected into the very heart of God, as God's primary characteristic. 19 What, after all, was the offense committed by Adam and Eve? Was it an offense in which some harm was inflicted upon anyone? No. God is not susceptible to harm. 20 Nor, in eating the forbidden fruit, did Adam and Eve do anything intrinsically harmful to themselves. Augustine makes a point of telling us that the fruit was not in itself bad. 21 The crime of Adam 9 and Eve was in their failure to subordinate themselves to God's command – a command whose only point seems to have been to enforce subordination. 22 God's response to this infringement on his dignity defies comprehension. As part of Adam's punishment for this transgression his very nature is changed such that he and his descendants will no longer be capable of refraining from sin. 23 This, taken at face value, is the most bizarre moment in Augustine's entire doctrine. It is a moment that cries out for 'demythologization.' We want to say that it is a mythic expression of the insight that sin itself breeds further sin. We want to say that it expresses the realization that dissension from God's love is the source of spiritual suffering. But the subtlety of these interpretations, however insightful, are overwhelmed by the harshness of the account and the insistence that its historicity be affirmed. 24 So we are left with a God whose punishment is of such a kind as to force the transgressor to continue in transgression as part of the punishment. What sort of a punishment is this? It can only be a punishment that is in no way concerned with the reformation of the transgressor or the elimination of evil. It is a punishment concerned with only one thing: a show of power. This show of power reaches its consummation in the everlasting torture to be visited upon the damned at the end of history. 25 This, according to Augustine, is the desert of all human beings, not for anything they do in their lifetimes, but as the 'just' punishment for the sin of Adam. By its everlasting nature, such punishment can have no purpose. It has, indeed, a kind of 'anti-purpose,' it is against nature. Augustine himself makes this clear in his analysis of the conditions for everlasting pain, in which body and soul will be in perpetual struggle with themselves. It will be "a struggle in which the violence of pain is in such conflict with the nature of the body that neither can yield to the other. For in this life, when such a conflict occurs, either pain wins, and 10 death takes away feeling, or nature conquers, and health removes pain. But in that other life, pain continues to torment, while nature lasts to feel pain. Neither ceases to exist, lest the punishment should also cease." 26 What is the justification for this punishment? Although we will find innumerable references to its 'justness,' we will find virtually no attempt to justify it in Augustine's writings. Rather, he seems to argue from the justice of the punishment to the gravity of the offense. 27 Augustine's emphatic insistence on the eternal suffering of the damned is based, so he tells us, strictly on scriptural evidence. 28 This doctrine of hell is the exclamation point to Augustine's 'horizontal' account of the human predicament. It is, as well, the final corruption of the vertical element in his thinking. Failure to love God appropriately results in being tortured by God forever. The inner contradiction in Augustine's theology reaches its pinnacle at this moment. Love compelled through threat of torture can never be love. At best it is servile ingratiation or flattery. Such cannot be our 'ultimate good,' for it is not even minimally honest. Augustine's doctrine is worse than a logical contradiction in terms, it is a spiritual dilemma. Augustine presents us with a God who must be loved and cannot be loved at one and the same time. Volumes could be written on the psychological evils that have arisen out of this inner tension. That this punishment is continuously called 'just,' with never an attempt to explain its 'justness,' is the occasion for further malaise. The justness of the punishment is simply assumed, never argued for. In defense of this, Augustine tells us that in this life "the just judgments of God are hidden from mortal perception and understanding." 29 Since Augustine never proffers any arguments there are no arguments to consider. We float upon a sea of unreason that threatens to engulf us. How does one argue with the Unknown? Reason is not so much defeated as dismissed, and Fear reigns in its place, as the ultimate argument. 11 But is it even conceivable that everlasting punishment could be just? What is the relationship between justice and punishment? Let us attempt to resurrect reason for a moment, to consider this question. There is a sense in which we feel that someone who has committed a serious transgression should 'pay' for the crime. It is an offense against something important for violators of justice to get off 'scott free.' Justice, we say, must be 'served.' What do we mean by these expressions? What is 'justice' and how is it 'violated' and how is it restored after having been 'violated'? Perhaps we can gain some insight by moving the question out of the heavily loaded sphere of morality and considering it in relation to more mundane matters. We say at times that a particular price for an item is a just price. We mean by this that the price accurately reflects its worth. If a just price is paid for an item then both buyer and seller have been well served. Equal worth has been exchanged for equal worth. Justice has something to do with respecting the true worth of things. But a thing can have worth only in relation to someone who values it. All questions of worth must ultimately be referred back to some 'valuing being' for whom something has its worth. In respecting the true worth of something, then, we are respecting the valuing being for whom it has worth. To the extent that we gratuitously destroy something of worth to a valuing being we have harmed that being. Justice demands that we restore the thing of worth and undo the harm we have done. Justice is the defender of worth. But what does this have to do with punishment? Let us imagine the following scenario: A man robs a liquor store, wounds the owner, and steals five hundred dollars. He is apprehended by the police a few blocks away with the five hundred dollars still in his pocket. After some 12 processing, the money is returned to the store owner. At this point, has justice been served? Might we now allow the robber to go free given that he has 'paid his debt' to the store owner? The answer, I think, is no, because, even after restoring the money, the robber has still not really 'paid his debt' to justice. The robber did more than steal the store owner's money, he disregarded the store owner's worth as a person. It was this that permitted him to steal the money and harm the owner in the first place. So long as the robber remains unrepentant, so long as he continues to disregard the worth of others, justice remains, in principle, violated. How are we to bring the robber into recognition of the store owner's worth? In what does this worth itself consist? Unlike things of value, whose value is always relative to one who values it, a person of value is always a value to himself or herself. A person's value is intrinsic to itself. It is because of the intrinsic nature of human value that harm to a human being is always some form of pain or suffering. Suffering is the experience of harm to that which has intrinsic value by that which has intrinsic value. The robber must be brought face to face with the truth of the harm he has done, which is only manifest in the suffering he has caused. This, I believe, is the relationship of justice to punishment. The violator is to be brought face to face with the harm he has done through experiencing that harm himself, or its equivalent. This is why just punishment must fit the crime. Moral violation is a denial of the axiological truth of the other. Just punishment exposes the violator to the truth of the harm done, for the purpose of restoring in him an acknowledgment of justice; i.e., for the purpose of 'justification.' That this is the moral significance of punishment becomes even clearer when we consider circumstances in which we would not punish an offender. We do not punish the criminally insane because we believe they are deranged in such a manner as to be unable to see the truth of right and wrong. To the extent that someone is incapable of understanding the wrong he or she 13 has committed, punishment is superfluous and cruel. It does not restore justice but further erodes it. Such a person may need to be restrained, but never punished. What this indicates is that just punishment is never simply a matter of exacting suffering for suffering. It is a matter of exposing the one who has willfully caused suffering to the truth of the suffering caused, for the purpose of bringing that person to an acknowledgment of the wrong done. This moral significance of punishment gets confused in the power relations of secular society. Here punishment is not so much a matter of justice as deterrence. Society has its laws, right or wrong. Those laws are enforced through threat of punishment, just or unjust. It is the mark of a just society to endeavor to make its laws just and its punishments apt. But the secular State as such is concerned not with justice but control. Punishment inflicted for the purpose of control is not justice, but intimidation. Punishment inflicted for no purpose whatsoever is plain cruelty. Augustine's God wavers between intimidation and cruelty, and this is why his theology is ultimately so noxious. Augustine does not seem to understand the value that justice defends, despite the centrality of this concept to his thinking. Endless pain can never be justice, for it advances no value. It is, in fact, the unending violation of value. It is the extreme of injustice. To attempt to mystify this fact by suggesting that we will come to understand it in 'another world,' is yet another injustice. Such mystification deprives the word justice of its very meaning. No one can any longer tell what is just or unjust. Fear and Confusion reign together. In Paul Ricoeur's "Interpretation of the Myth of Punishment" he writes that "the conjunction of reason and danger makes this 'mythologic' the most deceiving, the most fallacious of mythologies, the most difficult, consequently, to deconstruct." 30 In mythological terms it is 14 related to symbols of stain and purification. But, whereas purification removes stain, the relationship between punishment and expiation is logically unclear. Punishment cannot remove the crime committed because crime and punishment occur in two different persons. As stated above, it is possible to understand punishment as having a penitential, and thereby expiatory, value, but Ricoeur's point is well taken. Punishment is employed in society as a means of controlling behavior, not reforming souls. Its principle role in the judicial system is as threat. Is this not one of the main problems Paul has with the Law – the Law which condemns but never heals? The threatening nature of the Law detracts from one's capacity to see the supreme good toward which the Law points. It becomes itself an occasion for further spiritual distance from God, i.e., an occasion for sin. For Paul, the event of Christ is the overcoming of the spiritual negativity of condemnatory justice. What Augustine does is to bring the Law back with a vengeance. But now it is a Law gone mad. A Law that is no longer concerned even with control, but only Power – as it predestines some to salvation and others to damnation despite their merits, 31 forces all into the inevitability of sin and then tortures most for it, is blind even to the innocence of infants 32 – and calls itself Justice and Goodness and Love throughout. In disobeying God Adam and Eve turn from the truth of goodness itself, which is to say, they turn from their own greatest good. This is certainly a great error, but it is not crime. Crime requires a victim, but the only victims in Eden are Adam and Eve themselves. The real problem here is not that God's dignity has been wounded but that Adam and Eve have brought themselves into misalignment with truth and love. Such misalignment is suffering. This is a problem on the vertical dimension, utterly distorted when transposed to the horizontal. A generous reading of Augustine would suggest that the vertical is what he really means to emphasize, beneath the 15 juridical 'symbols.' But Augustine himself will not allow us this generous reading. Augustine will insist that the suffering of misalignment, even the misalignment itself for all but Adam and Eve, is willfully inflicted upon us by God as punishment. In the Confessions it is apparent that Augustine experiences his distance from God as a condition of grave error over which he has little control. The question is: who is responsible for this condition? Augustine wants to say, at one and the same time, that we are responsible for it while having no control over it. It is the doctrine of punishment that permits him to say both these things. Punishment is, precisely, a suffering for which the sufferer is responsible but over which the sufferer has no control. In this manner Augustine acquits God for the negativity of the human condition – but only by making God's justice into something monstrous. We search and search in vain to find the crime that could merit such punishment. But the crime and the punishment are 'mythically' one and the same, and actually something else altogether, so we shall never find it. There is no crime in the proper sense, just calamity. Tillich's Ontological Model When we begin to consider Tillich we move into a realm of discourse that is at once radically dissimilar to Augustine's and at the same time oddly related to it. Tillich affirms many of Augustine's insights on the vertical plane, while denying his assertions on the horizontal. In this manner Tillich is able to regard himself as within the Augustinian tradition. He himself writes "I would say, almost unambiguously, that I myself, and my whole theology, stand much more in the line of the Augustinian than in the Thomistic tradition." 33 But the differences between Tillich's and Augustine's theologies are profound, leading to profoundly different spiritual insights. 16 It is impossible to discuss Tillich's ontological notion of sin without discussing briefly his doctrine of God and his concept of the human relation to God. Tillich's primary designation for God is 'Being itself.' This is well within the tradition of Medieval theology and is consonant with Augustine's designation of God as 'Truth itself.' 34 There is a profound difference, though, in their understanding of the relationship of God to the creation. For Augustine, we exist at the decree of God and our substance arises from this decree 'out of nothing.' We do not have an organic relationship to God. Here we have one of the many incoherencies in Augustine's position. Augustine wants to say that our supreme good is achieved through "participation" in God. 35 But how can we participate in that from which we are radically severed by nature? To participate in something is to be part of it. But the creation, in Augustine's view, is radically exterior to God. 36 Tillich resolves this difficulty in the direction of unity. The difference between God and the creation is the difference between infinite being and its finite articulation, but it is not a radical difference in substance. God, says Tillich, is "the power of being in everything and above everything." 37 To the extent that anything is, it is through participation in the being of God. Such participation is not only our greatest good, but the precondition to our being at all. To the extent that we are, we are 'in' God. For Tillich, then, the creation is intimately bound to the being of God in a way that it is not for Augustine. This has huge consequences for their various conceptions of the human relation to God. For Tillich eternal damnation is an impossibility because it would entail a split in God's very being. 38 God's relation to the creation is such that God cannot abandon us without, in some measure, abandoning himself. Likewise, and for the same reasons, we cannot abandon God without, in some measure, abandoning ourselves. Human concordance with God is not a matter of obedience to alien commands (however benign in their intent), but of attunement to our own 17 inmost depths. The movement to God is characterized by a deep and wholehearted selfacceptance, not by self-denial and self-loathing. Tillich declares unambiguously that God, though personal, is not to be understood as a person. 39 Augustine too, in his designation of God as eternally changeless and as 'Truth itself' implicitly recognizes that God transcends categories of personhood, 40 but the juridical language he is committed to for his doctrine of sin creates an ambiguity in his picture of God that is never resolved. The principle theological problem with representing God as a person is the exteriority of person-to-person relations. Persons, as such, are independent centers of value, of self-concern. It is precisely this independence that creates the possibility that one person can disregard or exploit the value of another for the sake of his or her own value. This gives rise to the problem of justice. But the human relation to God as our ontological foundation and, therefore, our supreme value, is not a relation between distinct centers of self-concern. God bears a relation to the person that is intrinsic rather than extrinsic. God is not a separate center of concern standing above other personal centers and eclipsing them. Rather, God is the infinite source and depths of all centers. In this, Tillich is not at odds with Augustine's deeper thought concerning God as the supreme good for all. But whereas Augustine's God can be our supreme good while remaining supremely indifferent to our individual suffering (otherwise eternal torment would be impossible), Tillich's God is indissolubly implicated in our lives and our predicament. Sin is not simply our problem but an ontological problem that God resolves, not through an act of gratuitous mercy, but as an essential aspect of what God is. Insofar as God is never viewed as a separate personal center, the question of sin can never become a question of violation to God's 'rights' or 'interests' – for which God might be duly angry. Justice and punishment are simply not the issue. The person who fails 18 to recognize the value of God is one who fails to recognize his or her own true value. The issue, therefore, is one of intrinsic well-being. It may be unwise to turn from God but it is not 'unjust.' The primary right being violated in such a turning is always one's own. Tillich's willingness to speak unambiguously of a God who transcends categories of personhood also permits him to clarify the relation of biblical to theological language. Biblical language speaks in myth and metaphor for the purpose of expressing and evoking spiritual experience and insight. The horizontal is a mythical projection of the vertical. It is intentionally non-rational, or trans-rational, because it endeavors to speak to us at a level beyond mere ratiocination. It is for that very reason not irrational. But it is in danger of becoming irrational if accepted at face value. One of the tasks of the theologian is to penetrate the depths of such language and present its insights in terms that can be rationally appropriated. Tillich, thus, does not so much deny the juridical language found in the tradition as understand it to be a metaphorical expression for an ontological truth at a more profound level. But this translation from the juridical to the ontological is not just a shift in mode of expression, it entails a substantial shift in meaning as well. Let us, then, attempt to trace this shift through an examination of Tillich's understanding of the Garden of Eden myth. The first thing we need to recognize is that it is a myth. For Tillich, we can all be said to 'participate' in the sin of Adam precisely because it is not historical. It is a myth that points to something universal in the human condition. 41 As such it speaks of profound matters and has deep significance. To regard it as a contingent event in space and time is to trivialize it – to then attempt to overcome such trivialization by attributing to it an ultimate consequence is to demonize it. For Tillich, the historicity of biblical events is entirely a matter for historians to 19 determine and is, theologically speaking, largely irrelevant. To take the Bible's historicity too seriously is to put the medium in the way of the message. The Garden of Eden, then, is a mythical image of the creation in essential accord with itself and God. Tillich's notion of the essential owes a great deal to Platonic and neo-platonic thought. Classically, the distinction between essence and existence is that between what a thing should be and what it is in fact. A given tree, for instance, is considered a tree insofar as it shares in the characteristics of essential treehood, this is its essential 'whatness.' Strictly speaking, the essence of treehood is independent of any actually existing tree. Thus, the essential 'whatness' of a tree is conceptually distinguishable from its existential 'thatness.' In Platonic and neo-platonic metaphysical systems all existing things are thought to be modeled after eternal immaterial 'essences' or 'ideas' which determine their 'whatness.' They are modeled out of primal, formless, matter, which resists this prototypal structuring such that all existent things are somewhat imperfect instantiations of the eternal essences from which they are fashioned. With the Christian idea of creation ex nihilo the notion of a pre-existent resistant material out of which the creation is fashioned drops out, with the consequence that the imperfections of the temporal realm can no longer be attributed to it. The question of the source of these imperfections thus becomes a problem. As we have seen, Augustine locates this source in the free will of rational creatures and the 'just' response of God to its misuse. The imperfections of the temporal realm, and of temporal creatures, are interpreted as punishment. For Tillich, the imperfection of the temporal realm is an inevitable result of its coming to existence itself. Not only is the Garden of Eden not to be thought of as historical, but it is theologically necessary that it be regarded as a-historical, for the perfection depicted in Eden is precisely the consequence of its not having yet been existentially actualized. Tillich speaks of 20 Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden as in a state of 'dreaming innocence.' 42 From this we may understand that their independence from God as separate centers of action and will is not yet complete. They still exist, in effect, in the 'womb' of God; the umbilical cord has not yet been cut. They are as yet mere potentiality – they have yet to be actualized as free, independent beings. They represent essential humanity in full accord with its ontological basis, but as yet untested under the conditions of freedom and individuation. The moment of the Fall, for Tillich, is fully coincident with the moment of actualization itself. 43 The existential independence of the will creates an ineluctable temptation to 'hubris' (Tillich's Greek substitute for Augustine's 'Pride'), which is the human endeavor to center its existence upon itself. But even this talk of 'temptation' must be demythologized. For the temptation depicted in the Edenic myth is not principally a temptation to self-centeredness but to existence itself. Such actualization, of course, must be seen as a metaphysical event that precedes any act of choice on the part of the individual. It is only after actualization that the individual emerges as such, with the power and freedom to choose. It is God, then, who makes the 'choice' for existential actualization, with all the positive and negative ('good and evil') consequences that flow from this. The Garden of Eden story mythically depicts a moment in the life of God prior to the emergence of the full-fledged human being. 44 The eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge represents this metaphysical moment of human emergence. It symbolizes the activation of personal freedom, which both separates us from absorption in God's being and liberates us to be ourselves. The 'threat' of death and 'curse' of hardship issued by God in relation to this moment are to be understood as mythological expressions for the inevitable consequences of such finite actualization. As fully centered, independent, beings we are free to determine ourselves and our lives. As finite beings, however, 21 we do not abide in ourselves, but in the ontological ground from which we spring. Thus our existence is a paradox of dependence and independence. We are, to use Tillich's term, 'Finite Freedom.' As free, we have the power, even the necessity, to stray from our infinite ground. But as finite, such straying can never establish for us another ground, and so becomes a state of existential groundlessness – what Tillich calls 'existential estrangement.' This is the human predicament. Such existential estrangement is, for Tillich, the ineluctable impetus to sin. 45 The primary problem of sin, then, is not that we have spurned a domineering God and thereby incurred God's wrath, but that we have become estranged from the depths of our own being and thereby suffer a profound rootlessness, which, in its extreme, becomes despair. The result of this 'original estrangement' from our ontological ground is an anxious selfinvolvement that inevitably finds expression in self-destructive and other-destructive behavior, which further exacerbates our estrangement and tragically pollutes our relations with others. Thus, universal Sin, understood as existential estrangement, inevitably leads to personal sins, understood as destructive acts, and, through these, guilt. Insofar as such guilt is incurred through acts of personal choice it is something we must accept as our own. Insofar as it is conditioned by the tragic element in existence it is something for which we are not fully responsible. Thus, in stark contrast to Augustine, Tillich's notion of Original Sin has the effect of limiting our guilt rather than loading it upon us. Augustine's insight into the tragic inescapability of the negative in the human condition is fully affirmed by Tillich but, unlike Augustine, its character as tragedy, as opposed to choice, is fully affirmed as well. 46 As a result, such tragedy becomes a problem, not just for human beings under the judgment of God, but for God himself. It is God who creates the conditions for sin, not as punishment, but as the prerequisite to creation. It is through our relation to God that these conditions are overcome. 22 Thus, also, Tillich is able to restore the idea of a God who acts in all things through love and for love. 47 The creation itself, despite the inevitable fall that is its consequence, is an act of love insofar as it provides the possibility for love itself. Just as sin has an essentially ontological meaning, as estrangement from the ground of being, so the meaning of love is rooted in the ontological as well, as the reunion of the separated and estranged. Thus Love is the overcoming of Sin. The creation individuates and separates, making individual estrangement possible. Love reunites without violating individuation, grounding the individual in her true relation to being. Thus love is the fulfillment of created being, and the telos of the creation itself. 48 The bare unity of God is given life only when actualized as community. The comm-unity that is love, then, may be seen as the existential counterpart to the essential unity that is God. But the creation would not be an act of love if it were irredeemably tragic, if it were not able to overcome the disunity inherent within it. God's salvific work, thus, is not to be seen as an attempt to correct a creation gone wrong, as in Augustine, but as a necessary ingredient in the perfecting of a creation that would be incomplete without it. Christ does not correct the mistake of Adam, through paying the penalty incurred by Adam's sin, rather Christ perfects the creation, through revealing the truth of the human relation to God, and inviting us to participate in it. 49 This changes the focus of salvation. Whereas for Augustine salvation takes place as the pardoning act of God, and is, in essence, a salvation from other-worldly punishment, for Tillich salvation is the healing of the rupture between God and the person, effected, not through a change in the judgmental attitude of God, but through a change in our attitude toward God, ourselves, and each other. For Tillich, God always, eternally, 'pardons us' 50 – this is the universal message of Christ's atonement which makes it a true parallel to the universality of the fall (in distinction again, to Augustine's doctrine of election). But in order for this pardoning act of God 23 to be effective (that is, healing) we must accept it – that is, we must 'accept that we are accepted.' 51 In failing to accept it we do not thereby make ourselves less acceptable to God, whose acceptance is unconditional and irrevocable, but we continue in our estrangement from God, making our lives less acceptable to ourselves. The 'punishment' for sin, thus, is sin itself. The relationship between Tillich's and Augustine's thought is complex, and we have only touched upon some of its subtleties. Both believe that the human condition involves a negativity that cannot be overcome through a sheer effort of will. Both believe that this negativity is characterized by our failure to see our true status in being and our true, transcendent, good. But they part ways in their understanding of the source of this negativity and the solution for it. For Augustine, the horizontal, historical dimension takes precedence. The problem lies in the fact that we have offended God, and now live under God's wrath. Only a few will be spared the full extent of this wrath, and even these will only know true happiness when this life is over. For Tillich, the vertical takes precedence. The problem is inherent in the nature of creation itself. It is a problem for which God has, not a punishment, but a solution – even if never a final one. This solution is the Christian message itself, the 'good news' of Christianity. This good news is not that God has foresworn to punish some, in an act of selective mercy, but that it is of the very nature of God to save all, through a power of unconquerable love. 24 Notes 1 "The pair lived in a partnership of unalloyed felicity; their love for God and for each other was undisturbed. This love was the source of immense gladness, since the beloved object was always at hand for their enjoyment. There was a serene avoidance of sin, there was no encroachment of any kind of evil, from any quarter, to bring them sadness." Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin Books, 1972) 567, XIV.10 "How fortunate, then, were the first human beings! They were not distressed by any agitations of the mind, nor pained by any disorders of the body. And equally fortunate would be the whole united fellowship of mankind if our first parents had not committed an evil deed whose effect was to be passed on to their posterity..." Ibid., 567, XIV.10 2 The fruit, according to Augustine, was "a food not evil or harmful except in that it was forbidden. For God would not have created or planted anything evil in such a place of felicity." Ibid., 571, XIV.12 3 "The truth is that no one should try to find an efficient cause for a wrong choice...For to defect from him who is the Supreme Existence, to something of less reality, this is to begin to have an evil will. To try to discover the causes of such defection – deficient, not efficient causes – is like trying to see darkness or hear silence." Ibid., 479, XII.7 "...evil choice consists solely in falling away from God and deserting him, a defection whose cause is deficient, in the sense of being wanting – for there is no cause." Ibid., 481, XII.9 4 "This seed [of those to be saved] is certainly represented by a mere few, in comparison with the multitude of the ungodly." Ibid., 679, XVI.21 5 On those to be saved: "He does not now choose them for their merits, seeing that the whole mass of mankind has been condemned as it were in its infected root; he selects them by grace and shows the extent of his generosity to those who have been set free not only in his dealings with them but also in his treatment of those who have not been freed." Ibid., 591-592, XIV.26 6 "As for that first origin of mankind, this present life of ours (if a state full of such grievous misery can be called a life) is evidence that all the mortal descendants of the first man came under condemnation. Such is the clear evidence of that terrifying abyss of ignorance, as it may be called, which is the source of all error...What else is the message of all the evils of humanity? The love of futile and harmful satisfactions...cruelty, savagery, villainy, lust,...sacrilege, violence, robbery...all these evils belong to man in his wickedness, and they all spring from that root of error and perverted affection, which every son of Adam brings with him at his birth." Ibid., 1065, XXII.22 7 "The effect of that sin was to subject human nature to all the process of decay which we see and feel, and consequently to death also." Ibid., 571, XIV.13 8 "For who is not aware of the vast ignorance of the truth (which is abundantly seen in infancy) and the wealth of futile desires (which begins to be obvious in boyhood) which accompanies a man on his entrance into this world..." Ibid., 1065, XXII.22 9 "... to approve of falsehoods as if they were true, so as to err involuntarily, and to be unable, owing to the resistance and pain of carnal bondage, to refrain from deeds of lust, is not the nature of man as he was created, but the punishment of man as under condemnation. " Augustine, "On Nature and Grace, Against 25 Pelagius", in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, vol. V, Saint Augustin: Anti-Pelagian Writings, ed. Philip Scheff, trans. Peter Holmes and Robert Ernest (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1991) 150, chap. 81. 10 "Hence from the misuse of free will there started a chain of disasters: mankind is led from that original perversion, a kind of corruption at the root, right up to the disaster of the second death [eternal condemnation and torture], which has no end." Augustine, City of God, 523, XIII.15 "In consequence, the whole of mankind is a 'condemned lump'; for he who committed the first sin was punished and along with him all the stock which had its roots in him. The result is that there is no escape for anyone from this justly deserved punishment, except by merciful and undeserved grace; and mankind is divided between those in whom the power of merciful grace is demonstrated, and those in whom is shown the might of just retribution." Ibid., 989, XXI.13 "Now there are many more condemned by vengeance than are released by mercy; and the reason for this is that it should in this way be made plain what was the due of all mankind." Ibid., 989 XXI.13 11 Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson (New York: Macmillan, 1987) see Book I. 12 "...life will only be truly happy when it is eternal." Augustine, City of God, 590, XIV.26 13 "Greed is not something wrong with gold; the fault is in a man who perversely loves gold and for its sake abandons justice, which ought to be put beyond comparison above gold. Lust is not something wrong in a beautiful and attractive body; the fault is in a soul which perversely delights in sensual pleasures, to the neglect of that self-control by which we are made fit for spiritual realities far more beautiful, with a loveliness which cannot fade." Ibid., 481, XII.9 14 "This then is the original evil; man regards himself as his own light, and turns away from the light which would make man himself a light if he would set his heart on it." Ibid., 573, XIV.13 15 "...because of the first and supremely grave sin, committed in paradise, this life has been made a life of punishment for us..." Ibid., 992, XXI.15 16 "Consequently, just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men." Rom. 5:18, NIV (New International Version) 17 "The Apostle puts this in more striking terms in the same letter: 'It was by a man that death came; and by a man came the resurrection of the dead. For as it is in Adam that all die, so also it is in Christ that all will be brought to life.'...But it does not mean that all who die in Adam will be members of Christ, for the great majority of them will be punished with the second death." Augustine, City of God, 540, XIII.23 18 Ibid., 989 XXI.13 19 Do we have here, perhaps, the key to the whole problematic of Augustine's theology? Has Augustine failed to understand the true evil of pride? In speaking of his own temptation to pride in the Confessions Augustine writes: "But, O Lord, you who alone rule without pride since you are the only true Lord and no other lord rules over you, there is a third kind of temptation which, I fear, has not passed from me. Can it ever pass from me in all this life? It is the desire to be feared or loved by other men, simply for the pleasure that it gives me, though in such pleasure there is no true joy." Augustine, Confessions, ed. Betty Radice, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin Books, 1961), 244, X.36 26 'The desire to be feared and loved by men' – is this not what Augustine has projected into the heart of God himself and made into God's supreme principle?; this God who exacts love from some through 'mercy' and fear from all through gratuitous judgment and the threat of judgment? Has not Augustine made Pride, rather than Love, God's essential trait, and thereby given the demonic a foothold in the very heart of the divine? Let's consider: There are two reasons one person might object to the pridefulness of another. The first is because he objects to pridefulness as such, and the second is because he does not wish to have his own pridefulness challenged. The prideful person, of course, endorses pridefulness only in himself, in all others he demands deference. Now, the whole problem of Augustinianism (and the doctrines it has influenced) is that it correctly identifies pridefulness as sin, but incorrectly identifies God's reasons for objecting to it; supposing these to be that it challenges God's own pridefulness (which is then not called 'pridefulness' on the grounds that, in God, such pridefulness is legitimate). But in the humility of Christ's life and death we see something else. God objects to pridefulness as such, because it is an affront to love, not because it is an affront to his own pridefulness. This is the great good news of the Gospel: that God's being is love and that love is the supreme good (and, ultimately, the supreme power as well). It is because love is the supreme good that pridefulness, which opposes love, is sin – not because it is an affront to God's pridefulness. Interestingly, Augustine confesses about his own sin of pridefulness: "In other kinds of temptation I have some means of examining myself, but in this I have almost none" Ibid., 245, X.37. One wonders if Augustine's failure to see through to the bottom of his own pridefulness conditions his failure to see love itself as a possible motive for God. And we are reminded here of Jesus' rebuke to the Pharisees: "Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees. . . You shut the kingdom of heaven in men's faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to " (Mt. 23:13). It is this projection of their own pridefulness onto God, the using of God and God's law as a vehicle for the furtherance of their own pride rather than as a vehicle for healing the people, that is Jesus' principle objection to the Pharisees. But what is Christ's own motivation? Clearly it is love, it can only be love. And this is proven by his willingness to die for the sake of others ("For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son..."). This, not pridefulness, is the character of God as Christ reveals it ('He who has seen me has seen the Father'). 20 "It goes without saying that no evils can harm God..." Augustine, City of God, 474, XII.3 21 We "ought not to regard this offense as unimportant and trivial just because it was concerned with food – a food not evil or harmful except in that it was forbidden. For God would not have created or planted anything evil in such a place of felicity." Ibid., 571, XIV.12 22 "God's intention in this command was to impress upon this created being that he was the Lord; and that free service was in the creature's best interest." Ibid., 574, XIV.15 23 "Nor ought it to be wondered at, that either by ignorance man has not free determination of will to choose what he will rightly do, or that by the resistance of carnal habit (which by force of mortal transmission has, in a certain sense, become engrafted in his nature), though seeing what ought rightly to be done and wishing to do it, he yet is unable to accomplish it. For this is the most just penalty of sin, that a man should lose what he has been unwilling to make good use of, when he might with ease have done so if he would; which, however, amounts to this, that the man who knowingly does not do what is right loses 27 the ability to do it when he wishes. For, in truth, to every soul that sins there accrue these two penal consequences – ignorance and difficulty. Out of the ignorance springs the error which disgraces; out of the difficulty arises the pain which afflicts. But to approve of falsehoods as if they were true, so as to err involuntarily, and to be unable, owing to the resistance and pain of carnal bondage, to refrain from deeds of lust, is not the nature of man as he was created, but the punishment of man as under condemnation. " Augustine, "On Nature and Grace, Against Pelagius", 150, chap. 81. 24 Talking about symbolic exegesis: "There is no prohibition against such exegesis, provided that we also believe in the truth of the story as a faithful record of historical fact." Augustine, City of God, 535, XIII.22 25 "For in any case I have sufficiently argued that it is possible for living creatures to remain alive in the fire, being burnt without being consumed, feeling pain without incurring death; and this by means of a miracle of the omnipotent Creator." Ibid., 985, XXI.10 "The important thing is that we should never believe that those bodies [the resurrected] are to be such as to feel no anguish in the fire." Ibid., 985, XXI.10 "...and in that fire they will be tortured day and night for ever and ever." Ibid., 1013 XXI.26 26 Ibid., 894 XIX.28 27 "Since the creator of this nature, with all its powers, is, we know, the true and supreme God, and since he governs all that he has made, exercising supreme power and supreme justice, then assuredly that nature would never have fallen into this wretchedness, would never have been destined to proceed from those miseries into eternal woes (except for some, who will be set free), had it not been for the overwhelming gravity of that first sin committed by the first man, the father of the whole human race." Ibid., 1073 XXII.24 28 "I am going to speak about the day of God's final judgment, as far as he will grant me, and to assert it in the face of the irreligious and the unbelieving; and I must start by laying down as, so to speak, the foundation of the building, the evidence of inspired Scripture...For I am of the opinion that no man on earth who understands these statements as they were uttered and believes that they were spoken by the supreme and true God through the mouths of holy souls, can fail to yield his assent to them..." Ibid., 895 XX.1 29 Ibid., 898 XX.2 30 Paul Ricoeur, "Interpretation of the Myth of Punishment" in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 372 31 "God makes both 'vessels of wrath destined for dishonor', and also 'vessels of mercy destined for honor', as if out of a single lump consigned to well-merited condemnation. To the former he gives their due, by way of punishment; on the latter he bestows the undeserved gift of grace." Augustine, City of God, 635 XV.21 32 "Thus the process of birth rightly brings perdition on the infant because of the original sin by which God's covenant was first broken, unless the rebirth sets him free." Ibid., 689 XVI.28 33 Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought: From its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism, ed. Carl E. Braaten (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), 104 28 34 "For I found my God, who is Truth itself, where I found truth, and ever since I learned the truth I have not forgotten it." Augustine, Confessions, 230, X.24 35 Of eternal life: "There we shall have leisure to be still, and we shall see that he is God, whereas we wished to be that ourselves when we fell away from him, after listening to that Seducer saying, 'You will be like gods.' Then we abandoned the true God, by whose creative help we should have become gods, but by participation in him, not by deserting him." Augustine, City of God, 1090 XXII.30 36 "Hence he gave existence to the creatures he made of nothing; but it was not his own supreme existence." Ibid., 473 XII.3 "The things he made are good because they were made by him; but they are subject to change, because they were made not out of his being but out of nothing." Ibid., 472 XII.3 37 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. I, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 236 38 "Ontologically, eternal condemnation is a contradiction in terms. It establishes an eternal split within being-itself. The demonic, whose characteristic is exactly this split, has then reached coeternity with God; then nonbeing has entered the very heart of being and love." Ibid., 285 39 "'Personal God' does not mean that God is a person. It means that God is the ground of everything personal and that he carries within himself the ontological power of personality. He is not a person, but he is not less than personal." Ibid., 245 "Ordinary theism has made God a heavenly, completely perfect person who resides above the world and mankind. The protest of atheism against such a highest person is correct. There is no evidence for his existence, nor is he a matter of ultimate concern. God is not God without universal participation." Ibid., 245 40 "Within me I hear the loud voice of Truth telling me that since the Creator is truly eternal, his substance is utterly unchanged in time and his will is not something separate from his substance...It follows that he does not will first one thing and then another, but that he wills all that he wills simultaneously, in one act, and eternally. He does not repeat his act of will over and over again or will different things at different times, and he neither starts to will what he did not will previously nor ceases to will what he willed before. A will which acts in this way is mutable, and nothing that is mutable is eternal. But our God is eternal." Augustine, Confessions, 290 XII.15 41 "Biblical literalism did a distinct disservice to Christianity in its identification of the Christian emphasis on the symbol of the Fall with the literalistic interpretation of the Genesis story. Theology need not take literalism seriously, but we must realize how its impact has hampered the apologetic task of the Christian church. Theology must clearly and unambiguously represent 'the Fall' as a symbol of the human situation universally, not as the story of an event that happened 'once upon a time'." Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 29 42 Ibid., 33 43 "Man does exist, and his existence is different from his essence. Man and the rest of reality are not only inside the process of the divine life but also 'outside' it. Man is grounded in it but he is not kept within the ground. Man has left the ground in order to 'stand upon' himself, to actualize what he essentially is, in order to be finite freedom. This is the point at which the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of the fall join...Fully developed creatureliness is fallen creatureliness." Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. I, 255 29 44 "Any theologian who is courageous enough to face the twofold truth that nothing can happen to God accidentally and that the state of existence is a fallen state must accept the point of coincidence between the end of creation and the beginning of the fall...The supralapsarian Calvinists, who asserted that Adam fell by divine decree had the courage to face this situation. But they did not have the wisdom to formulate their insight in such a way that the seemingly demonic character of this decree was avoided." Ibid., 256 45 "Estrangement is not a biblical term but is implied in most of the biblical descriptions of man's predicament. It is implied in the symbols of the expulsion from paradise, in the hostility between man and nature, in the deadly hostility of brother against brother, in the estrangement of nation from nation through the confusion of language, and in the continuous complaints of the prophets against their kings and people who turn to alien gods." Ibid., 45 "Nevertheless, 'estrangement' cannot replace 'sin'...[Sin] expresses what is not implied in the term 'estrangement', namely, the personal act of turning away from that to which one belongs. Sin expresses most sharply the personal character of estrangement over against its tragic side." Ibid., 46 46 "Theology should reinterpret the doctrine of original sin by showing man's existential selfestrangement...In doing so, it must develop a realistic doctrine of man, in which the ethical and the tragic element in his self-estrangement are balanced." Ibid., 38-39 47 "There are no conflicts in God between his reconciling love and his retributive justice. The justice of God is not a special act of punishment calculated according to the guilt of the sinner. But the justice of God is the act through which he lets the self-destructive consequences of existential estrangement go their way. He cannot remove them because they belong to the structure of being itself and God would cease to be God – the only thing that is impossible for him – if he removed these consequences. Above all, he would cease to be love, for justice is the structural form of love without which it would be sheer sentimentality. The exercise of justice is the working of his love, resisting and breaking what is against love." Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. II, 174 48 "Love is the drive towards the unity of the separated. Reunion presupposes separation of that which belongs essentially together. It would, however, be wrong to give to separation the same ontological ultimacy as to reunion. For separation presupposes an original unity...Therefore love cannot be described as a union of the strange but as a reunion of the estranged." Paul Tillich, Love, Power, and Justice: Ontological Analyses and Ethical Applications (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 25 49 "Christianity is what it is through the affirmation that Jesus of Nazareth, who has been called the 'Christ', is actually the Christ, namely, he who brings the new state of things, the New Being" Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. II, 97. "New Being is essential being under the conditions of existence, conquering the gap between essence and existence. For the same idea Paul uses the term 'new creature', calling those who are 'in' Christ 'new creatures. 'In' is the preposition of participation; he who participates in the newness of being which is in Christ has become a new creature" Ibid., 119. 50 "But the message of Christianity is that God, who is eternally reconciled, wants us to be reconciled to him" Ibid., 169-170. 30 51 "[Man] must accept that he is accepted; he must accept acceptance. And the question is how is this possible in spite of the guilt which makes him hostile to God. The traditional answer is 'Because of Christ!' This answer has been interpreted in the preceding sections. It means that one is drawn into the power of the New Being in Christ, which makes faith possible; that it is the state of unity between God and man, no matter how fragmentarily realized. Accepting that one is accepted is the paradox of salvation without which there would be no salvation but only despair" Ibid., 179.