I studied religion and philosophy at WVU, and that helped me frame certain questions and think about life and religion in a rational and critical way. One of the people I studied in depth was Paul Tillich. One of my professors happened to have studied with Tillich when he attended graduate school at Harvard.

Tillich wasn’t interested so much in what he would call the historicity of the Christian Bible or of Jesus. The books of the Bible and the events and people described took place in the distant past, and the question of their literal truth is beyond our capacity to answer in a way that is satisfactory. The study of the language and the cultures involved may have academic significance for some, but it’s not really helpful for the average person dealing with ultimate questions of life. For Tillich, Christianity wasn’t about dogma and a set of finite beliefs one had to attest to. For him, the Bible and the Christian story was mythology, a way of expressing and exploring our fundamental reality.

Tillich thought that religion should address the specific concerns of peoples’ lives, and he believed in the modern world we had to confront, broadly speaking, our anxiety. He didn’t mean mental illness that should be treated by a doctor, but the questions of life that concern us all simply because we exist. Death, knowing that we will one day come to an end. Guilt, knowing that we are moral agents in an ambiguous world. Meaninglessness, what’s it all for and why are we here? These things plague the mind of people who are no longer struggling to survive on a day to day basis, the problems of people who have time to think. Tillich believed that the problem of anxiety stemmed from a sense of separation and that faith was about finding the courage to accept that we are acceptable as we are despite our flaws and our imperfect knowledge.

Tillich believed very much that religion should address the modern situation, and he did not see any problem with science. I’m sure if he were alive today, he would claim that Christians should accept that modern science has expanded our view of sexuality and gender and that the Christian church should fully and completely embrace LGBT people and their reality.

Most fundamentalists don’t accept him as Christian. He didn’t even like to speak of God so much because he believed we should train ourselves to stop thinking of God as a being alongside other beings. He thought of God as what he called the Ground of Being. For Tillich, God was remote and abstract, and he insisted that God or this Ground of Being was beyond our intellectual capacity to the point that our faith must always carry with it a high level of uncertainty.

I found him to be intensely interesting. And his views seemed much more valid than the insipid fundamentalism that I grew up with. But in the end, I didn’t feel I could call myself a Christian or claim I had faith even using Tillich’s broader terms. But he, along with a number of others, provided a kind of ladder for me to climb up out of the simplistic beliefs I was brought up with and provided a vocabulary that helped me better understand my own point of view.