Tillich and the Courage to Be: Spinoza

Tillich’s next section focuses on a philosopher that has a special place in the hearts and minds of most science minded folk interested in religion: Baruch Spinoza. Our interest in Spinoza comes from the fact that most people I know who were interested in physics and or math when young admired Albert Einstein and held him as a kind of hero. In a famous response to a Rabbi’s inquiry about whether he believed in God, Einstein wrote:

I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.

In my teens, let’s just say “if it was good enough for Einstein…” Of course in later life hero worship wanes buts formative interests developed by them doesn’t necessarily. Carl Sagan (probably influenced in much the same way) talks of the God of Spinoza and Einstein in his excellent essay “A Sunday Sermon” found in his book Broca’s Brain, and in his book The Varieties of Scientific Experience (based on Sagan’s 1985 Gifford Lectures – the 1985 offering of the same lecture series Tillich participated in the years 1953 and 1954 when he spoke there about his systematic theology).

Interestingly Tillich and Einstein had a bit of an intersection when Tillich responded to Einstein’s famous essay “Science and Religion.” Einstein’s essay, which was written for a 1940 conference entitled “Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion” at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, was highly influential on me growing up and on many science students I knew. In it he explicitly expressed his denial of belief in a “personal god.” Sounding to me much like Tillich and John Hick, Einstein said

A person who is religiously enlightened appears to me to be one who has, to the best of his ability, liberated himself from the fetters of his selfish desires and is preoccupied by thoughts, feelings, and aspirations to which he clings because of their super-personal value. It seems to me that what is important is the force of this super-personal content and the depth of the conviction concerning its overpowering meaningfulness, regardless of whether any attempt is made to unite this content with a divine Being, for otherwise it would not be possible to count Buddha and Spinoza as religious personalities.

Einstein never meant for his denial of a personal God to imply a denial of God in total, but it was perceived in many quarters as just that. For a great discussion of this and the Tillich link, see Max Jammer’s Einstein and Religion. Tillich argued that Einstein was being unfair to the idea of a personal God by attacking the most primitive version of it. He felt that was equivalent to attacking physics on the basis of outdated theories. (Jammer at 109.) The response to Einstein’s paper by Tillich reminds me in general terms of the discussions that frequent the subject on the net – for example, James McGrath has had many (it seems to me) interactions with atheists, and atheistic or agnostic literature, of this sort. See for example his blog post Why I am a Christian.

I can see both sides of this, but I tend to agree with the McGrath point of view – there are sophisticated ways of being Christian that don’t conflict with science like fundamentalism does. On the other hand I also understand the atheist point of view on this – the analogy with physics that Tillich uses, doesn’t quite work. Why? Because even if some people are unsophisticated about physics and cling to outdated theories, the bulk of folk don’t – especially professional representative of physics in the field (professors, research scientists and the sort). The personal God that Einstein argued against, however, is part of mainstream Christian belief in the sense that most Christians believe in one and most mainstream churches’ creeds are closer to that “primitive” belief than they are Tillich’s. When the atheist argues against the idea of a personal God that answers prayers and behaves much like a very powerful and smart human he or she is not arguing against an abandoned primitive theology that has given way to Tillich or Borg. The views of Tillich and Borg seem to be by far the minority – even among educated church leaders and some very well educated theologians.

Despite that I think the attempt to find different ways of being Christian rather than throwing Christianity out the window is a noble and important one. If only there was a church that allowed something like a Tillich-ian viewpoint to be compatible with it’s official doctrine. Unitarian-Universalist does, sort of, but its focus seems too broad to me to allow for much development of even a Christianity that acknowledges the symbolic nature of its mythology.