Paul Tillich

I think that's right to say.

But his, his first book, it wasn't actually his first book, but this first book that kind of launched him on the scene was this book called "The Transforming Moment." And that's important because who Jim Loader was, was really trying to think about what does it mean for human beings to be transformed? What does transformation look like? And so he was, he was a practical theologian at, at Princeton, but he had worked with Telk at Parsons at Harvard, and, um, Paul Tillich when Paul Tillich was at Harvard.

I mean, he's incredibly philosophically, um, that kind of social science, is really incredibly inf- informed person.

But he ended up down as a young faculty person, um, at, at Princeton.

I, I think, I think if you look at the, like, this lecture, there's, there's basically, I, I, I got five, I got five philosophers here, um, or thinkers or theologians that were kind of, uh, talked about, the primary ones at least.

Um, Schlei- Schleiermacher, Tillich, uh, Rahner, Barth, and de Lubac.

And so think the first three, like, what separates them from the last two, uh, uh, the devil's in the details in here.

It, it, it's just, it's where did they begin? Like, the, if you begin with yourself or, or your experience or the human ...

And so one way to kind of critique that is this hope against hope, but it's a hope that is active.

Maybe instead of saying we need hope, we'll lean on Tillich and say, no, we need courage.

The courage to keep going is that hope against hope.

Nahasi Coates.

And this is not for various historical reasons.

There was a powerful religious socialist element even in the 20s and the 30s in Europe, like I think Paul Tillich was was a famous religious socialist so this is this is actually there there is a tradition here but could you talk about it in the context of texas and also i'd love to hear your thoughts on that question today as as well

yeah i mean i'll just say um i think that one of the things that made the religious socialism so effective was it was the fact that it allowed people to speak a common language There was just a common understanding, and this was a grammar that meant something to other people.

So, I mean, I think maybe one of the best ways to introduce Texas religious socialism is by talking about one of my favorite characters in the book, Reverend G.G. Hamilton.

And so anytime you talk about what it means to be human, you have to talk about being embodied.

In fact, Paul even says, even though there will be this cutting and severing of the soul, the immaterial material, right? That's not naturally says that we're going to get those bodies back.

And I think it's beautiful when we think about that theologically, because one of the scandals of Orthodox Christianity is that God became man, right? He took on human flesh.

But I think in the restored gospel, something even more scandalous is that the heavenly father is flesh and bones.

And so all that to say, I think it's in the body that we really begin to work out through practices, right? through disciplines are salvation.

Paul talks about that.

Work out your salvation with fear and trembling.

Even Romans 12, 1 and 2, he says, offer your bodies up as a living sacrifice.

It was a little book entitled Nausea [laughing]And the book Nausea was Sartre's Perhaps most vivid description of the futility and meaninglessness of human existence His final comment was that man is a useless passion A useless passion.

A passion ladies and gentlemen is a feeling an intense emotion That we express something that consumes us and controls our very being It's not just a casual concern You know Paul Tillich used to say that a person's God can be defined or identified once you identify that person's ultimate concernThat about which you are most passionate Most caringIt is a given about our humanity that we do care about things Don't we? That we have feelings Every person in this room and every person that sees this has wounds that have never healed in their souls From something they heard somebody say To them Or about themIn their lifetimeWe care We feel We laugh We weep We become afraid We don't just think Thinking alone does not define the essence of our humanity In fact you can even sense in the thinker here That there's not simply cerebral activity taking placeBut what else is communicated hereIs an attitude HuhI'm not sure what the attitude is but it's certainly not one Of frivolity He is not in a moodOf partying at the moment EhHe's got different feelingsthat are absorbing himin this postureOur feelings change! The one thing about our feelings is that th-they always change.

I always say the person who commits suicide if they would have waited twenty four hours They probably wouldn't have done it How quicklyour feelingsand our emotionschangebut the question that sartre was wrestling with isAll this caringall this feeling All this hurting All this rejoicing Does it matterDoes it mean anythingAnd his conclusion wasnohit doesn'tthat we are bundlesof passionbundles offeelingbundles ofcare and all of ourcaringis nothing more andnothing lessthan an exerciseinfutilityit's use lessbecausehumanityhas nomeaningAt that point when Sart made that commenthe was merely echoingthe philosophythat Nietzschehad propagateda century beforeEven Nietzche'sbio logicalheroism He understood to be an exercise in futility because Nietzsche's bottom line anthropology was one that could not be rescued even by the appearance of The Superman, because Nietzsche said at the bottom all there is, is das Nichts, the nihil, the nothingness, the abyss.

That man is involved in a chaotic endless myth of a recurring cycle that has no definitive origin and no purposeful destiny.

Yeah, I mean, uh, and I've read a lot of ...

I actually have read a lot of the people mentioned in it, you know, like Tillich and, uh, I don't know if he mentioned Nietzsche, but I know he mentioned Immanuel Kant.

Yeah, he mentioned, he mentioned Nietzche.

Kierkegaard, and I mean, he, like, kinda goes through the history of, of western philosophy.