Paul Tillich

I heard something really interesting.

Paul Tillich said this.

And I was like, wow, that's really deep.

He said, the other is the unconditional limit right, is always the unconditional limit of all of my being able to, of consolidating my world or making it mine.

And this is where my argument about these kind of the importance of religion in climate discourse really takes place.

it's forced because this idea of there being true and false religion and therefore having the right belief as being the way to salvation is what's underlying this discourse and therefore just by debunking their facts you're actually never going to get out of this rhetoric you have to understand that actually you're in a religious argument And this argument is about what someone like Paul Tillich would call ultimate concern, right? What is really important? What are our values? What is going to happen to us on an existential level? And these are religious questions.

Yeah, so we've been focusing so much on the denialist side of the coin.

So let's talk about the activists or the ecological activists who are trying to push toward change, trying to push more toward consciousness about the climate crisis.

So I saw liberal theology or liberal Christianity as including all of the good stuff about Christianity, but none of the bad.

And in particular, I was really interested in theologians like Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich at this time.

And they offered pretty drastic revisionist forms of Christianity, but I thought that that's what I needed.

I thought that was necessary, because I thought, you know, the modern world has changed so many things, and one of the things that needs to be changed is how we think about Christianity, how we think about the Bible and things like that.

Well, John Mack didn't actually create that word, that phrase.

It was created by a man named Paul Tillich who came over to America during World War II.

And he worked at Columbia University and he taught theology and philosophy.

It was very, very well known.

So I read all of those.

He actually coined the term ontological shock because of what had happened to him during World War II.

My parents at Columbia University lived underneath, Paul Tillich lived above them.

Mm-hmm.

Every culture has a story that tells you this is what should be of ultimate concern.

Paul Tillich, the 20th century theologian said, that's what religion is.

And what we believe is of ultimate concern functions as God in our life.

It may not actually be God, but it functions as God in our life.

And it made me think of this book that we all loved when I was in graduate school by Judith Plaskow, a great Jewish feminist theologian.

And she wrote a book called Sex, Sin, and Grace, in which she critiqued two male theologians who were big deals in the 20th century, Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, for saying that the primary human sin is pride.

It's the desire to dominate.

It's putting yourself at the center of things.