What Is Truth?

Paul Tillich preached all his life, and he published his sermons — “The Shaking of the Foundations” (1948) and “The New Being” (1955) made him known to a readership that never opened his systematic theology. The sermons are not a sideline. They are the place where it has to show whether the concepts carry: whether “the unconditional”, “the ground of being”, “depth” are more than technical language.

Tillich does not preach edification. He begins with what is troubling his hearers anyway — with doubt, with the experience of losing meaning, with the question whether anything at all is still true. In “What Is Truth?” he takes up Pilate’s question from John 18 and refuses to answer it quickly. Whoever cannot go with Jesus should go with Pilate, he says, but then in earnest. That is a homiletically risky sentence, and it marks Tillich’s basic conviction: serious doubt is not an absence of faith but one of its forms.

Below stands “The Depth of Existence” in Tillich’s own English, abridged — the sermon works on a spatial word made to designate a spiritual reality, and in doing so lays open how Tillich handles religious language: as symbols that come from sensuous experience and that nevertheless, or precisely for that reason, point to something which cannot be said otherwise.

The sermon “What Is Truth?” comes from “The New Being” (1955) and is not part of the volume held here. The German version of this module carries both sermons in abridged form, in their published German translations.

On “the Jews” in “What Is Truth?”

In that sermon Tillich takes over from the Fourth Gospel the way of speaking about “the Jews” and uses it as a cipher for all those who believe they possess the truth. He widens it explicitly — many of us, he says, whether Christian or secular, are “Jews” in the sense of the Fourth Gospel — and aims it at Christians, at churches and nations. What is meant is an attitude, not a group.

That does not alter the fact that an antisemitically burdened usage is being carried forward here. John 8:44 — the verse about “the father, the devil” — is among the texts that had the gravest consequences in the history of Christian anti-Judaism. That Tillich adopts the phrase without questioning it is a blind spot of the sermon, not a matter of wording.

This is to be read together with Tillich’s own engagement with Christian anti-Judaism. How he worked on the relationship between Christianity and Judaism, and why the very term “the Jewish question” is a perpetrators’ term, is set out in the module The Jewish Question.

The Depth of Existence

But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. — 1 Corinthians 2:10

Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord. — Psalm 130:1

From the words of Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, let us concentrate on one verse: “The Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.” And from this verse, let us make one word the word “deep” the subject of our meditation. And from the 130th Psalm let us concentrate on that one verse: “Out of the depths I have cried unto Thee, O Lord.”; and let us make one word the word “depth” also the subject of our meditation. The words “deep” and “depth” are used in our daily life, in poetry and philosophy, in the Bible, and in many other religious documents, to indicate a spiritual attitude, although the words themselves are taken from a spatial experience.

From the words of Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, let us concentrate on one verse: “The Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.” And from this verse, let us make one word the word “deep” the subject of our meditation. And from the 130th Psalm let us concentrate on that one verse: “Out of the depths I have cried unto Thee, O Lord.”; and let us make one word the word “depth” also the subject of our meditation. The words “deep” and “depth” are used in our daily life, in poetry and philosophy, in the Bible, and in many other religious documents, to indicate a spiritual attitude, although the words themselves are taken from a spatial experience.

Depth is a dimension of space; yet at the same time it is a symbol for a spiritual quality. Most of our religious symbols have this character, reminding us of our finitude and our bondage to things that are visible. We are and we remain sensuous beings even when we deal with spiritual things. There is, on the other hand, a great wisdom in our language. It is the embodiment of innumerable experiences of the past. It is not by chance alone that we use certain visible symbols and do not use others. Therefore, it is often useful to find the reasons for the choices of the collective mind of former generations. It may become of ultimate significance to us, when we see what is implied in the use of terms like “deep”, “depth”, and “profound”, for the expression of our spiritual life.

It may give us the impulse to strive for our own depth. “Deep” in its spiritual use has two meanings: it means either the opposite of “shallow”, or the opposite of “high”. Truth is deep and not shallow; suffering is depth and not height. Both the light of truth and the darkness of suffering are deep. There is a depth in God, and there is a depth out of which the psalmist cries to God. Why is truth deep? And why is suffering deep? And why is the same spatial symbol used for both experiences? These questions shall guide our meditation. All visible things have a surface. Surface is that side of things which first appears to us. If we look at it, we know what things seem to be. Yet if we act according to what things and persons seem to be, we are disappointed.

[…] The sermon is abridged here. The full text is in “The Shaking of the Foundations” (1948), chapter 7.

We believed once that we were living in a period of unavoidable progress to a better humanity. But in the depth of our social structure the forces of destruction had already gathered strength. It once seemed as if human reason had conquered nature and history. But this was surface only; and in the depth of our community the rebellion against the surface had already begun. We produced ever better and ever more perfect tools and means for the life of mankind. But in the depth they had already turned into means and tools for man’s self-destruction. Decades ago prophetic minds looked into the depth. Painters expressed their feeling of the coming catastrophe by disrupting the surface of man and of nature in their pictures.

Friedrich Nietzsche writes: “The world is deep, and deeper than the day could read. Deep is its woe. Joy deeper still than grief can be. Woe says: Hence, go! But joys want all eternity, want deep, profound eternity” Eternal joy is the end of the ways of God. This is the message of all religions. The Kingdom of God is peace and joy. This is the message of Christianity. But eternal joy is not to be reached by living on the surface. It is rather attained by breaking through the surface, by penetrating the deep things of ourselves, of our world, and of God. The moment in which we reach the last depth of our lives is the moment in which we can experience the joy that has eternity within it, the hope that cannot be destroyed, and the truth on which life and death are built.

For in the depth is truth; and in the depth is hope; and in the depth is joy. return to religion-online The Shaking of the Foundations by Paul Tillich Paul Tillich is generally considered one of the century’s outstanding and influential thinkers. After teaching theology and philosophy at various German universities, he came to the United States in 1933. For many years he was Professor of Philosophical Theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, then University Professor at Harvard University. His books include Systematic Theology; The Courage to Be; Dynamics of Faith; Love, Power and Justice; Morality and Beyond; and Theology of Culture. This book was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, in 1955 and is out of print.