I really like Thomas Aquinas. If you’ve been around for a while, you’ll know I spent a fairly long time reading his Summa Theologica and writing about the different weird things he says. The all-time favourite, of course, is Did Adam Poop, a real question asked by the Angelic Doctor. I like Aquinas because he makes a bunch of weird arguments and commits to thinking them through. You can’t always take him seriously, and so it’s important to take him seriously. That contradiction, in my view, carries something fundamental to faith.

We’re dealing this week with Paul Tillich’s Dynamics of Faith. Tillich was a Protestant theologian during the 20th century. He was a chaplain in the First World War, and taught in Germany, before emigrating to America during the rise of the Third Reich. In his 1957 book Dynamics of Faith, he sets out a working definition of faith – similar to the H. Richard Niebuhr book we were talking about back in July. Tillich argues that “faith is the state of being ultimately concerned.” We all have our various concerns in life – food, shelter, sick haircuts – and some of them are more important than others. An ultimate concern, Tillich says, is that which “demands the total surrender of he who accepts this claim, and it promises total fulfilment even if all other claims have to be subjected to it or rejected in its name.” Again, the broad strokes seem very similar to Niebuhr. Niebuhr tends more towards terms like loyalty and confidence in his definition, but there’s this joint idea of faith as the main big thing you’re committed to.

Tillich also talks about how faith carries with it this implied existential doubt, which is “aware of the element of insecurity in every existential truth.” It’s the Thomas Aquinas thing – it’s knowing that something is potentially unstable and insecure, knowing that it might all go up in a puff of smoke. You can’t always take Aquinas seriously: taking him seriously regardless, in spite of, is part of the faith act. It’s a rehearsal or celebration of the fragility of the whole affair. “Faith risks the vanishing of the concrete god in whom it believes,” Tillich writes. That’s what happened to Aquinas. He laid out this very structured philosophical set of arguments about the nature and identity of God, and 750 years later it doesn’t really work. His system is built on all of these Aristotelian assumptions and beliefs that we just don’t hold any more – like his ideas around perfection, or his thoughts on women (“by nature of lower capacity and quality”). It’s fun to read Aquinas because he represents a vanished faith. He represents a way of thinking about the divine that just doesn’t hold up. That’s the risk of faith. It’s a fate that’s coming for all of us. With enough time, and enough perspective, all of our thoughts and beliefs will come to seem insufficient, poorly articulated, incoherent – remnants of something that isn’t here any more.

Tillich goes on to make some points about how doubt is a weird foundation for any sort of religious community. An individual might have doubts, but aren’t communities built around fairly settled core ideas? “Is it not necessary that the community formulate the content of its faith in a definite way as a creedal statement and demand that every member of the community accept it?” The point leads into a broader discussion of the tension between individuals and the community in matters of faith. Believers draw on a communal language of faith in understanding their beliefs, but community also has a risk of calcifying into this very rigid, unthinking doctrinal environment, where faith, with its implied existential doubt, vanishes under the weight of in-group propaganda. How does doubt fit into the bigger picture? Tillich’s suggestion is that doctrinal statements must be self-critical. They have to acknowledge their limits. “It must become obvious in all of them – be they liturgical, doctrinal or ethical expressions of the faith of the community – that they are not ultimate. Rather, their function is to point to the ultimate which is beyond all of them.” Communities have to acknowledge that their doctrines and beliefs are incomplete – that they are insufficient in some way, that they’ll need to change and adapt over time, even just as our language and patterns of thought develop. Otherwise, Tillich suggests, they’ll get stuck. The doctrines have to point beyond themselves. They aren’t self-sufficient – they’re questing, searching for something beyond what they are able to express. The expressions of faith can’t be static. They need to acknowledge their limits, the insecurity of their existential truths. That doesn’t mean you stop believing, or that your belief is somehow untrue. It’s belief in spite of that instability, in spite of the impermanence, not because the belief is correct in itself but because it points to something beyond itself that responds from out in the deep. The search is never complete, and the form is never perfect. Faith, true faith, remains dynamic.