Tag: Faith
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When God Hides
The spiritual journey begins with faith, which is essentially the recognition that we lack power and need dependence on God. Initially, faith may be only fragmentary and episodic, but nonetheless it comprises the basis for our spiritual life. Without faith, we cannot please God (Hebrews 11:6), because only through trust will we form with God…
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All We Don’t Know
Something curious about the story of Job is that the supposed cause of all his troubles is a wager between God and Satan about whether Job will remain faithful if he suffers. What’s striking is that this crucial “behind the scenes” detail is never revealed to Job. He lives and suffers without access to the…
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Tillich’s Absolute Faith
For those most in the grip of the doubt and meaninglessness of our age, we have seen that none of the answers which served in past eras offer respite from despair. To take seriously our limitations, our ignorance both collectively and individually, our weakness, and human finitude, is to enter the darkness of existential anxiety.…
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The Power of Doubt
In Paul Tillich’s retelling of changing culture and dominant human anxieties since antiquity, he emphasizes that modernity introduced, for the first time in human consciousness, the self-understanding of the person as an individual. Our identity is no longer merely as part of a collective mass of humanity, of some tribe or people, but we think…
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Our Shifting Anxieties
In The Courage to Be, Paul Tillich offers his overview of three ages of Western thought and the cultural shifts these eras produced. His purpose is to explore the nature of Christian faith in each time, and so he identifies the nature of the fundamental human fears during those periods. Antiquity, he claims, was characterized…
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Promise and Faith
Then he believed in the Lord; and He reckoned it to him as righteousness. Genesis 15:6 This passage is from the story of God reaffirming the promise He initially made to Abram in Genesis 12:1-3. Despite Abram’s misgivings, which he had enumerated in the previous verses, we are told he trusted God. His trust in God…