Faith & Spirit Quote by Paul Tillich

Tillich doesn’t start with doctrine; he starts with temperature. Faith, for him, isn’t assent to a checklist of supernatural claims but the state of being “vitally concerned” - grabbed by something you can’t shake. That word choice is deliberate: vital as in life-or-death, concerned as in oriented, disciplined, organized around an “ultimate reality.” It’s a definition designed to pull faith out of the church pew and into the bloodstream of ordinary existence, where people already live by ultimates (career, nation, romance, justice) whether they call them sacred or not.

The subtext is a quiet demolition of the smug atheist-versus-believer binary. Tillich’s “symbolical name of God” reframes God not as a rival object in the universe but as a symbol pointing to what matters most, what claims you when you’re alone with the question of why any of this is worth doing. He’s also protecting the idea of God from literalism: by calling the name symbolic, he signals that religious language is indirect, more like poetry or myth than lab report. That’s an invitation and a warning: take the question seriously, but don’t mistake the sign for the thing.

Context matters. Writing in the shadow of two world wars and the collapse of old European certainties, Tillich aims his theology at modern doubt, not to scold it but to recruit it. The line about earnest reflection being “on the verge” of faith treats existential anxiety as a threshold experience: you don’t reason your way into faith; you arrive there when life forces you to choose what’s ultimate.