The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

For centuries, symbols such as “God” or “providence” enabled people to look through the ebb and flow of temporal life to glimpse Being itself. This helped them to endure the terror of life and the horror of death, but now, Tillich argued, many had forgotten how to interpret the old symbolism and regarded it as purely factual. Hence, these symbols had become opaque; transcendence no longer shone through them. When this happened they died and lost their power, so when we spoke of these symbols in a literal manner, we made statements that were inaccurate and untrue. That was why, like so many premodern theologians, Tillich could state without qualification: “God does not exist. He is being itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him.”61 This was not, as many of his contemporaries believed, an atheistic statement: We can no longer speak of God easily to anybody, because he will immediately question: “Does God exist?” Now the very asking of that question signifies that the symbols of God have become meaningless. For God, in the question, has become one of the innumerable objects in time and space which may or may not exist. And this is not the meaning of God at all.62 God could never be an object of cognition, like the objects and people we see all around us. To look through the finite symbol to the reality—the God beyond “God” that lies beyond theism—demands courage; we have to confront the dead symbol to find “the God who appears whe...