Introduction
You often struggle with a fragmented spiritual life because you misunderstand faith as weak knowledge, emotional dependency, or blind obedience. When you treat faith as a set of doubtful intellectual propositions, you set up an unnecessary conflict with modern science and reason.
Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned, demanding unconditional surrender and offering ultimate fulfillment beyond all intellectual, emotional, or voluntaristic distortions.
Paul Tillich examines the dynamic structure of religious experience to help you grasp the true depth of human ultimacy. You will explore what faith actually is, why common emotional and intellectual definitions fail, and how faith communicates through living symbols and myths. The subsequent chapters analyze the ontological types of faith, the criteria for its truth, and its practical integration into your daily life.
You can use this book to answer several core questions:
- How does ultimate concern unite your entire personality?
- Why do literal interpretations destroy the power of religious symbols?
- How can you distinguish genuine faith from idolatry?
- Where do faith and scientific truth intersect without conflict?
1. What Faith Is
Faith is formally defined as the state of being ultimately concerned, functioning as a centered act of the total personality that incorporates existential doubt and communal language.
You experience faith whenever an issue claims unconditional obedience from you. This ultimate concern demands the sacrifice of all other preliminary matters. The formal definition applies regardless of whether the content is true or idolatrous.
Extreme nationalisms of the twentieth century functioned as complete ultimate concerns where everything was centered in the nation as a god, demanding total sacrifice.
Faith is an ecstatic, centered act of the total personality. It integrates the unconscious, the rational conscious, and the will without reducing itself to any single function. Faith transcends both nonrational drives and rational structures without destroying them. It is not merely an emotion, a cognitive conclusion, or an act of the will.
You possess an element of infinity that drives you beyond transitory experiences toward the absolute. True faith is directed toward the truly ultimate. Idolatrous faith elevates preliminary, finite realities like success or the nation to ultimacy, which inevitably results in existential disappointment and the disruption of the personality.
Novels like Point of No Return illustrate the misplaced ultimate concern with success and social standing, showing how its promise ultimately proves to be empty.
The sphere of faith involves an awareness of holiness, characterized by a mysterious presence that simultaneously attracts and repels the human heart. Genuine holiness represents what is separated from the ordinary realm of things and experiences as the entirely other. Historically, prophetic religion transformed the ambiguous, potentially demonic destructive elements of the holy into moral concepts of justice and truth.
In Indian thought, deities like Siva or Kali exhibit the double, terrifying and consuming function of the holy.
Doubt is an intrinsic and necessary element of genuine faith. Faith involves the risk of accepting an infinite concern through a finite being. Because concrete contents of faith might prove transitory, holding them requires courage to endure uncertainty. This existential doubt is distinct from scientific methodological doubt and skeptical rejection. It functions instead as a confirmation of the seriousness and unconditional character of the ultimate concern.
An act of faith depends on communal language. Communities of faith must incorporate institutional criticism to prevent static dogmatism and preserve dynamic faith. When religious authorities claim infallibility, they treat preliminary human interpretations as ultimate, suppressing doubt. To counter this, creedal expressions must apply the Protestant principle by pointing beyond themselves to the ultimate.
2. What Faith Is Not
Popular thinking often views faith as affirming something despite insufficient theoretical evidence. You might treat faith as a low-evidence form of knowledge or a probable belief. This intellectualistic distortion alienates people from religion.
Daily life involves belief based on partial evidence or trust in authorities. Faith is fundamentally different because it is a centered act of the whole personality involving ultimate concern, not a theoretical judgment of probability.
Faith is neither an intellectual probable belief, a voluntaristic act of the will, nor a purely emotional feeling of unconditional dependence.
The voluntaristic distortion of faith assumes that a lack of theoretical evidence can be overcome by an act of human will or grace. Divided into Catholic and Protestant types, voluntarism relies on the will to believe to make up for unproven assertions like the immortality of the soul. No command or act of will can create faith, because faith as an ultimate concern must already precede any moral obedience or forced decision.
Thomas Aquinas emphasized that the lack of evidence in faith must be complemented by an act of will.
Reducing faith to mere emotion or the subjective feeling of unconditional dependence is an emotionalistic distortion that strips religion of its truth claims. Friedrich Schleiermacher defined religion as the feeling of unconditional dependence. Scientists and moralists gladly accepted this definition to push religion into a harmless private corner where it cannot interfere with culture. Yet faith claims the whole person and demands truth and commitment, meaning it cannot be restricted to subjective feelings alone.
3. Symbols of Faith
Because ultimate concern infinitely transcends finite reality, it must be expressed through living symbols and broken myths rather than literalism.
Ordinary concepts like success or the nation become idolatrous symbols when treated as ultimate concerns. The fundamental symbol 'God' combines an element of immediate experience with concreteness drawn from ordinary existence. Debates about the physical existence of God miss the point. The real question is which symbol expresses ultimacy without idolatry.
A man who adores Apollo or Jahweh has both an ultimate concern and a concrete image symbolizing his relation to the ultimate.
Signs merely point conventionally, but symbols participate in the reality to which they point. Traffic lights have no inherent relation to what they signify and can be easily replaced. Symbols participate in the power and dignity of what they represent, such as a national flag. Genuine symbols grow out of the unconscious and cannot be invented at will.
An attack on a national flag is felt as an attack on the majesty of the group, considered as blasphemy.
Myths are stories combining symbols of ultimate concern. They frame divine-human encounters in time and space, which invites rational and religious criticism. Unbroken mythology and literalism resist this by treating symbols like creation or the virgin birth as literal historical events to maintain authoritarian control. A broken myth acknowledges its own symbolic character, preserving the language of faith against idolatry.
4. Types of Faith
Faith divides into distinct ontological and moral directions. The ontological type experiences the holy as present here and now through concrete media.
Faith manifests through ontological and moral types that eventually find their essential unity in the dynamic concept of the Holy Spirit.
In the sacramental type, faith is grasped by the holy through a specific medium like an object, person, or event. Mystical faith goes beyond concrete objects to merge the soul with the divine ground of being. Secular humanist forms of this type view actualized humanity or romanticized nature and history as the manifestation of the ultimate.
A Catholic praying before a picture of the Virgin or participating in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper illustrates the sacramental expression.
The moral type of faith is characterized by the idea of the divine law demanding moral obedience, justice, and righteousness as the criterion for human relation to the ultimate. Unlike the ontological type which demands ritual submission, the moral type focuses on what ought to be.
It takes several concrete shapes:
- juristic forms like Islam and Talmudic Judaism;
- conventional forms like Confucianism;
- ethical prophetism in the Old Testament;
- progressive-Utopian modern humanism.
Old Testament prophetism consistently judged the sacramental self-certainty of leaders and demanded the law of justice and righteousness.
Although ontological and moral types of faith diverge into conflict, their essential unity is preserved in the New Testament concept of the Holy Spirit as love, justice, and truth. Sacramental religions contain ritual laws, while legal religions contain sacramental origins, demonstrating that pure types do not exist in reality. The historical dynamics of faith move through divergence and convergence. Christianity must continually regain the experiential unity of the ecstatic and the personal, the sacramental and the moral.
Paul's description of the Spirit as the presence of divine power, love, justice, and truth acting in the human mind shows this integration.
5. The Truth of Faith
Faith and reason are not in conflict when properly understood, because faith is the state of ultimate concern and reason in ecstasy. Reason has two meanings: technical reason as a tool for control, and reason as the meaningful structure of mind and reality. When finite reason is grasped by an ultimate concern, it is driven beyond its finitude into ecstasy without destroying its rational structure.
The truth of faith rests on whether its symbols are alive and truly ultimate, leaving science, history, and philosophy untouched in separate dimensions.
Science and faith occupy different dimensions of meaning and therefore cannot genuinely conflict with one another. Science deals with measurable structures and experimental verification, while faith deals with the ultimate dimension of meaning. Apparent conflicts arise only when science oversteps its bounds into ideological faith or when faith literalizes its symbols into scientific descriptions.
Conflicts involving early modern astronomy, the theory of evolution, and contemporary depth psychology appear repeatedly.
Faith cannot guarantee historical or factual truth, and its validity is independent of historical research into sacred texts. Historical truth deals with unique, non-repeatable events assessed through critical document comparison and probability. Faith interprets the meaning of historical foundations from the standpoint of ultimate concern, meaning critical historical analysis cannot shake true faith.
Historical-literary research shows that Biblical writings contain blended historical, legendary, and mythological elements.
Philosophical truth uses concepts to describe the structure of being, whereas faith uses symbols to express ultimate concern, creating an intrinsic union. While philosophy provides a detached conceptual description and faith provides an involved expression of concern, genuine philosophers and thinkers are invariably driven by an ultimate concern. Philosophical concepts and religious symbols share mutual implications.
The criteria for the truth of faith are whether the symbol is alive and whether its content is genuinely ultimate rather than idolatrous. A living faith adequately expresses an ultimate concern by generating communication and action. Furthermore, true faith contains an element of self-negation, recognizing that no human possesses the ultimate.
The Cross of the Christ acts as the supreme Christian symbol of self-negation against idolatrous faith.
6. The Life of Faith
Participation in the ultimate brings certainty, while separation brings doubt. True faith does not eliminate doubt through rigid dogmatic repression or fanaticism. You overcome it instead through the daring courage to risk failure.
Living faith necessarily includes doubt and requires courage to take that doubt into itself without repression.
Faith serves as the central integrating power of the human personality. It unites your body, soul, and spirit. Without an ultimate concern, personal life lacks a uniting center and faces disintegration.
Love and action are inherent elements of genuine faith. Ultimate concern implies the desire for reunion with that which you are estranged from. This desire immediately expresses itself through actions, whether through ascetic withdrawal or ethical transformation.
Faith is real only within a community of faith. It expresses itself fundamentally through ritual and myth. These two forms of expression remain interdependent:
- What is practiced in the cult is imagined in the myth.
- What is imagined in the myth is practiced in the cult.
The history of the Jews serves as the supreme document of the ultimate and unconditional character of faith. While interest-based groups die out when their biological or technical conditions vanish, a community of faith persists based on its ultimate concern.
Without an ultimate concern as its basis, any system of morals degenerates into a method of social adjustment. The distortion of ritual symbols into magic realities drives humanists toward independent morals. However, historical Protestantism often removed genuine ritual meaning along with superstition, starving the life of faith.
Intolerance arises when a concrete expression of ultimate concern participates in that ultimacy and denies other expressions. Religions of justice and history like Judaism, Islam, and Christianity became intolerant of idolatry.
The criterion of every faith is the ultimacy of the ultimate. You practice self-criticism by recognizing the relative validity of your concrete symbols.
Conversion is either the awakening to a conscious awareness of an ultimate concern or the shift to a better preservation of it. The encounter of Christianity with secularism is an encounter of faith with faith because secularism possesses an ultimate concern.
Christianity is capable of universality only so long as it maintains the radical self-criticism symbolized by the cross. The Christian churches often neglect this by attributing ultimacy to their own particular expressions. The symbol of the cross stands precisely against the self-elevation of any concrete religion.
Conclusion
You now see how the dimensions of faith unite into an inescapable human necessity. Faith is not an optional belief or a passing emotion, but the central orientation of your whole personality toward an ultimate concern. When you recognize that faith permeates every area of your existence, you can consciously evaluate what truly commands your unconditional surrender. You must avoid the trap of idolatry, where finite things are treated as infinite.
- Identify your true ultimate concern by examining what demands your absolute devotion and gives your life its final meaning.
- Recognize and reject all forms of idolatry that elevate finite realities like nation, success, or success into unconditional status.
- Accept the presence of existential doubt within your faith rather than suppressing it, understanding that doubt belongs to the courage of faith.
- Distinguish living symbols from literal dogmas, allowing your religious language to point beyond itself to the infinite mystery.
- Practice radical self-criticism within your religious community, acknowledging that every historical expression of faith remains fragmentary and finite.
10 Key Ideas
- Faith is formally defined as the state of being ultimately concerned, functioning as a centered act of the total personality that incorporates existential doubt and communal language.
- Idolatrous faith elevates preliminary, finite realities like success or the nation to ultimacy, which inevitably results in existential disappointment and the disruption of the personality.
- Faith is neither an intellectual probable belief, a voluntaristic act of the will, nor a purely emotional feeling of unconditional dependence.
- Because ultimate concern infinitely transcends finite reality, it must be expressed through living symbols and broken myths rather than literalism.
- A broken myth acknowledges its own symbolic character, preserving the language of faith against idolatry.
- Faith manifests through ontological and moral types that eventually find their essential unity in the dynamic concept of the Holy Spirit.
- The truth of faith rests on whether its symbols are alive and truly ultimate, leaving science, history, and philosophy untouched in separate dimensions.
- Living faith necessarily includes doubt and requires courage to take that doubt into itself without repression.
- Faith serves as the central integrating power of the human personality, uniting your body, soul, and spirit.
- Christianity is capable of universality only so long as it maintains the radical self-criticism symbolized by the cross against the self-elevation of any concrete religion.