Tillich proposes replacing the images of 'height' by those of 'depth' in order to express the truth of God. When Tillich speaks of God in 'depth', he is not speaking of another Being at all. He is speaking of 'the infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being', of our ultimate concern. The word 'God' denotes the ultimate depth of all our being, the creative ground and meaning of all our existence.
'To predicate personality of God', says Feuerbach, 'is nothing else than to declare personality as the absolute essence.' Feuerbach believed that true religion consists in acknowledging the divinity of the attributes, not in transferring them to an illegitimate subject. Bultmann, in answering Barth, says, 'I am trying to substitute anthropology for theology, for I am interpreting theological affirmations as assertions about life.' This is dangerous ground, because to say as Feuerbach says, that 'theology is nothing else than anthropology' means that 'the knowledge of God is nothing else than the knowledge of man.' The question inevitably arises, if theology is translated into anthropology, why do we any longer need the category of God? Is not the result of destroying supranaturalism simply to end up with naturalism, as the atheists asserted?
Bonhoeffer insists, 'God is the "beyond" in the midst'; 'The transcendent is not infinitely remote but close at hand'. Tillich insists it is necessary to push beyond naturalism and supranaturalism. The naturalist critique of supranaturalism is valid. It has torn down an idol and Christianity must not be found clinging to it. But equally Christianity must challenge the assumption of naturalism that God is merely a redundant name for nature or for humanity. The necessity for the name 'God' lies in the fact that our being has depths which naturalism, whether evolutionary, mechanistic, dialectical or humanistic, cannot or will not recognize.
The question of God is the question whether this depth of being is a reality or an illusion, not whether a Being exists beyond the bright blue sky, or anywhere else. Belief in God is a matter of 'what you take seriously without any reservation', of what for you is ultimate reality. Tillich's great contribution to theology - the reinterpretation of transcendence in a way which preserves its reality while detaching it from the projection of supranaturalism. Tillich makes the point that though it may be difficult to avoid concepts of a super-Being in religious thought and education, 'they are at least as dangerous as they are useful'.
God as the ground, source and goal of our being cannot but be represented at one and the same time as removed from the shallow, sinful surface of our lives by infinite distance and depth, and yet as nearer to us than our own selves. This is the significance of the traditional categories of transcendence and immanence.
God, since he is Love, is encountered in his fullness only 'between man and man'. God, the unconditional, is to be found only in, with and under the conditioned relationships of this life: for he is their depth and ultimate significance. Whether one has known God is tested by one question only, 'How deeply have you loved?' - for 'He who does not love does not know God; for God is love'. This links up with what Bonhoeffer was saying about a 'non-religious' understanding of God. For this ultimate and most searching question has nothing to do with 'religion'. It rests our eternal salvation upon nothing peculiarly religious. Encounter with the Son of Man is spelt out in terms of an entirely 'secular' concern for food, water, housing, hospitals and prisons, just as Jeremiah had defined the knowledge of God in terms of doing justice for the poor and needy.
Our contention has been that God is to be met not by a 'religious' turning away from the world but in unconditional concern for 'the other' seen through to its ultimate depths, that God is 'the personal ground of all that we experience'. God is the depth of common non-religious experience.
A statement is theological not because it relates to a particular Being called God, but because it asks ultimate questions about the meaning of existence.
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