it was a combination of this paragraph and the tillich quote about the hubris of putting humankind at the center of your life that got me thinking:
Our search for meaning, and for the courage to withstand the ontological anxiety which is also part of our human destiny, must be centered on the transcendent. Our hubris may delude us thinking we are our own appropriate centers, but our finitude is insufficient for the role we try to play. The answer to ontological anxiety is, in every case, God. And it is only by and through God’s grace that we are able to keep Him at the center of our lives, and our other loves subordinated to our love for God.
i'm remembering now that tillich is pretty big on immanence -- and i'm not really surprised that you are too, it just didn't come out explicitly in this paper. the tillich quote about not putting humanity at the center isn't in context, but my thought when i read it was that i actually do make humankind my ultimate concern, but i don't see that as being inconsistent with making god my ultimate concern because human beings are the primary medium through which i relate to the divine.
it's possible to imagine a hypothetical situation where devotion to humankind would be an idol -- like deciding life is meaningless because you're the last human being left on earth -- but they're so unlikely i don't give them a lot of thought. it seems to me it's perfectly okay to put humankind at the center since humankind is already too big and complicated to be grasped. i guess, being pressed, i'd say service to the earth as a living system is more important than service to humanity, but if we care about our own survival at all we should be serving gaia, so really it ends up being the same anyway.
heh. i hope this is making sense, it's starting to make my head hurt. :>
anyway, my complaint is really about the overemphasis on transcendence in western theology in general, and this looked like a good opportunity to run my mouth off. :>
and a God who is utterly immanent stops being God.
i may have overstated myself a little, since i'm not really entirely clear on that issue yet. it certainly is easy to make the medium of your service to the divine into an idol, and that's not good. but i'm not sure if a god who is utterly immanent stops being god. being is certainly far too vast and complicated for us to grasp in anything but a partial way, but being -- and here i guess i mean "the universe" -- may well be finite. a god who is utterly immanent in a finite universe that is still utterly ineffable to us might still be god in my mind. i have to think about that more.
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Our search for meaning, and for the courage to withstand the ontological anxiety which is also part of our human destiny, must be centered on the transcendent. Our hubris may delude us thinking we are our own appropriate centers, but our finitude is insufficient for the role we try to play. The answer to ontological anxiety is, in every case, God. And it is only by and through God’s grace that we are able to keep Him at the center of our lives, and our other loves subordinated to our love for God.
i'm remembering now that tillich is pretty big on immanence -- and i'm not really surprised that you are too, it just didn't come out explicitly in this paper. the tillich quote about not putting humanity at the center isn't in context, but my thought when i read it was that i actually do make humankind my ultimate concern, but i don't see that as being inconsistent with making god my ultimate concern because human beings are the primary medium through which i relate to the divine.
it's possible to imagine a hypothetical situation where devotion to humankind would be an idol -- like deciding life is meaningless because you're the last human being left on earth -- but they're so unlikely i don't give them a lot of thought. it seems to me it's perfectly okay to put humankind at the center since humankind is already too big and complicated to be grasped. i guess, being pressed, i'd say service to the earth as a living system is more important than service to humanity, but if we care about our own survival at all we should be serving gaia, so really it ends up being the same anyway.
heh. i hope this is making sense, it's starting to make my head hurt. :>
anyway, my complaint is really about the overemphasis on transcendence in western theology in general, and this looked like a good opportunity to run my mouth off. :>
and a God who is utterly immanent stops being God.
i may have overstated myself a little, since i'm not really entirely clear on that issue yet. it certainly is easy to make the medium of your service to the divine into an idol, and that's not good. but i'm not sure if a god who is utterly immanent stops being god. being is certainly far too vast and complicated for us to grasp in anything but a partial way, but being -- and here i guess i mean "the universe" -- may well be finite. a god who is utterly immanent in a finite universe that is still utterly ineffable to us might still be god in my mind. i have to think about that more.