The Line Is Busy

Theologian Paul Johannes Tillich died the same year that theologian Thomas J.J. Altizer stirred the waters with his “death of God” postulation. I am unaware of any collaboration between the two, but there is a strong similarity between how the two regarded the “God connection”. Tillich defined sin as anything that separates us from the love of God. Altizer made the cover of the Easter 1966 TIME magazine bearing his question, “Is God Dead?” What you had to go ahead and read to find out was Altizer’s qualification: to human experience. Each man was saying in his own unique way that our relationship to God is critical to life’s meaning, and each of them was simply expounding on that same revelation of the Christ. God is always present and available. Humans have the choice to be aware of the availability of that presence, or not. As I have pursued my Lenten quest to give up all the things that keep me from being aware that God is in me and I am in God, I am quite literally dumbfounded by how ubiquitous they are. Now, I’m not recommending some sort of monastic isolation as the route to a good connection with my Creator because that isolates and limits the omnipresence of God. The something that is everything is present in the television, the morning commute, the water cooler exchange, etc. What is either present or not, then, is my awareness, my comprehension. When I am not aware, God is dead to my experience. When I am not aware, then I am separated from the “love” of God (this term is going to require some further examination) and, according to Tillich, in a state of sin. Jesus himself riled the religious establishment by declaring that piety and righteousness in and of themselves are not the means by which to enter the reign of God. Indeed, he exposed them as empty acts without redemption when they interrupt and distort the ultimate connection.