Rev. Bob Olmstead

Compare the curriculum in a graduate school of engineering today with that of an engineering school 100 years ago - or 50 years ago - or even 20 years ago. The curriculum has changed. The same is true of schools of business, law, literature . . . and theology.

One might think "teaching the Bible" would be the same from age to age, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Just as the computer has replaced the slide rule in schools of engineering, there are new tools for analyzing Scripture. When people ask me to get "back to the Bible" they mean back to the Bible as it was understood in about 1850 - not the way it was understood in the 16th century or the 6th century or the 1st century.

I went to seminary in the early 1960s. Maggie went to seminary two decades later, in the 1980s. Seminary curriculum changed dramatically during those two decades - especially in the area of theology. We thought it would be interesting to reflect upon the theologians who formed the core of theological education when I was in seminary (the assigned reading!) - and to compare that with the theologians who were assigned reading when Maggie was in seminary. So during these autumn months Maggie and I will preach alternating sermons drawing upon the theologians who shaped the way we "think about" God. We'll leave it up to you to compare.

I graduated from college in 1961 and entered seminary that fall. I was 22 years old. My professors were in their 40s and their 50s. The theological "giants" of that time were in their 60s and their 70s. They had lived through two world wars, the great Depression, the recent Korean War, and the emergence of the Cold War.

They had witnessed the rise of modern science, modern secularism, the birth of psychoanalysis, the advent of Communism, the emergence of modern art, the waning power of the Church in both society and in the lives of people.

They were no longer struggling to implement "higher criticism" of the Bible - that battle had been won. There were new questions.

Where was God during the Holocaust? How do we relate to Christ after Freud? Which would kill Christianity more quickly: Communist oppression or capitalist affluence? What was the role of the Church in a secular society? I entered seminary at the end of the Eisenhower era. We were known as the Silent Generation. The Civil Rights Movement was just beginning to gather steam. Within a matter of months President Kennedy would send the first troops to Viet Nam.

The majority of "great names" in theology were German. Most of them were dead. The ones who were alive had come to America early in their lives as their parents immigrated or early in their careers as they fled Hitler and the Nazis. They were all male, with names like Reinhold Niebuhr, H. Richard Niebuhr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rudolff Bultmann, Karl Barth (Swiss), and Paul Tillich. We read younger and more contemporary American theologians - but they had all been students of the Niebuhrs and Bultmann and Tillich.

I don't have a particularly systematic or philosophical mind. Theology wasn't all that easy for me. Until Paul Tillich, whose writings weren't easy, but who made sense of things in a way that opened windows, and gave me "aha!" moments.

Tillich believed in starting with the questions people were asking, with the concerns and anxieties of non-theologically trained - even non-religious - people. What were they concerned about? What did they talk about when they weren't talking about Bible, or God, or Jesus?

His goal was to find a correlation in the Scriptures and then to "translate" the Biblical message back into secular terms - into people talk (rather than theological, religious, or Bible talk).

Jesus' life and death and ministry were usually described in terms of guilt. Jesus was a sacrifice who "paid" for our sins. Therefore we don't have to feel guilty before God.

Tillich rightly recognized that depth psychology gave another explanation and another "solution" to feelings of guilt. Tillich realized that fewer and fewer people were worrying about guilt or going to Hell.

What does bother post-Freudian people?. He tried a German term: "angst" (a general non-specific anxiety). He settled on estrangement, alienation. Modern people don't fear a God who is going to zap them for their sins, but they DO feel alienated, estranged, small and forgotten in a vast, cold, deserted universe.

Modern art, modern literature, modern music were all expressing this - this "disconnect" from what had once given life its meaning and its structure. D.H. Lawrence, a novelist whose characters live without reference or relationship to any God, describes the deep hunger of the human heart:

A yearning that even love cannot fill.

H.L. Mencken put it perhaps more succinctly, "The problem with life is not that it's a tragedy, but that it's a bore."

Tillich knew that the Scriptures already anticipated this and he invited moderns to think of "sin" as "separation."

In the fact of birth we are separated from our mothers; in the fact of individuality we are other-than and separate- from all other humans; in the fact of life we are alienated from eternity, for to have a life is to be limited in time and space and body and particulars. We yearn to overcome separation, we are tempted to fill the vacuum in our hearts with addictions, with "causes", or with other people (calling it love). This drive to overcome our isolation, emptiness, estrangement, anxiety, alienation, leads us to do things that are hurtful to others, to ourselves, to the environment. The ancients called it sin. Tillich said, if it helps you understand it better, call it separation.

Christ is God's attempt to reach out from "beyond the scope of stars", to invite us into relationship.

Karl Barth was Tillich's theological counterbalance, a Swiss theologian whose neo-orthodox theology said there could be no compromise with culture. The Gospel is the Gospel and should be proclaimed in its mysterious purity and its truth, for God's truth cannot be made to fit human categories, modern or otherwise.

In a bit of (probably apocryphal) correspondence, Barth supposedly wrote to Tillich accusing him of watering down the truth of the Gospel and the power of salvation. "Surely," he wrote, "you would throw a drowning man a life preserver." Tillich is rumored to have written back, "Yes, but I would inflate it first."

I've been criticized a number of times for not having enough God and Jesus talk in my sermons. It's because I am enamored of Tillich's method of correlation. Start where people are. Translate the message into words that people commonly use. Inflate the life preserver!

As I delved deeper into Tillich's writings I was startled to find these four words: "God does not exist."

Tillich does not mean there is no God. He helps us see that once we say God "exists" we have made God one-among-many things, all of which exist. God does not exist. God is not a being. God is the Ground of Being (perhaps Tillich's best known phrase.)

God is the Ground of Being and therefore anything that exists cannot be God. God is the Ground of Being from which every existing thing has come.

Tillich's first volume of sermons is entitled, "The Shaking of the Foundations". These are collection of sermons preached in the 1940s while World War II still raged. They were preached alternately in a seminary chapel and a New York City prison. In the sermon which gives its title to the collection, he said:

I am convinced that "God is not bound to any special language, not even to that of the prophets." God speaks many languages!

Tillich urges us to discover God by looking down into the depths instead of up into the heights. Tillich described God as the "dimension of depth" in all things. To have faith that a loving God rules the universe is not to say that God resides in heaven, pulling strings and making things turn out all right. It is to say that God is at the heart - the ultimate depth - of everything. This is why suffering often brings us into the presence of God. Suffering is a portal into the depths - the deepest reaches of human experience.

If "sin" is separation, then "salvation" is reconciliation, restoration of relationship, recovering of wholeness. Salvation comes from the same root word as "salve". In a sermon about Jesus' power to heal - his miracles - Tillich said:

That is a description of "wholistic health" which Tillich coined in the 1930s.

Tillich describes prayer as descending into the depths of solitude:

Tillich describes "truth" as something we do, not something we know. We can't hope to figure out the truth and then act on it. Because we never know. We never know. It is not possible to know the truth, except as we "do" it. Jesus is the Christ, not because of his teachings, not because of his moral purity or ethical perfection, but because he "did the Truth" - he lived without being alienated from God, who was the heart and depth of his being.

Tillich defined religion as "first an open hand to receive a gift, and second, an active hand to distribute gifts."

Tillich knew there were no such things as atheists. Whatever we are ultimately concerned about is our god. It rules us. It can be family, fame, security, success in business, health, personal freedom, high morals, low cholesterol, clean floors, firm abs, or a good tennis backhand. Whatever ultimately concerns us is our god. There are no atheists. The problem is idolatry, the worship of inadequate gods.

How do we know when we have gone deep enough? How does the Christian Gospel correlate with our anxieties. How do we do the Truth? How do we fill the vacuum of alienation and estrangement, the sense of isolation that keeps us from connecting with the "beyond in you and [the] beyond in me which goes further than love, beyond the scope of stars?"

I want to once more read you this passage from Paul Tillich's sermon, "You Are Accepted". I've promised to read to you at least once a year for as long as I am here. It means that much to me.

I agree with Tillich when he says,

Amen!