THE PHILOSOPHY OF BEING

HISTORY OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF BEING (Continued)
1. Hegelianism.
  The German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), in both his Logic and Encyclopedia, attempts to deduce the Categories of thought. He begins with the most abstract idea, that of Being, and then moves through 270 categories before he has satisfied himself that he has found the prominent ideas of his philosophical system. The all-inclusive concept in Hegel's system is the Absolute Idea, often referred to as the Absolute or the Idea. (When used in this sense, the word "Idea" should be capitalized and prefixed by "the".) The Absolute Idea passes through a dialectic of many triads -, each of which has its own thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The most general triad has Logic as thesis, Nature as its antithesis, and Mind or Spirit (as German word "Geist" is translated) as its synthesis. The Absolute Idea in itself (an sich) as pure reason, apart from the world, is the categories of Logic. From these the Idea advances for itself (fur sich), or out of itself into the external world of Nature, as revealed in the natural sciences. The Idea then returns to itself in a synthesis of Logic and Nature as Mind or Spirit, and in human experience becomes self-conscious of its own activity. "Logic, for Hegel, is the Absolute Idea in itself, before it becomes external nature." (In this statement "before" refers to logical priority only, not temporal; Hegel does not mean that once upon a time the Absolute Idea existed only as the categories of the Logic and that it subsequently externalized itself in Nature.) The most comprehensive triad of the Logic consists of the categories of Being (Sein), Essence (Wesen), and Notion (Begriff). In Being reality manifests itself most abstractly; in the antithesis, in the categories of Essence the inner nature of thought revealed as the relatively concrete outcome of reflection; the synthesis is the Notion or Concept. In the Notion the opposition between Being and Essence is reconciled and overcome in a larger synthesis; it is most concrete form of the Logic. The categories of Being consists of the triad, in the order of diminishing abstractness and increasing concreteness, of Quality, Quantity, and Measure, each of which includes all those which precede it, and implies all which follow it, leading in due course to the categories of Essence. That is, the category of Measure includes within itself and presupposes the category of Quantity; and the category Quantity includes and presupposes that of Quality. Now the categories of Quality consists of the triad of Being, Nothing, and Becoming. Being is the most abstract aspect of any quality, that it is. That is the very least that can possibly be affirmed of anything that is perceived or thought. It is a universal that is present in everything that is; it is the most abstract of all universals. And yet, because it does not makes distinctions, the idea of Being reveals its emptiness turning into its opposite or antithesis, Nothing or Not-Being. That is, Being implies a distinction from what is not, i.e., Non-Being or Nothing, for all determination is negation. To affirm that something is is at the time to affirm that it is not something else. But, then, the passage of Nothing into Being is what is called Becoming, the synthesis of Being and Non-Being or Nothing. Thus Hegel attempts to solve the problem of change. Hegel is right in believing that change involves something becoming what it previously was not. But is he right in believing that Becoming logically follows from Being and Non-Being? Is not Hegel slipping in here a conception which he knows from experience, and not by purely logical deduction? Note here that Hegel uses the word "Being" to distinguish two different categories. Hegel did not find enough words in the German language to enable him to use a separate word for every category; the context will usually make clear what he meant in each instance.
2. Existentialism.
  Existentialism as a philosophical movement opposes Essentialism, which gives the primacy to the essence in the being of things. Essence is what a thing is and existence is that a thing is. For Plato, essence (the realm of Ideas) as the really real is separated from existence (the world of sense) and existence is a pale copy of essence. For Aristotle essence and existence are united in the substance and its attributes. First substance is the essence of a thing (the universal) and second substance is an existing essence (the particular). In the Middle Ages, the scholastics derived existence from essence in the ontological argument for the existence of God from the idea of God as a perfect being. Kant correctly criticized this argument when he pointed out the difference between the thought of a thing and its existence. Hegel, by construing Becoming as a passage from non-existence (not-Being) to existence (Being), completes the absorption of existence into essence. Existentialism, on the other hand, gives primacy to existence and places the emphasis on the primacy of existence in the human self or person. With things existence is secondary to its essence. With the self, it is the other way around; essence is secondary to existence. Before we know what we are, we exist and we know it. Rene Descartes made this discovery, "cognito ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am."), but falsely treated the self as a thing and the existence of the self as the attribute of a thinking substance, res cogitans.
  1. Soren Kierkegaard.
    The Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), who during 1841-2 studied philosophy in Berlin with the Philosopher of the Romantic movement and the absolute or objective idealist Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854), rejected the Hegelian philosophical system of his day. S. K. announced in his philosophical writings, Philosophical Fragment (1844) and Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), that he was opposed to those who believed that truth could be found in an absolute objective system of ideas. Over against "truth as objectivity" he set forth "truth as subjectivity". That is, the subjectivity of the individual is lost in the objectivity of system of ideas. Largely ignored until World War I (1914-1918), S. K. was rediscovered in the aftermath of the war by the European philosophers Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers in Germany, who created the philosophy of Existentialism. After World War II, Sartre in France popularized the Existentialist philosophy.
    Kierkegaard does not try to prove the existence of God; he seeks to show that the three stages of life's way or journey, the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious, brings us to a choice to trust God, or, as he says, a leap of faith. This is not an intellectual leap to believe something irrational, but a choice to trust the God, who in his love for us gave his Son for our salvation. Kierkegaard expresses this difference with his contrast between Socrates and Christ. Socrates, the Teacher, is sufficient to educe the knowledge from within us, if we already possess the condition for knowledge and the Truth. But if we do not possess the condition for such knowledge, our need is greater than for a teacher; we need a savior; not Socrates, the Teacher, but Christ, the Savior. Similarly, Socratic irony, which feigns ignorance in order that the ideas in the learner may be more easily educed and examined, must be replaced by "indirect communication", which cuts away alternatives, leaving a void, to be filled by revelation and the leap of faith. Many have criticized this leap of faith as irrational and Kierkegaard would agree that it is a paradox; the Christian Faith is filled with many paradoxes, the most ultimate of these is that God should become man, the incarnation. From the point of view of human reason, these seem irrational, but who said that human reason is the ultimate criterion. Human reason has often been wrong and in error; the advance of science has been made correcting the "truths" of human reason, as, for example, the motion of celestial bodies is circular and uniform about the earth, the geocentric universe.
  2. Martin Heidegger.
    The central theme of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1884-1976) is the estrangement from Being itself. In his greatest book, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) published in 1927, which has become a kind of philosophical Bible of modern Existentialism, he proposed no less a task than a "repetition" of the problem of Being: a repetition in the sense of a radical renewal, a fetching back from the oblivion of the past the problem as the first Greek thinkers formulated it. But this task, as he tells us on the first pages of Being and Time, involves nothing less than the destruction of the whole history of Western philosophy: that is, of the way the West has thought about Being. Why does this have to be done? In the first place, the word "being" in English is ambiguous. As a participle, it has at once the characteristic of a verb and a noun. As a noun, it is a name for beings, things: a table is a being, as is the tree outside, etc. Anything that is is a being. But also it is the most empty and abstract characteristic of any thing. But as a verb "being" signifies the "to-be" of things, and for this we have no single word in English. Other languages do not have this problem and set off these two meaning clearly: e.g., in Greek, to on [the thing which is] and to einai [the Being of the thing which is]. (Heidegger suggests that the best solution to this problem in English is: beings, when we mean: the things that are, and Being, when we mean the to-be of whatever is.) Heidegger contends that the whole history of Western philosophy has shown an exclusive preoccupation with the first member of this pair, with the thing-which-is, and let the other, the to-be of what is, to be ignored. What this means is that from the beginning of Western thought it has been concerned about things, objects. Once Being has been understood solely in terms of beings, things, it becomes the most general and empty of concepts. Heidegger here overturns the traditional concept. He insists that Being is not an empty abstraction but something in which all of us are immersed. When we remark to a friend, "This is Monday," the preconceptual meaning of Being is given to most men and there are no questions asked, nor need to be, about the meaning of "is".
    Heidegger makes use of a method, called phenomenology, borrowed from his teacher, Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), but he gave a different sense and direction from Husserl's. For Husserl, phenomenology was a discipline that attempts to describe what is given to us in experience without obscuring preconception or hypothetical speculations. Heidegger accepts Husserl's definition of phenomenology; but he will attempt to describe, he says, and without any obscuring perceptions, what human existence is. But he points out that the word "phenomenon" etymologically means in Greek "that which reveals itself". Phenomenology therefore means for Heidegger the attempt to let the thing speak for itself; it will reveal itself to us, only if we do not attempt to coerce it into one of our ready-made conceptual straitjackets. According to Heidegger we do not know the object by conquering and subduing it but rather by letting it be what it is and, in letting it to reveal itself as to what it is. Heidegger carries the etymological analysis beyond the single word "phenomenology". He finds around a word a whole cluster of etymologies, all of them having an internal unity of meaning that brings us to the very center of the meaning of the word. The Greek word phainomenon has as its root the Greek word phaos, light, and is also connected with the word apophansis, a statement or a speech. Thus the cluster of ideas is: revelation-light-language. The light is the light of revelation, and language itself is in this light.
    Heidegger's theory of truth is based on this same etymological phenomenological analysis. The Greek word translated "truth", aletheia, means literally "un-hidden", "un-veiled", "revelation". Truth occurs when what has been hidden is no longer so. Combined with the previous cluster of revelation - light - language, truth is what is revealed and brought to light being expressed in language. Thus truth does not reside primarily in the intellect, but that, on the contrary, intellectual truth is in fact a derivative of a more basic concept of truth. What is this more basic concept of truth? Heidegger answers that truth is related to being and this being is not as has been understood in Western philosophy as the being of things, of substances, but as "our" kind of being or Dasein. The German word Dasein means literally "being there"; Heidegger uses it to express the kind of being exhibited by human life, as it is disclosed or revealed to us, with all its uniqueness and immediacy, in our existence. This is not the type of being represented by things such as physical objects. Heidegger says that their being is not Dasein, but vorhanden, that is, being present or at hand. He wants to get beyond the Cartesian dualism of mind and body, of subject and object, of thinking substance and extended substance. He wants to bridge the gulf that has been dug into modern philosophy by this dualism. He does this by avoiding the use of the terminology characteristic of this dualism. This makes him difficult to understand and it takes awhile to comprehend what he is talking about. Instead of talking about Dasein directly he talks about the "mood" of being here and now. The moods of being are not feelings as emotions that we have but states of our being; it is the way we are. The most fundamental of these moods, according to Heidegger, is anxiety (Angst). This is a deep-seated insecurity about our being. We are aware that our hold on being is fundamentally precarious and shaky. As Heidegger puts it, we sense that we are "thrown" into being. This dread is to be distinguish from fear. Fear has an object; it is fear of something, a storm, an enemy, a lost of job, etc. Dread has no object; it is dread of Nothing, Not-Being. In Western philosophy not-being is the opposite of being; a metaphysical zero. For Heidegger Nothing is related to Being; it is Other-than-being. It always accompanies Being and on those infrequent and rare moments when we apprehend Nothing, we are oppressed that everything has slipped away, and we ourselves with them. Heidegger is not here propounding a psychology but an ontology, but it definitely affects the whole of our understanding of physchological matters. A Being or Dasein can either choose itself or lose itself; it can either exist (German, Ek-sistens, stand out) as a distinctive being which it is, or it can be submerged into a kind of anonymous manner of life, in which its possibilities are taken over and controlled by circumstances or social pressures. Thus there are two fundamental modes of existence: authentic existence, in which Dasein has taken over the possibilities of existence, and inauthentic existence, in which these possibilities are relinquished or suppressed. Each individual Dasein exists much of its time in an inauthentic way and authenticity can not be gained once for all but must be decided for in each new situation that come along.
  3. Karl Jaspers.
    Although Karl Jaspers (1883-1973) refused the title of existentialist and denied any connection with the philosophy of Heidegger, he echoes many of its themes: authenticity and the distinction and polarity between essence (Reason) and existence (Existenz). His thought is a modern adaptation of Kierkegaard's theory of crisis. The climactic moment of crisis he likes to describe as a "foundering" (Scheitern), and the situation productive of crisis are labeled by him as "limit situation" (Grenzsitation). In all this Jaspers faithfully follows S.K., and his contribution consists chiefly of a wealth and subtlety of application both to the inner life of the individual and the cultural life of the twentieth century. But the philosophical conclusions which he draws from Kierkegaardian premises depart widely from what S.K. intended. Jaspers' Existentialism is Kantian both in conception and execution.
    According to Jaspers, man's search for truth induces a crisis of intellectual despair caused by the perspective character of his knowledge. Man only sees segments only of reality. The "Encompassing" (das Umgreifende) eludes his grasp. In passing through this crisis man may establish a contact with that unknown something that lies beyond the perspective limitations of his knowledge. This encounter is described by Jaspers as the "rise into transcendence" (Aufschwung in die Transzendenz) - an experience which results, not in knowledge proper, but in a symbolic equivalent of knowledge, the "decodification" (Entziffern) of rationally unintelligible "signs" (Chiffren). Communication, on this level, becomes possible as "evocation". Jaspers' distinction between limited perspectives of knowledge and the Encompassing which is unlimited but also unknowable has its counterpart in Kant's dualism of appearance and "thing in itself", of phenomenon and noumenon.
  4. Jean-Paul Sartre.
    After World War II, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) in France popularized the Existentialist philosophy. Some have denied that his Existentialism is a philosophy but that it is a literary movement, emphasizing themes connected with Existentialist philosophy: "Existence precedes Essence", the human freedom of choice, anxiety (Angst) of choice, Being and Nothingness. Sartre, quoting Nietzsche's Zarathustra, asserts that "God is dead". Since man is free, God can not exist. Hence, man can not find in God's will, the values and principles for his life. Each person in his freedom must invent his own values, principles, and purposes. Sartre's Existentialism is an Atheistic Existentialism, which sees Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) as its spiritual father. This stands in contrast to Kierkegaard's Theistic Existentialism.
  5. Dialectical Theology.
    - Neo-Orthodoxy - Barth and Brunner.
    - Neo-Protestantism - Niebuhr and Tillich.
    Karl Barth
    In 1919, the Swiss reformed theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968) published his famous commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. In the same year. Karl Jaspers submitted a work on the Psychology of World Views. These two works mark the beginning of the Existential Movement. Barth, faithful to Kierkegaard's intentions, looks upon crisis as the triumph of faith over the discomfiture of reason. God is for him the reality that is disclosed in the anguish of despair, not the God of the savants and philosophers but the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who spake through the prophets and was revealed in Jesus Christ. The surrender of autonomous reason at the climax of the inner crisis comes from the contrite hearing of the Word of God. The conclusion drawn by Barth from the theory of crisis is itself no philosophical theory but a "Crisis Theology" which denounces philosophy as an inept guide toward faith. The publication of Barth's revolutionary book, Dialectical Theology, has caused an abandonment of liberal theology and a revival of orthodox Protestant theological thought. God is understood to be the "Wholly Other One" by Whom all human beings are put under the judgment of God. This means that God and the things of God cannot be explained by human reason. Barth interprets the ontological argument as faith seeking understanding, confounding the reason of man. Thus one must turn to the revealed Word of God, opposing a scriptural revealed theology to all natural theology. The result is a "Dialectical Theology" which emphasizes the difference between God and the world. Since the truth is the result of grace, the rationalistic "analogy of being" must be replaced with "analogy of faith". Barth later abandoned this "Dialectical Theology" for a "Theology of the Word" in which he rejects the dialectical dualism for the scriptural doctrine of the Creator and the Creation.
    Emil Brunner
    Occupying a position midway between liberal Prostestant theology and the crisis theology of Karl Barth, the Swiss Protestant theologian Emil Brunner (1899-1966), who taught at Zurich, held that while man could not provide his own salvation, he does possess certain natural powers of responding to God. From the standpoint of reason there are contradiction in man's situation with respect to revelation, but this merely points to the dialectical nature of revelation itself, which takes man beyond reason. Both technologically and politically, modern societies tend to depersonalize man; the Christian revelation, directed toward persons, provide a key tothe true nature of community. Brunner presented this view in his book Truth as Encounter (1964) which is an enlarged edition of an earlier work The Divine-Human Encounter in 1943. Click here to see a Bibliograph of Brunner's works in which he sets forth the philosophical foundation of his theology.
    There are essentially four elements to his foundation:
    Let us briefly consider these in that order.
    1. The ontological distinction between created and uncreated.
      This distinction is what makes the Christian understanding of reality totally unlike all other conceptions, idealistic, materialistic, etc.. God is the creator and the world is His creation. Idealism asserts a monistic conception of being while the Aristotelian and and Neoplatonic conception of being is that of a continuum in which God is the highest and matter is the lowest being. In the Christian view
      "God is never to be seen in continuity with the hierarchy of the created world... There is not transition between created and the non-created being, God alone has non-created divine reality, and all creation has merely dependent, created reality. Between these two there are no intermediates... No continuity whatever is left but sharp opposition: Godhead on the one hand, the world's creatureliness on the other." (BC&C, 20-21).
      However, Brunner points out that
      "this transcendence of God's being should never be confused with a transcendence of God's activity. The transcendent God -- that is, the God who has the monopoly of divinity -- is not separated from His creation. Distinction is not separation. God's being is distinguished from that of the world but the world exists by His sustaining presence and activity... He is the One by Whose will and action it (the world) is real and remains in existence, and without Whose presence and sustaining activity it would fall into nothingness." (BC&C, 21).
      It must also be noted here that the world, even if it is creaturely being and is not the ultimately real as the materialist would assert, the created world is no mere appearance as idealism would assert.
      "It is reality. God has called it to be real. Its being is not stamped with the mark of nothingness or degeneracy. What God has created, that is, even if it is not independent but dependent being. It is God Himself who gives it the weight of reality." (BC&C, 20).
      Now in the world there are laws. From the Christian point of view these
      "natural laws themselves are created. They are, as we have it in the German language, Ge-setze, i.e. 'settings.' God set them to be. Now this conception of setting is ambiguous or ambivalent... On the one hand, God's settings, orders, laws, Gesetze, are thought of a permanent, static structures, as stable dependable traits of the God-created Universe. You can rely upon these orders being maintained; you can count on them; there is no disorder and arbitrariness in this world; it is an orderly world." (BC&C, 23-24).
      On the other hand, God in His freedom is above all settings or laws. They are limitations for our freedom, but not for His.
      "Natural laws are not ultimates, they are instrumental to God's purposes. They do not determine his purposes. They are organs, servants of His will... The law in every sense of the word has a subordinate, although a very important and indispensable function in God's economy... All laws, whether natural or moral, belong to the created world. God's own will can never be expressed ultimately in terms of law, because the freedom of His love as well as of His holiness is above them." (BC&C, 24).
      Let us bring our discussion of this point to close with a summary statement in Brunner's own words.
      "The Christian conception of God as Creator, and of the world as His creation, is neither that of naive realism nor that of speculative idealism; in structure as in origin it is different from both. God, Who is spirit, is the primary original being and the world is dependent secondary being. That is say that world has objective reality, not in itself, but through the thought and will of the Creator. It is, but it is what God thought and willed to be before it was. Everything which objectively is, is (1) an idea of God, (2) a realization of His will, and therefore has reality only because it God's idea and will." (BC&C, 26).
    2. The Nature of God as personal.
      Another distinguishing mark of the Christian view is the idea of God as personal. There is
      "an unbridgeable contrast between the Christian and the Neoplatonic idea of being. The Neoplatonic -- and we may say also the idealistic and mystical conception of being -- is impersonal, the Christian idea of personal. The Neoplatonic is static; the Christian is active and dynamic. God's being is the being of the Lord who posits everything and is not posited... God is therefore never object, but always subject; never something -- it, substance -- but He, or rather Thou. God is absolutely free will, free in such a way that the world, His creation, is at every moment conditioned by His will." (BC&C, 18-19).
      In this passage, which Brunner points up this distinguishing mark of the Christian concept of God, we are introduced to the contrast between subject and object, person and non-person. This contrast is fundamental in Brunner's thinking about God and man.
      "God is Person; He is not an 'IT'; He is our primary 'Thou'." (BCDG, 121).
      "The 'Thou' is something other than the 'Not-I'; the 'Not-I' is the world, the sum-total of objects. But the 'Thou' is that 'Not-I' which is an ‘I’ (or a Self) as I am myself, of which I only become aware when it is not thought by my own efforts, or perceived as an object, but when it makes itself known to me as self-active, self-speaking, as 'I-over-against me'." (BCDG, 122).
      By an object, Brunner means both an ontological object, a thing, and an epistemological object, something which is known.
      "That which we can think and know by our own efforts is always an object of thought and knowledge, some thing which has been thought, some thing which is known, therefore it is never 'Person'." (BCDG, 121).
      It is for this reason that all philosophical conceptions of God are to be rejected. The God's conceived by the philosophers are its, objects of thought.
      "The God with Whom we have to do in faith, is not a Being who has been discussed, or 'conceived' (by man); He is not an Ens, a 'substance', like the Godhead of metaphysical speculation; He is not an object of thought -- even though in a sublimated and abstract form -- but the Subject who as ‘I’ addresses us a 'thou'. God is the Personality who speaks, acts, disclosing to us Himself and His will." (BCDG, 139).
      "In extreme cases a man can 'think' a personal God; theistic philosophy is a genuine, even if an extreme possibility. But this personal God who has been conceived by man remains some-thing which has been thought, the object of our thought-world. He does not break through the barriers of my thought-world, acting, speaking, manifesting Himself -- He does not meet me as a 'Thou', and is therefore is not a real 'Thou'. He is something which I have thought, my function, my positing; He is not the One who addresses me, and in this 'address' reveals Himself to me as the One who is quite independent of me."
      "The God who is merely thought to be personal is not truly personal; the 'Living God' who enters my sphere of thought and experience from beyond my thought, in the act of making Himself known to me, by Himself naming His Name -- He alone is truly personal." (BCDG, 122).
      Some have raised objections to the use of the ideas of "personality" or "person" in the formulation of the Idea of God, on the ground that it is anthropomorphic.
      "'Who', they ask, 'gives us the right to take the conception of personality, derived from our own human experience, and to apply it to God?' They contend that to do so makes the Idea of God finite, which is entirely improper; for even though we may intensify the concept of personality to the highest degree possible, this Idea of God still makes Him too human, creaturely, and earthly. The "Personal God" is a naive idea, unworthy of the Divinity, a product of the imagination which delights in creating myths." (BCDG, 139).
      Brunner attempts to meet these objections. He first of all points out that all the alternatives to the Idea of a Personal God are attenuated conception of an "object" weakened by abstraction.
      "If we ask: -- 'what are the alternatives to the idea of the Personal God?' -- then all the answers that are given, however, they may be expressed, finally say the same thing; God is an 'It', not an ‘I’; He is an Object of thought, something that is constructed in thought, not One who Himself speaks, but a Neuter -- an ens a se, ens subsistens per se, the Absolute, the Inexpressible, the absolute Substance, etc." (BCDG, 139).
      Then Brunner asks,
      "Can we really think that a Supreme Object gained by a process of abstraction is a more worthy conception of God than the concept of Person? The highest that we know is not the 'it', the 'thing', but the person." (BCDG, 139-140).
      How can we think of God as being less than we are? God must be at least a person, in view of the fact that we are persons.
      Brunner has a second answer to these objections. From the Biblical point of view, the question whether the application of the idea of "person" to God is anthropomorphism is backwards. "The question is not whether God is person, but whether man is." From the Biblical point of view,
      "it is not the personal being of God which is 'anthropomorphic,' but, conversely, the personal being of man is a 'theomorphism.' God alone is Person; man is only person a symbolic way, as a reflection of God, as the Imago Dei. God is only Subject, He is not also Object; He is the absolute Subject, subject in the unconditional, unlimited sense. Man, however, is a subject which is also an object. The Self of man, is a subject which is also an object. The Self of man, indeed, is enclosed in a body, in a material form which fills space; it is therefore and an 'it'; he is personal and impersonal at one the same time. Hence man is only 'person' in a parabolic, symbolic sense, 'person' who is at the same time 'not-person', a 'thing'. God is pure personality; man is not." (BCDG, 140).
      Thus it is that the question of whether the application of the idea of "person" to God is an anthropomorphism turns out to be a pseudo question for those who start with revelation and the knowledge of God as the Absolute Subject.
      Before we go on to the third element in the foundation of Brunner's theology let us try to determine just what he means by person or subject in contrast to non-person, object, or thing. That which constitutes the nature of the 'subject' in contradistinction to that of 'object' is "freedom, positing and not being posited, thinking and not being thought, that which is absolutely spontaneous, that which is only active and not at the same time passive, that which only gives and does not at the same time receive." (BCDG, 140). Thus to be a person is to be capable of self-determination, that is, freedom. This shall be further clarified in our discussion of the third element in the foundation of Brunner's theology.
    3. The creation of man in God's own image.
      Now this Personal God has created a being outside Himself. This has already been elaborated in the preceding section. This being stands "over against" God: a created, creaturely being. Now in this being that God has created, He imprints in and upon it something of His own nature.
      "He, the Absolute Subject creates a being which is also 'subject', and in this 'existence or being as subject' is 'like' God." (BCDG, 177).
      God has created man, in His own image or likeness. However,
      "man is absolutely unlike God in the fact that he is a created, conditioned, limited subject, whereas God is absolute Subject. He creates in man a creative nature, and one which is capable of dominion, and fitted for dominion -- once more, like God. But man is absolutely unlike God in the fact that his creative activity is always connected with that which is given him, and that his dominion is limited by his responsibility toward Him to whom he owes an account for the use he makes of his powers. In all that makes man like God, man remains absolutely unlike Him, in the fact that all that he has received from God, and that for all that he does he is responsible, so that his very freedom can be realized in absolute obedience to God; thus human freedom itself shows both man's 'likeness' to God, and his 'un-likeness' -- an 'unlikeness' which is an abiding fact." (BCDG, 177).
      The fact that man has been created in God's own image is the basis of Brunner's social ethics as well as private ethics.
      "That conception of justice by which all human beings, old or young, man or woman, bond or free, have equal rights in the sense they ought to be treated alike, is in essence derived from the revelation of Scripture, according to which God created man 'in his image'" (BJSO, 34).
    4. Epistemological basis in revelation and faith.
      It is at this point Brunner disagrees with orthodoxy. Orthodoxy had conceived of revelation as a body of divinely revealed propositions or truths which are gathered into a book. The Bible is the revelation of God. While sometimes speaking of the Bible as a revelation of God, Brunner does not mean the same thing that the orthodox meant. He means that the Bible is record and a witness to revelation. Brunner understands revelation to be basically personal encounter. God is not an object, a thing, but a subject. Man is like God; he is subject but not absolutely so. Our knowledge of a subject, a person, is wholly contingent upon the act of self-disclosure on the part of the person known. However, revelation is not complete without the subjective act of perceiving. This subjective act of perceiving is called faith. It is in the act of faith, which is also an act of decision, is response to the other persons act of self-disclosure, that revelation is completed. Thus revelation is a transitive process between the absolute Subject, God, and conditional subject, man. Revelation is not an objective phenomenon, independent of subjective act of perceiving, it is not a Something, a thing, but a process, an event. Revelation is an event between two persons; a meeting or an encounter between God and man.
      From another point of view, revelation is the address of God, to which man responds in faith. This address is the Word of God. Now in this address God does not say something but says Himself; He discloses Himself. (BDHE, 86). The address of God is God's self-communication; He communicates Himself. For this reason the Word of God in the Scripture is a person (John 1:2) in contrast to the Stoic concept of the Word which is impersonal. The Word of God is God's communication of Himself to men. Now the Word of God is understood, known in the act of faith. Knowledge of God is essentially an act, a decision on man's part, in response to God's address. Believing is knowing.
      With this concept of revelation, the Bible is to be only a witness, a pointer to God in His self-disclosure. The Bible is not the Word of God but only a witness to the Word of God. Theology is thinking about God from the standpoint of revelation. Theology has its basis in the situation of the encounter: revelation-faith. The Scriptures are the primary guide for theology and ethics.
    BIBLIOGRAPHY OF EMIL BRUNNER
    
    BCDG
    Brunner, Emil. The Christian Doctrine of God,
    Dogmatics, Vol. I.
    London: Lutterworth Press, 1949.
    BCDCR
    Brunner, Emil. The Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption,
    Dogmatics, Vol. II.
    Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1952.
    BCDCFC
    Brunner, Emil. The Christian Doctrine of Chruch, Faith, and the Consummation,
    Dogmatics, Vol. III.
    Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1962.
    BC&C
    Brunner, Emil. Christianity and Civilization,
    First Part: Foundations.
    New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948.
    BC&CII
    Brunner, Emil. Christianity and Civilization,
    Second Part: Specific Problems.
    New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1949.
    BDI
    Brunner, Emil. Divine Imperative.
    Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 19??.
    BJSO
    Brunner, Emil. Justice and Social Order.
    New York: Harper & Brothers, 1945.
    BPR
    Brunner, Emil. The Philosophy of Religion,
    New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937.
    BR&R
    Brunner, Emil. Revelation and Reason.
    Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1946.
    BSC
    Brunner, Emil. The Scandal of Christianity.
    Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1951.
    BTAE
    Brunner, Emil. Truth as Encounter,
    Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1964.
    A New Edition, Much Enlarged, of
    BDHE
    The Divine-Human Encounter.
    Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1943.
    
    Reinhold Niebuhr
    In America, Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) developed a Protestant theology called neo-Orthodoxy or neo-Protestantism, in which God is regarded "wholly other" and man is alienated from God by original sin due to the fall. Human pride and egotism is the essence of sin. The tragedy of man is that he can conceive of self-perfection but he can not acheive it. Niebuhr affirmed man's freedom by paradox: man is both bound and free, both limited and limitless; man is, and yet is not, involved in the flux of nature and time. Niebuhr says in his Nature and Destiny of Man, vol. I, p. 258 (two volumes, 1941-43),
    "The ultimate proof that the human spirit is free is its recognition
    that its will is not free."
    Reason is an instrument, says Niebuhr, which can be used for either good or evil. One evil use of reason is to impose rational coherence upon reality and to reject as unreal what cannot be fitted into that coherence. Another false use of reason, says Niebuhr, is to make it the basis of a false security, thus turning away from the one sure ground of security, which is a belief beyond the tests of reason, namely, that God in forgiving love will overrule all evil "at the end of history." Even though man is a free spirit and thus responsible to God for his use of his freedom, there is a demonic element in all his actions. Thus moral progress does not occur in human history.
    Thus the crisis theology was tranformed under the influence of the prevailing pragmatic temper and the interest in social problems. Politically, Niebuhr believed in a liberal realism capable of recognizing man's irrationalities in order to direct to direct them rationally. In this kind of assessment, it seemed clear to him that institutional changes were more important than changes of heart in attempting to reach the good society. Although opposed to utopian visions, he believed in the creation of systems of justice, and that social adjustment was needed within the framework of American capitalism. Beyond politics, Niebuhr believed in Christian realism, a point of view that applies to the social perspectives the insights of neo-Orthodoxy mentioned above in the previous paragraph.
    Niebuhr was born in 1892 at Wright City, Missouri. His father was Gustave Niebuhr, a minister in the Evangelical Synod of the Lutheran Church, who came to the United States when he was 17 years old. His mother was the daughter of the Reverend Edward Jacob Hosto, a second-generation German American of the same religious sect. Niebuhr studied at Elmhurst College, Eden Theological Seminary, and Yale University. He was ordained in 1915 and was the pastor of the Bethel Evangelical Luthern church of Detroit until 1928. His ministry there was notable for his support of the labor union movement and of pacifism. A was a committed Socialist for a time, but he later broke with the party. He spent most of his career teaching Christian ethics and theology. He was appointed professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1928. He gave the Gifford Lectures in 1939. He reitred in 1967 and died in 1971.
    Paul Tillich
    Paul Tillich (1886-1965), a German-American theologian, was born in Starzeddel in eastern Germany, the son of a Lutheran pastor. He was educated in theology and philosophy at Berlin, Tubingen, Halle, and Breslau. Ordained in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in 1912, he served as an army chaplain during World War I and then taught theology and phiilosophy at Berlin, Marburg, Dresden, and Frankfurt. And on the ascension of Hitler to power in 1933, he immigrated to the United States. He taught systematic theology and philosophy in America at Union Theological Seminary from 1933 to 1956, and from 1956 he held chairs at Harvard, and the University of Chicago until his death in 1965.
    Tillich is considered a representative of existentialism in theology. But Tillich defends a metaphysical system that is rare since Hegelianism ceased to be a dominant influence in philosophy. The first opponent of Hegel's system was Soren Kierkegaard, the Father of modern existenialism. In the name of the Christian faith, Kierkegaard rejected not only this and that element in Hegelianism but the whole, referring to it in mockery as 'the System'. Tillich, who is often critical of Hegel, nearly always speaks in praise of Kierkegaard, and he gives such an important place in his own thinking to the category of existence that he seems to be following in the Danish thinker's footsteps. Thus he explains that in making use of the word existential he is borrowing from Kierkegaard. But at the same time, by defending the system as needful for theology, Tillich is confessing himself to be a nay-sayer of the other's message -- an anti-Kierkegaard.
    Paul Tillich, in his widely reprinted article, "Two Types of Philosophy of Religion" (Union Seminary Quarterly Review, March, 1946, to which the following citations refers unless otherwise specified), argues the thesis that all philosophy of religion may be reduced to two fundamental types: the ontological, represented by the mystical tradition, including parts of Augustine, and based upon an underlying point of identity between man and God, and the cosmological, represented by Aquinas and most subsequent religious thought, and based upon the discrete, separate coexistence of men and of God.
    "On the first way, man discovers himself when he discovers God; he discovers something that is identical with himself.... On the second way, man meets a stranger when he meets God."
    Subjecting both types to searching analysis, and disclosing convincingly the inadequacies of the second, Tillich concludes that the ontological, as the only remaining alternative, is the valid philosophy of religion, and he devotes most of the article to a vindication of it.
    The history of Christian thought, so deftly traced by Tillich in terms of these two types, shows how Christian theology turned first to a neo-Platonic metaphysic (Augustine), and then, finding it to be an insufficient safeguard for certain fundamental Christian affirmations, turned 800 years later to the only other alternative available to it, the endless discursive ratiocinations of Aquinas. Having pursued this method to its sterile conclusion, the pendulum now appears, after nearly 800 more years, about to swing back again to ontology.
    Tillich's magnum opus is his Systematic Theology, 3 volumes (Chicago, 1951-1963). Volume 1 contains most of the philosophical sections. He sees man as "...that being in whom all levels of being are united and approachable." But man is not merely "... an outstanding object among other objects." He is the "... being who asks the ontological questions and in whose self-awareness the ontological answer can be found." Every human being, Tillich believed, has an "ultimate concern". Tillich conceives of faith as ultimate concern in which man unconditionally surrenders to something, recognizing it as an absolute authority. But the objects of ultimate concern vary enormously. Supernatural beings, historical persons whether religious or secular, nations, social classes, political movements, culture forms like paintings and science, material goods, social status -- any of these may be objects of an ultimate concern.
    Tillich tries to show that the religious life is more than an organization of human feelings and attitudes and that it involves a reference to a reality outside itself, a reference that can be validated. Although Tillich did not, like Kierkegaard, deny the religous relevance of rational investigation, and although he did think that ontology gives some support to religion, he did not believe in the validity of traditional metaphysical proofs of specifically religious doctrines and in particular of the existence of a personal God. Tillich did not, in fact, accept the notion of a personal deity. For him the doctrine of a supernatural person, like all religious doctrines, is to be conceived as an attempt to symbolize an ultimate reality, "being-itself," which is so ultimate that all that can be said about it is that it is ultimate. If the God of theism is a person, the often repeated charge that Tillich is really an atheist thus seems justified; yet Tillich can point out that in the past Christian theology has repeatedly found difficulty in the notion that God is a person in any straightforward or literal sense. But Tillich is not an atheist because he defends his view that religious faith is objectively valid by claiming that ultimate concern must necessarily have what is metaphysically Ultimate as an object. And nothing can properly be of ultimate concern unless it is the ultimate determiner of the reality and meaning of our existence, and only being-itself occupies this position. From this conclusion, it is short step to say that in ultimate concern one is always really concerned with being-itself, whether one realizes it or not.
    "Being-itself" is Tillich's name for God, virtually the only non-symbolic or literal term in the lexicon of religion. Tillich likewise describes God as the "power of being," the "ground of being," and "the God beyond the God in theism." Apparently, God as "being-itself" is the answer to the question asked by Schelling: "Why is there not nothing?" And Tillich answered, "Because there is a self-validating concept of existence, Being-itself."
    Although "Being-itself" provides a link between the literal use of terms in philosophy and their symbolic use in religion, the development of the meaning of this term relates to its symbolic use. The basic religious symbols for God are "Lord" and "Father." Symbols differ from other signs in pointing to the ultimate and "participating" in the reality that they signify. An effective symbol not only has truth, but it is true and using it, we participate in its truth. Symbols also have lives of their own, become enfeebled, die, and cease to function as vehicles of the ultimate. At this point new symbols are needed.
    The ultimacy of religion is protected from the absolutizing tendencies of man by the Protestant principle. This principle forbids the identification of the divine with any human creation whether the creation in question is the biblical writings or the institution of the Church itself.
    As a Christian theologian, Tillich wanted to demonstrate that among the ultimate concerns, the Christian concern is the most adequate. He sometimes said that some ultimate concerns are "idolatrous" because they are directed at finite objects rather than the Ultimate. But by his own principles, Tillich should not say this, because every case of ultimate concern involves concrete objects that manifests or points to the Ultimate. If it did not so function, it would not be a case of ultimate concern. The only possible way of showing that one ultimate concern is more adequate than another would be to show that it served better as a symbol of being-itself. But since nothing can be said literally about being-itself except that it is Ultimate, a feature that nothing else can share, it is not clear how this could be done. Tillich's own argument for the superiority of Christianity seems itself to be in symbolic terms. Tillich said that by dying on the cross, Jesus Christ, who is the basic symbol of being-itself in Christianity, underlined the fact that symbols have their significance not in themselves but as manifesting the Ultimate.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF EMIL BRUNNER