Faith for Tillich does involve passionate emotions; “but emotion does not produce faith.” Faith cannot be confused with emotional outbursts or feelings of rapture, though it can involve such things. Faith for Tillich also includes a cognitive component, but only “as an inseparable element in a total act of acceptance and surrender.” If one reduces faith to a cognitive act, faith would be confused with mere belief. It would lose its quality as a living reality. Similarly, faith involves the will, but “faith is not a creation of the will.” To reduce faith to an act of the will is to confuse it with a mere act of obedience to a moral imperative.
In sum, faith assumes “being grasped and changed by Spiritual Presence,” without which faith is degraded “into a belief, an intellectual act produced by will and emotion”. Human capacities cannot ultimately account for the reality of faith.
Faith as an intellectual capacity is impossible in part because of the pneumatological nature of revelation. The Spiritual Presence grants not abstract meaning but rather “meaning-bearing power which grasps the human spirit in ecstatic experience”
“Faith is the state of being grasped by the transcendent unity of unambiguous life— it embodies love as the state of being taken into that transcendent unity”. The quality of our love, however, is not the basis of justification. In justification, “we surrender our goodness to God” and affirm unambiguous life in the midst of the ambiguity and estrangement of finite existence. Justifying faith as a transformative reality also locates justification within regeneration and healing as the more encompassing soteriological reality. Tillich is adamant in maintaining that “faith means being grasped by a power that is greater than we are, a power that shakes us and turns us, and transforms us and heals us.”
In sum, faith assumes “being grasped and changed by Spiritual Presence,” without which faith is degraded “into a belief, an intellectual act produced by will and emotion”. Human capacities cannot ultimately account for the reality of faith.
Faith as an intellectual capacity is impossible in part because of the pneumatological nature of revelation. The Spiritual Presence grants not abstract meaning but rather “meaning-bearing power which grasps the human spirit in ecstatic experience”
“Faith is the state of being grasped by the transcendent unity of unambiguous life— it embodies love as the state of being taken into that transcendent unity”. The quality of our love, however, is not the basis of justification. In justification, “we surrender our goodness to God” and affirm unambiguous life in the midst of the ambiguity and estrangement of finite existence. Justifying faith as a transformative reality also locates justification within regeneration and healing as the more encompassing soteriological reality. Tillich is adamant in maintaining that “faith means being grasped by a power that is greater than we are, a power that shakes us and turns us, and transforms us and heals us.”
- Paul Tillich and Pentecostal Theology : Spiritual Presence and Spiritual Power, p90-92
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