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THE ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS (영/한) (09)
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PAUL
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2022-02-21 12:53:48, 조회 : 927 |
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A DEMONSTRATION OF GOD AND THE ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF CHRISTIAN GOD IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS (09)
by Dr. Paul B. Jang (Ph.D, Christian Apologetics) (영문) ✝✝✝
CHAPTER II
REVIEW OF THE LITERATURES:
PHILOSOPHICAL AND THEOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK OF THE CONCEPTS AND EXISTENCE OF GOD
HISTORICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL SURVEY
The First Problem: God s Existence
Paul Tillich says that the question Does God exist? has the background of the entire history of the philosophy which is going to understand what is existence. The biggest question of human life is just Does God exist? In order to deal with this problem it is necessary to study ample analysis of the history of philosophy, philosophical understanding, and a deep thought concerning being and nonbeing.
He says that any theologian can never get out of this question and its necessity. According to Paul Tillich, anyone who was a theologian, cannot answer God is a being to this question. If God was a being, he says, we cannot think of the other being to make it be. In other words, the other being is not the being itself, the biblical God, namely I AM WHO I AM (Ex. 3:14) but a Ground of Being that lets the being to be a Being in itself.
He says that God cannot be the Being itself which has the concept of relative word because He is an absolute One. Because the Being must be objected to the concept of non-Being, it is incompatible with God who lets the Being to be. God is therefore the Ground of Being who transcends the relative being, who lets the being to be.
This theory is nothing but a Pantheistic reflection, as it were, something that God is not the ontological Entity but let the being to be.
This is his concept of God. If we follow this theory, God will be a Force of the being as God is a Blind Force in the fatalism. He asserts that such a cause makes the being to be, therefore the being cannot be God because it has the relative concept itself.
If so, he says, it must be contradictory to the unrestricted nature of God. Because of that, theology always needs the theory of being, and the theory of being always includes non-being (Tillich, 1967, 186).
The Second Problem: The Living God
When God is called the God of the living creatures, what does it mean? This means that God is not the one that has no life in him. God has diversity within him. To say more correctly, death substitutes life when life transcends itself and it is going to come back to itself at the same time, and it has no impulse trying to go beyond itself, as it were, a situation given to it, cultural tradition, dogmatism, and our mental state as the philosopher s of life like Nietzsche and Heidegger.
Therefore when life always is suffocated between both poles, namely a fixed situation, and when it cannot transcend itself and come back to itself after going beyond itself, it is destined to come and go between the poles. Actually, the whole course of life must have such a nature. This is the situation of human side.
In this way, Paul Tillich applied the philosophy of common life to the concept of God as a living One. When he says the Christian God, the concept of God is no more than the experience of God as a living One. This experience is the expression of our experience in God who transcends himself by the way who exists as a living One is no more than a symbolic God located in the human experience (Tillich, 1967, 242).
Paul Tillich points out that it is a foolish mathematical expression for a person to call the God Trinity because He will not be an absolute One but three one in number.
He asserts that there it is found that this Trinity idea in a number of the great religions such as Indian religion, Christianity and the other religions, especially in the miscellaneous religions when Christianity was completed after Christ s Ascension in the old days. The problem of Trinity is not the problem of the number, he says, the fools believe in God as Trinity. He also says it is foolish for anyone to agree that one is three, and also three is one. The Triune God of the Indian religion as well as of the Christianity is no more than the God in the experience of human life.
This is the meaning of God as the living one, the symbolic expression of the Trinity thought. The thought may not be interpreted by an irrational method, said he. But his methodology must be wrong. 💟💟💟
- To be continued -
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선교운동소개
동역자실 