The Courage to Be…In Christ

An Examination of Tillich’s Concept of Courage

Some books haunt you. Others merely annoy. Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be did both.

I remember reading it late one night in seminary, half-dreaming and wholly frustrated, trying to track Tillich’s winding river of existential angst. He was brilliant, certainly, but brilliant in a way that makes you wonder if clarity has been sacrificed on the altar of profundity. And yet, as I turned the final page, I had to admit: he was asking the right questions, even if I believed he offered all the wrong answers.

Tillich, the German-American theologian who fled the Nazis and found refuge in the lecture halls of Union Theological Seminary, was deeply preoccupied with anxiety. Not the kind triggered by public speaking or long lines at the DMV, but the primordial kind, the “threat of nonbeing.”¹ His book is, in many ways, a lament for the soul of modern man, who has lost God but cannot quite shake the feeling that he needs Him. It is this paradox, this ache for something ultimate in a world that seems to have collapsed under the weight of its own disenchantment, that Tillich attempts to resolve with his concept of “the courage to be.”

And there’s the rub. “The courage to be,” Tillich tells us, is the existential strength to affirm one’s being in spite of the threat of nonbeing, to assert oneself in the face of meaninglessness.² But what happens when being itself is hollowed out? When the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is replaced with the “Ground of Being,” a reality too abstract to crucify, too impersonal to resurrect? Tillich’s courage is stirring, yes. But is it enough?

In what follows, I want to wrestle with Tillich, not merely to critique him, but to engage him as one might a brilliant but wayward teacher. He saw our age clearly; he named our dread honestly. But where his existential theology leaves us adrift in a sea of symbols, I will argue that the Christian gospel offers something more: a shoreline. A name. A cross. A Person.

Understanding the “Courage to Be”

Tillich was not a theologian easily confined to boxes. He was a kind of philosopher-poet in clerical garb, wielding words like “ontological anxiety” and “ultimate concern” with the air of someone who had long since made peace with ambiguity. For Tillich, theology was not primarily about systematizing doctrines or defending creeds; it was about addressing the existential condition: that deep, often inarticulate dread that gnaws at modern man in the quiet hours.

At the heart of The Courage to Be is a simple but profound observation: human beings are anxious, not in the psychological sense (though Tillich certainly would not exclude it), but in a much deeper way. Our very existence is under threat. We fear death not just because it ends life, but because it confronts us with the possibility that we may be nothing.³ We fear guilt because it whispers that we are not only finite, but also morally suspect. We fear meaninglessness because it challenges the very purpose of living. These fears (death, guilt, and meaninglessness) are, for Tillich, the triad of what he calls “existential anxiety.”⁴

It’s not hard to see his point. Consider the man sitting in traffic on his morning commute, suddenly struck by the question: Is this all there is? Or the college student, once certain of everything, now paralyzed before a world that offers too many choices and too little guidance. Or the elderly woman whose quiet home echoes with the absence of family, purpose, or the divine. These are not the anxieties cured by a vacation or a prescription. They are the unsettling tremors that shake the very foundations of our being.

Tillich’s solution? Courage. But not the kind of courage you see in a war movie or a Nike ad. Rather, what he calls “the courage to be,” a kind of existential defiance. It is the act of affirming one’s own being in spite of the threat of nonbeing.⁵ It is saying “yes” to life, even when death, guilt, and absurdity shout “no.” It is, in a word, self-affirmation.

But there’s more. Tillich distinguishes between several types of courage, the most significant of which is the “courage to be as a part” and the “courage to be as oneself.”⁶ The former is the courage we experience by identifying with a group, a nation, or a cause. It is basically finding meaning through participation. Think of the soldier who finds purpose in his platoon or the protester who stands with others for justice. The latter, by contrast, is the lonely path of the individual who dares to be authentic, even if it costs him everything. Tillich sees these two forms as incomplete on their own. Ultimately, true courage comes from transcending both individualism and collectivism through union with the “Ground of Being,” which is Tillich’s term for God.⁷

Here’s where things get metaphysically fuzzy. Tillich does not mean “God” in the traditional Judeo-Christian sense. He rejects the image of a personal deity “out there” who intervenes in the world like a divine puppet master. That God, he argues, is too small. Instead, God is Being-itself. Not a being among others, but the very power of being from which all things derive. To experience this Ground of Being is to transcend anxiety and participate in something ultimate.

It’s all very elegant and, in its own way, deeply comforting, but it’s also abstract. It is so abstract, in fact, that it begins to feel like courage in a vacuum. One might admire Tillich’s intellectual architecture while still wondering whether anyone could actually live inside it.

Tillich’s Insightful Diagnosis

Say what you will about Tillich’s abstraction (and I will, later), the man understood anxiety. Not merely as a psychological condition, though he was well acquainted with the Freudian landscape, but as the spiritual wallpaper of modern life. In this, Tillich joins the ranks of Kierkegaard and Pascal, those rare thinkers who refuse to comfort us with false certainties, insisting instead that we confront the chasm beneath our feet.

There’s a particular brilliance in the way Tillich names our modern demons. He does not moralize; he diagnoses. He sees beneath the symptoms (our busyness, our consumption, our technological noise) and calls out the deeper affliction: a terror of nonbeing. In a world where God is dead (or at least demoted), and where meaning is increasingly self-generated, Tillich recognizes that the human spirit is not coping well. He observes, without flinching, the spiritual anemia of a culture that has traded metaphysical depth for therapeutic distraction.

Tillich is especially incisive when describing the anxiety of meaninglessness. This is a uniquely modern burden. Earlier ages, he argues, were haunted by death and judgment; our age is haunted by the absence of judgment, the suspicion that nothing really matters.⁸ This is not despair in the grand tragic sense. It’s more banal than that. It’s the slow suffocation of significance. A kind of metaphysical claustrophobia.

This is where Tillich is at his best. He does not simply preach courage in the abstract; he names the forces that sap us of it. And he does so in a way that Christians would do well to learn from. Far too often, the Church has offered platitudes when what the world needs is prophecy. Tillich, for all his theological unorthodoxy, sounds at times more like a prophet than many preachers I’ve heard. He refuses to baptize our idols. He calls us to wakefulness, to seriousness, to the kind of spiritual honesty that begins with the terrifying question: What if God really is absent?

His critique of shallow religiosity is equally sharp. Tillich spares no punches for the “God of theism.” A deity he finds too small, too anthropomorphic, too easily co-opted by ideology. And while I’ll later argue that he throws the baby out with the holy water, he is right to challenge the domestication of God that often passes for faith. Any God who fits neatly within our categories, Tillich warns, is no God at all.

What’s more, Tillich’s emphasis on ultimate concern is, in many ways, a gift to the Church. For him, religion is not fundamentally about doctrines or rituals, it is about what grips us at the core of our being. What demands our devotion? What defines our identity? In an age drowning in distraction, this is a piercing question. Whether we agree with his answers or not, Tillich reminds us that theology cannot be compartmentalized. If it is not ultimate, it is not worthy of the name.

Finally, I must acknowledge that Tillich invites Christians into a deeper interiority. His writing is not easy, sometimes maddeningly so, but it pushes the reader to think, to wrestle, to look beneath the surface. His theology is not a safe place to hide; it’s a mirror. And that, perhaps more than anything, is why it continues to provoke, decades after his death.

But for all this insight, for all his courage in naming the void, I believe that Tillich ultimately fails to offer a bridge across it. And it is to that failure, respectful but unflinching, that we must now turn.

The Crumbling Ground

Like so many other great thinkers, Tillich ultimately builds his house on sand, and not even the picturesque kind. The architecture is impressive, the scaffolding intricate, the view from the balcony quite breathtaking. But there is no foundation. And when the existential storms come, and they will, Tillich’s “Ground of Being” proves to be exactly what he says it is: ground, but not rock.

Let’s begin with the most glaring absence: Tillich’s God is not a person. This is no minor deviation, it is a seismic theological shift. Tillich’s “God” is not the God who speaks, listens, grieves, rejoices, commands, or loves. He is a “what,” not a “who.” He is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He is, rather, the impersonal Ground of Being, the abstract depth behind all that exists. And while Tillich insists this is a richer, more philosophically satisfying conception of God, it is one that cannot save. One does not pray to the Ground of Being. One does not cry out to it in the night. One cannot be known by it, loved by it, or forgiven by it.

In attempting to free God from the constraints of theism, Tillich ends up evacuating Him of His character. The result is a theological system in which “God” becomes little more than a placeholder for human longing. A projection upward rather than a revelation downward. Even Tillich’s language betrays this shift. “God does not exist,” he writes provocatively because existence is something things have, and God is beyond thing-ness.⁹ That may work in metaphysics class. It does not work in life or death.

Second, and flowing directly from this abstraction, Tillich’s Christ is reduced to a symbol, not a Savior. Jesus, in Tillich’s framework, is the “New Being,” the clearest expression of God’s depth breaking into history.¹⁰ But this Christ does not shed real blood for real sin. He does not die a substitutionary death. He does not rise bodily and victoriously from the grave. His significance is existential, not atoning. He reveals “the courage to be” more perfectly than anyone else, but he does not rescue us. He inspires; he does not redeem.

This distinction is not theological hair-splitting. It is the difference between symbolic courage and concrete hope. If Christ is only a symbol of divine depth, then the cross is not cosmic victory, it is convenient metaphor (Jordan Peterson much?). The resurrection is not triumph, it is mythic language for inner renewal. And if all that is true, then sin is not a real offense against a holy God; it is merely alienation from one’s essential being. The result is a gospel without blood, a faith without atonement, a courage with no anchor beyond the self.

Third, Tillich’s insistence on self-affirmation as the heart of courage, while psychologically compelling, subtly reinforces the very problem it seeks to solve. If the answer to existential anxiety is to “affirm one’s being,” then salvation is ultimately a solo project. The burden of transcendence falls back on the individual; ironically deepening the very anxiety Tillich sought to alleviate. Yes, he gestures toward participation in the Ground of Being, but since that Ground is impersonal and symbolic, the affirmation still has to come from me.

Contrast this with the Christian gospel, where courage does not arise from self-assertion, but from union with Christ. We do not conjure courage from within; we receive it as a gift from the One who has gone before us, who has passed through death, guilt, and cosmic meaninglessness, and emerged victorious. Our courage is not existential defiance. It is borrowed strength. It is the trembling, blood-covered resolve of the eternal Son who in bloody sweat-soaked resolve says, “Not my will, but Yours be done,” and is raised three days later.

Finally, and perhaps most devastatingly, Tillich’s system leaves us without assurance. Because his God is not personal, we can never be personally reconciled. Because his Christ is not a redeemer, we can never be fully forgiven. Because his courage is not rooted in resurrection, we can never be finally secure. We are left with elegant metaphors and profound existential gestures, but no living voice saying, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid” (Matt. 14:27).

For a man so attuned to the sickness of the age, Tillich offers only palliative care. He names the cancer, but refuses the surgery. He constructs a theology for the courageous soul, but not for the penitent one. And so, despite all the insight and all the erudition, we must finally say: it is not enough.

The Courage to Be…In Christ

Tillich was reaching for something profoundly human. He heard the cry beneath the noise, the tremor beneath the rationalism. His theology, for all its speculative scaffolding, was born of deep wounds: Two world wars, exile, a culture unmoored from its sacred roots. He knew what it was to tremble before the abyss. And he sought to offer courage, not as bravado, but as being’s last stand against the void.

But what if the courage to be is not found by digging deeper into the self, nor by dissolving God into philosophical ether, but by falling into the arms of a Savior who has already been to the abyss and returned with the keys?

This is the scandal and glory of the Christian gospel: that the God who is Being itself also took on flesh. That the Ground of all existence became a crying baby in a borrowed manger. That the One in whom all things hold together once bled on a Roman cross. That the courage to be is not an act of sheer existential will, but a response to a love that finds us when our will is gone.

In Christ, the fear of death is met, not with abstraction, but with resurrection. “Because I live,” He says, “you also will live” (John 14:19). Death is no longer the final punctuation, but a doorway into fuller life. We do not stare into the abyss of nonbeing; we follow a risen Lord who passed through it and came out glorified.

In Christ, the weight of guilt is lifted, not by denial or psychological sleight of hand, but by atonement. “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1). The Judge has borne the judgment. The sin is not repressed, but confessed and covered.

In Christ, the ache of meaninglessness is met with vocation, communion, and eschatological hope. We are not drifting atoms in an accidental cosmos; we are sons and daughters of a coming Kingdom. Our lives do not terminate in the silence of a cold universe; they resound in the eternal chorus of the redeemed.

This is a courage not merely to be, but to belong to the One who calls us by name. It is a courage not of the isolated self, but of the crucified and risen Christ living in us. It is the courage not to affirm our own being, but to lose it in love, and so find it forever.

Tillich rightly saw that shallow religion cannot bear the weight of modern anxiety. But in his attempt to go deeper, he bypassed the One who stood in history and declared, “I am the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25).

I do not doubt that Tillich sought to point toward transcendence. But I would gently suggest that what he gestured toward in shadow has come to us in light. What he abstracted in concept has come to us in flesh. And what he called the Ground of Being has stooped, scandalously, to wash our feet. Yes, we need courage. But more than that we need Christ.

In Christ, the courage to be is transformed into the courage to believe, to belong, to be made new. This is courage rooted not in existential defiance, but in eternal love.

We do not conjure it. We receive it.

We do not affirm ourselves. We are named.

We do not rise on our own. We are raised.

This is the courage of martyrs who sang through fire. Of saints who prayed through prisons. Of doubters who whispered, “I believe, help my unbelief.” This is the courage not of myth, but of Messiah. Not of ground, but of grace.

So yes, read Tillich. Wrestle with him. Let him ask you questions you’ve been too polite to raise in church. But then look beyond him. Lift your eyes to a hill. There you will see not an abstraction, but a God-Man. Bleeding. Dying. Rising. Reigning.

And in His face, you will find not only the courage to be, but the courage to live, to love, to die, and to rise again.

1. Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), 41.

2. Ibid., 3-5.

3. Ibid., 35

4. Ibid., 43.

5. Ibid., 3.

6. Ibid., 83-95.

7. Ibid., 126–127.

8. Ibid., 46.

9. Ibid., 184-186.

10. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 150–155.