Ground of Being

The ground of being is Tillich's reformulation of the concept of God for a culture that has lost the capacity to think theistically. It is not a being, not even the highest or most powerful being. It is being-itself — the power of being that enables every particular being to be, the depth dimension that particular beings participate in but cannot possess, the unconditional that transcends every conditioned reality. Tillich insisted that the word "God" had become so corrupted by anthropomorphic imagery and superstitious thinking that it could no longer communicate what it was meant to communicate. His alternative — "the ground of being" — is a translation rather than a replacement. It names the same reality the religious traditions have always named, but it names it in a way that does not require belief in a supernatural person who intervenes in history. For Tillich, the ground of being is encountered not through metaphysical arguments about a supreme being's existence but through existential participation in the depth dimension of one's