O DISCURSO RELIGIOSO APÓS A “MORTE DE DEUS”: UMA ANÁLISE A PARTIR DE PAUL TILLICH

Abstract

The primary objective of this master thesis is to characterize the possibility of reinstatement of the religious and theological discourse in our times, marked by the event of the death of God, from the work of philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich. Is it possible to speak of God in a serious way beyond metaphysics, after the event of the death of God? Without a valid answer all religious discourse is irrelevant. In order to answer I chose Paul Tillich, who dares to criticize all metaphysical systems which do not start from the finite and places the heart of truth in the supersensible. The truth of being is trapped in a world beyond, and from there it monitors the whole truth, in a God unpermissible in his essence, but that exists, in an evident way, in thought as the greatest being (St. Anselm), which can be indirectly reached by effects as First Cause (St. Thomas). From that starting point, metaphysics creates the foundation of the knowledge of God, as the fundamental basis, in the names of God. All this collapsed with the "death of God", which is the death of the metaphysical Jewish - Christian – Hellenic God. This was Friedrich Nietzsche's work and it destroyed all possibility of the supersensible as a source of knowledge, replacing it all by the finitude of life as will to power. This created the greatest crisis of the West, characterized by loss of meaning, emptiness, insignificance. There is no God, there is no foundation. To this deeply distressing problem, Tillich responds with an answer that does not intend to be metaphysic: it starts from the finite being, which has no supersensible to support himself. In the anguish of insignificance, he discovers the God above God, manifested in the Unconditional which nests inside man as a response to the fundamental concern. He finds the faith that recognizes the utter despair at the end of metaphysics, to create a new relationship with the divine from the symbolic world (no longer conceptual and much less literal). In this new language there is the possibility of historical interpretation on the concept of theonomy.