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The New Being
by Paul Tillich
The New Being was published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1955. This material was prepared for Religion
Online by Ted & Winnie Brock.
PDF by ANGEL (realnost-2005@yandex.ru)
Chapter 1: "To Whom Much is Forgiven. . ."
Jesus is on the side of the sinner. Forgiveness is not found among the righteous ones, for they
do not know how to give it. The Church would be more the Church of Christ if it joined Jesus
in its encounter with those who are rightly judged unacceptable.
Chapter 2: The New Being
Christianity as a religion is not important, for Christianity is more than a religion. It is the
New Being that is important. Resurrection is not an event that might happen in some remote
future, but it is the power of the New Being to create life out of death, here and now, today
and tomorrow. Where there is a New Being, there is resurrection, namely, the creation into
eternity out of every moment of time.
Chapter 3: The Power of Love
He who professes devotion to God may abide in God if he abides in love, or he may not abide
in God if he does not abide in love. And he who does not speak of God may abide in Him if
he is abiding in love. And since the manifestation of God as love is His manifestation in Jesus
the Christ, Jesus can say that many of those who do not know Him, belong to Him, and that
many of those who confess their allegiance to Him do not belong to Him.
Chapter 4: The Golden Rule
The great commandment as Jesus repeats it and the descriptions of love in Paul and John’s
tremendous assertion that God is love, infinitely transcend the Golden Rule. It must be
transcended, for it does not tell us what we should wish that men would do to us.
Chapter 5: On Healing (I and II)
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. Faith here, of course, does not mean the belief in
assertions for which there is no evidence. It never meant that in genuine religion, and it never
should be abused in this sense. The people whom Jesus could heal and can heal are those who
self-surrender to the healing power in Him. Today we know what the New Testament always
knew—that miracles are signs pointing to the presence of a divine power in nature and
history, and that they are in no way negations of natural laws.
Chapter 6: Holy Waste
There is no creativity, divine or human, without the holy waste which comes out of the
creative abundance of the heart and does not ask, "What use is this?"
Chapter 7: Principalities and Powers
Life, personal and historical, is a creative and destructive process in which freedom and
destiny, chance and necessity, responsibility and tragedy are mixed with each other in
everything and in every moment.
Chapter 8: "What Is Truth?"
There is not freedom but demonic bondage where one’s own truth is called the ultimate truth.
For this is an attempt to be like God, an attempt which is made in the name of God. Distrust
every claim for truth where you do not see truth united with love. The truth that liberates is
the power of love, for God is love.
Chapter 9: Faith and Uncertainty
We may not grasp anything in the depth of our uncertainty, but that we are grasped by
something ultimate, which keeps us in its grasp and from which we may strive in vain to
escape, remains absolutely certain.
Chapter 10: "By What Authority?"
Even the authority of Jesus the Christ is not the consecrated image of the man who rules as a
dictator, but it is the authority of him who emptied himself of all authority; it is the authority
of the man on the Cross
Chapter 11; Has the Messiah Come?
The Christians feel blessed, according to the words of Jesus, because they have seen the
presence of the saving power within the world and history. The Jews consider such a feeling
almost blasphemous, since, according to their faith, nothing of what they expect to happen in
the Messianic age has actually happened.
Chapter 12: "He Who Believes in Me..."
We cannot pray to anyone except to God. If Jesus is someone besides God, we cannot and
should not pray to Him. But he who sees Him sees the Father.
Chapter 13: Yes and No
Yes and No
Truth as well as life unite Yes and No, and only the courage which accepts the infinite tension
between Yes and No can have abundant life and ultimate truth.
Chapter 14: "Who Are My Mother and Brothers...?"
The image of God can be distorted by the images of father and mother, so that its saving
power is almost lost. This is not a limit for God, who again and again breaks through the
images we have made of Him, and who has shown in Christ that He is not only father and
mother to us, but also child, and that therefore in Him the inescapable conflicts of every
family are overcome.
Chapter 15: "All Is Yours"
No finite being can attain the infinite without being broken as He who represented the world,
and its wisdom and its power, was broken on the Cross. "Broken" does not mean reduced or
emaciated or controlled, but it means undercut in its idolatric claim.
Chapter 16: "Is There Any Word From the Lord?"
The Church calls not His words but His Being the Word of God. The Church believes that in
His Being, the eternal has broken into the temporal in a way which once for all gives us a
word, nay, the word from the Lord.
Chapter 17: Seeing and Hearing
We never see only what we see; we always see something else with it and through it! Seeing
creates, seeing unites, and above all seeing goes beyond itself. The disciples and the masses
saw Christ and through Him the God who is really God. He who has seen Him has seen the
Father: This is true only of the Crucified.
Chapter 18: The Paradox of Prayer
Words, created by and used in our conscious life, are not the essence of prayer. The essence of
prayer is the act of God who is working in us and raises our whole being to Himself.
Chapter 19: The Meaning of Joy
Joy which has in itself the depth of blessedness is asked for and promised in the Bible. It
preserves in itself its opposite, sorrow. It provides the foundation for happiness and pleasure.
Chapter 20: Our Ultimate Concern
Being concerned ultimately, unconditionally, infinitely is what Mary was. It is this that
Martha felt and what made her angry, and it is what Jesus praises in Mary.
Chapter 21: The Right Time
The Preacher starts his enumeration of things that are timed with birth and death. They are
beyond human timing. They are the signposts which cannot be trespassed. We cannot time
them and all our timing is limited by them.
Chapter 22: Love Is Stronger Than Death
It is love, human and divine, which overcomes death in nations and generations and in all the
horror of our time.
Chapter 23: Universal Salvation
We should ask whether we are able to feel with the evangelists and the painters, with the
children and the Roman soldiers, that the event at Golgotha is one which concerns the
universe, including all nature and all history.
Chapter 1: "To Whom Much is Forgiven. . ."
One of the Pharisees asked him to eat with him, and he went into the Pharisee's house, and
sat at table. And behold, a woman of the city, who was a sinner, when she learned that he was
sitting at table in the Pharisee's house, brought an alabaster flask of ointment, and standing
behind him at his feet, weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears, and wiped them with
the hair of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment. Now when the
Pharisee who had invited him saw it, he said to himself, "If this man were a prophet, he would
have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner." And
Jesus answering said to him, "Simon, I have something to say to you." And he answered,
"What is it, Teacher?" "A certain creditor had two debtors; one owed five hundred denarii,
and the other fifty. When they could not pay, he forgave them both. Now which of them will
love him more?" Simon answered, "The one, I suppose, to whom he forgave more. And he
said to him, "You have judged rightly." Then turning toward the woman he said to Simon, "Do
you see this woman? I entered your house, you gave me no water for my feet, but she has wet
my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I
came in she has not ceased to kiss my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has
anointed my feet with ointment. Therefore, I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven,
for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little."
LUKE 7:36-47.
The story we have read, like the parable of the Prodigal Son, is peculiar to the Gospel of
Luke. In this story, as in the parable, someone who is considered to be a great sinner, by
others as well as by herself, is contrasted with people who are considered to be genuinely
righteous. In both cases Jesus is on the side of the sinner, and therefore He is criticized,
indirectly in the parable by the righteous elder son, and directly in our story by the righteous
Pharisee.
We should not diminish the significance of this attitude of Jesus by asserting that, after all, the
sinners were not as sinful, nor the righteous as righteous as they were judged to be by
themselves and by others. Nothing like this is indicated in the story or in the parable. The
sinners, one a whore and the other the companion of whores, are not excused by ethical
arguments which would remove the seriousness of the moral demand. They are not excused
by sociological explanations which would remove their personal responsibility; nor by an
analysis of their unconscious motives which would remove the significance of their conscious
decisions; nor by man's universal predicament which would remove their personal guilt. They
are called sinners, simply and without restriction. This does not mean that Jesus and the New
Testament writers are unaware of the psychological and sociological factors which determine
human existence. They are keenly aware of the universal and inescapable dominion of sin
over this world, of the demonic splits in the souls of people, which produce insanity and
bodily destruction; of the economic and spiritual misery of the masses. But their awareness of
these factors, which have become so decisive for our description of man's predicament, does
not prevent them from calling the sinners sinners. Understanding does not replace judging.
We understand more and better than many generations before us. But our immensely
increased insight into the conditions of human existence should not undercut our courage to
call wrong wrong. In story and parable the sinners are seriously called sinners.
And in the same way the righteous ones are seriously called righteous. We would miss the
spirit of our story if we tried to show that the righteous ones are not truly righteous. The elder
son in the parable did what he was supposed to do. He does not feel that he has done anything
wrong nor does his father tell him so. His righteousness is not questioned--nor is the
righteousness of Simon, the Pharisee. His lack of love toward Jesus is not reproached as a
lack of righteousness, but it is derived from the fact that little is forgiven to him.
Such righteousness is not easy to attain. Much self-control, hard discipline, and continuous
self-observation are needed. Therefore, we should not despise the righteous ones. In the
traditional Christian view, the Pharisees have become representatives of everything evil, but
in their time they were the pious and morally zealous ones. Their conflict with Jesus was not
simply a conflict between right and wrong; it was, above all, the conflict between an old and
sacred tradition and a new reality which was breaking into it and depriving it of ultimate
significance. It was not only a moral conflict--it was also a tragic one, foreshadowing the
tragic conflict between Christianity and Judaism in all succeeding generations, including our
own. The Pharisees--and this we should not forget--were the guardians of the law of God in
their time.
The Pharisees can be compared with other groups of righteous ones. We can compare them,
for example, with a group that has played a tremendous role in the history of this country--the
Puritans. The name itself, like the name Pharisee, indicates separation from the impurities of

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