Faith Before the Fork: Buber, Tillich, and Catholic Theology on the Definition of Faith

This page examines two books that are frequently assigned as an introduction to "faith" in a nondenominational register: Martin Buber's Ich und Du (1923), known in English as I and Thou,^[1] and Paul Tillich's Dynamics of Faith (1957).^[7] Each is set against Catholic theology as stated in Aquinas, the councils of Trent, Vatican I, and Vatican II, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The comparison is organized around the questions on which the three positions can be placed side by side: what God is, what faith is, whether revelation has content, whether anything mediates between God and the person, what a sacrament is, who Christ is, and what to make of doubt, law, and institution.

The occasion for the study is a pedagogical claim examined in Sections 09–11: that these two books state what Protestants and Catholics hold in common about faith, so that Catholic students could take a course built on them "without any problems." The analysis concludes that the claim was defensible only at the thinnest possible level and misleading at every level below it. Buber and Tillich are worth reading, and Catholic theology has engaged both with seriousness. But the shared ground the claim asserts does not exist: on the definition of faith, on mediation, and on the content of revelation, both authors take the position that Catholic theology was formulated to deny.

The book in question is Martin Buber's I and Thou (Ich und Du, 1923).^[1] Buber was a Jewish philosopher of religion, not a Christian theologian, and the "Thou" is the translator's rendering of the German intimate Du. Ronald Gregor Smith's 1937 translation chose the archaic English second-person singular to preserve the intimacy of Du as against Sie;^[2] Walter Kaufmann's 1970 translation rejected "Thou" as pious and archaic and rendered the title I and You, explaining in his prologue that "Thou" had come to suggest exactly the distance Buber meant to abolish.^[3] The point is the mode of address, not archaic pronouns.

His thesis: there are two primary word-pairs, I–It (the world as object, used and known) and I–Thou (the world as presence, met), and God is the Eternal Thou who can only be addressed, never possessed.^[1] The primary words are not two vocabularies but two modes of the whole person's existence; the I of I–It and the I of I–Thou are not the same I.^[1] The Eternal Thou is the one Thou that by its nature cannot become an It; every particular Thou is addressed through it, and it is addressed through every particular Thou.^[1] Buber's account is shaped by his Hasidic sources^[5] and is, at the same time, critical of any mysticism that dissolves the self into the divine, since dissolution abolishes the two terms that dialogue requires.^[1]

The comparison below runs along the lines that matter most. Each Catholic position is cited to a magisterial or classical source; each Buber position to his own text.

Two rows deserve comment. On the nature of God, the Catholic tradition does not choose between the ontological and the personal. Aquinas argues that in God essence and existence are identical, so that God is subsistent being itself,^[12] and that our names for God are neither univocal nor equivocal but analogical;^[13] the same tradition confesses God as the one who speaks, hears, and is addressed in prayer.^[21] Buber's Eternal Thou excludes the first half of this pairing on principle.^[1]

On Christ, Buber's Two Types of Faith distinguishes the Hebrew emunah, trust in a person whom one already stands in relation with, from the Greek pistis, acknowledgment that something is true; he locates Jesus within the first and Paul and the Church within the second.^[4] Catholic theology refuses the disjunction: Dei Verbum describes the obedience of faith as the free commitment of the whole self to God and the willing assent to the revelation he gives,^[18] and the Catechism treats personal adherence and free assent to revealed truth as inseparable.^[21]

Where the two converge is Catholic personalism, which was partly developed alongside or in response to Buber. Ferdinand Ebner, a Catholic, published Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten in 1921, slightly before Buber, arguing that the human spirit is constituted in the I–Thou relation established by the word.^[35] Romano Guardini's Welt und Person (1939) developed a Catholic account of the person as constituted by being addressed by God.^[36] Gabriel Marcel's distinction between problem and mystery, and between having and being, runs parallel to Buber's I–It and I–Thou.^[37] Above all, Karol Wojtyła's Love and Responsibility (1960) and, as John Paul II, his catecheses on the theology of the body ground sexual ethics in the personalistic norm that a person may never be treated as a mere object of use^{[38, 39]} — a norm structurally identical to Buber's prohibition on reducing a Thou to an It.^[1]

Gaudium et Spes 24, which teaches that man cannot find himself except through a sincere gift of himself, is the closest conciliar statement to Buber's dialogical anthropology.^[20] Balthasar wrote the most direct Catholic engagement, Einsame Zwiesprache: Martin Buber und das Christentum (1958), which treats Buber as a serious interlocutor while arguing that the Incarnation and Trinity complete rather than contradict the dialogical principle.^[41] Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity (1968) makes the same move at the level of doctrine: the Trinitarian confession establishes relation as a basic category of being, so that the dialogical structure Buber finds between God and man already exists within God.^[40]

The sharpest fault line is mediation. Buber holds that whatever is interposed between the I and the Thou, whether image, concept, institution, or intermediary, converts the relation into an I–It relation with the intermediary.^[1] Catholic theology holds the opposite as a matter of confession: there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus,^[28] whose mediation the Council of Trent places at the center of justification;^[27] the sacraments confer the grace they signify by the power of Christ acting in them;^{[22, 26]} and the neighbor is the place where Christ is encountered, so that the meeting with the person is not a detour from the meeting with God but its ordinary form.^[20] That is the point any comparison should be built around.

The second book is Paul Tillich's Dynamics of Faith (1957).^[7] Tillich was a German-American Lutheran theologian and philosopher, and this is his most accessible statement of what faith is. His thesis: faith is "the state of being ultimately concerned" — not belief in propositions with insufficient evidence, but the centered act of the whole person gripped by what concerns it unconditionally.^[7] Everything else follows from that redefinition: the analysis of idolatry as misplaced ultimacy, the claim that faith speaks only in symbols, the insistence that doubt is internal to faith, and the treatment of the historical Jesus.^[7] The book is a popular condensation of positions worked out systematically in the first two volumes of the Systematic Theology.^{[8, 9]}

The first row governs the rest. For Aquinas the act of faith is "to think with assent": the intellect adheres to what God has revealed, moved to do so by the will under grace, and this assent is distinguished from opinion, which assents with fear of the opposite, and from doubt, which does not assent at all.^[15] Vatican I defined faith as a supernatural virtue by which, with the help of grace, we believe that what God has revealed is true, not because its intrinsic truth is seen by natural reason but on the authority of God who reveals.^[17] Vatican II added, without retracting this, that the obedience of faith is the free commitment of the whole self to God.^[18] Tillich's "ultimate concern" is designed to retain the second element and discard the first.^[7]

Where Catholic theology can meet Tillich: his critique of faith as "belief with weak evidence" is close to Aquinas's rejection of faith as mere opinion,^{[7, 15]} and his account of idolatry as misplaced ultimate concern is nearly a commentary on Augustine's ordo amoris, the rightly ordered love that gives to each thing the measure of love its place in the order of being deserves and no more.^{[7, 33, 34]} Rahner's "supernatural existential" — the thesis that every human being is already ordered by grace toward God as the horizon of all knowing and willing^{[46, 47]} — and the Council's teaching on implicit faith among the unbaptized in Lumen Gentium 16^[19] overlap with Tillich's claim that everyone has an ultimate concern.^[7]

Catholic readers who engaged him seriously include Thomas O'Meara, Gustave Weigel, and later David Tracy.^{[48, 49, 50, 51]} O'Meara and Weisser's Paul Tillich in Catholic Thought (1964) collected the Catholic responses of the period and included Tillich's own reply;^[48] Weigel's 1950 essay in Theological Studies was among the first sustained Catholic readings;^[49] Tracy adopted and revised the method of correlation in Blessed Rage for Order and The Analogical Imagination.^{[50, 51]} Balthasar was sharply critical.^[42]

The decisive divergence is the same one as with Buber but running the opposite direction.^{[1, 7]} That insistence — that the finite can carry the infinite — is the analogy of being,^{[13, 44]} and it is what Tillich, following Barth's suspicion of it, could not accept. Barth's preface to the first volume of the Church Dogmatics called the analogia entis the invention of Antichrist and the decisive reason not to become Catholic;^[45] Balthasar's study of Barth is the classic Catholic reply.^[43] Tillich's own ontology allows finite realities to "participate" in being-itself only symbolically, never to convey it efficaciously.^{[7, 8, 52]}

The other point worth pressing is doubt. Tillich's most attractive claim for modern readers is that doubt belongs inside faith: because faith concerns the ultimate and the believer is finite, every act of faith carries a risk, and the acceptance of that risk is the courage of faith.^{[7, 11]} The Catholic reply is not that believers never doubt but that doubt is the shadow of the act, not its structure: certainty rests on God who reveals, not on the believer's psychological state.^{[16, 17, 21]} Aquinas holds that faith is more certain than science with respect to its cause, though less certain with respect to the subject's grasp;^[16] Newman's Grammar of Assent argues that real assent can be unconditional even where the grounds cannot be exhaustively demonstrated;^[32] and the Catechism treats voluntary doubt as a sin against faith and involuntary doubt as a difficulty to be overcome, not as faith's inner form.^[21]

These two texts were assigned at the University of San Francisco by a Protestant instructor who claimed, at the beginning of the course, that they state the same thing as Catholic theology — that they express the common belief shared by Protestants and Catholics — so that Catholics could also take the course and should do so without any problems. The claim turned out to be a manipulation. The instructor's defense, when the point was pressed, was that the claim concerned only the level of faith and not yet "the next step." But even at this step the two theologies are already very different, as the tables in Sections 02 and 06 record line by line.

The claim was defensible only at the thinnest possible level and misleading at every level below it. Here is how the levels sort.

Before asking why the claim could be made, the instruments that govern the arena have to be listed, in two tiers. The doctrinal tier fixes what "Catholic theology" means for the comparison in Sections 02–08; the institutional tier fixes what a Catholic university owes its students in a core theology course. Each row records the instrument, its source and year, what it requires, and whom it reaches. measured public record throughout.

Status of the evidence: the course record is documentary (degree evaluation: THRS 104, Summer 2016, B+, 4 credits);^[58] the assigned texts and the opening claim are the author's testimony; the reading of the instruments is public record.^[53–56] Nothing in this section depends on the instructor's motive, which is not in evidence and is not asserted.

Each clause of that statement rests on a documented position. Tillich opens Dynamics of Faith by declaring that faith as "belief in something with a low degree of evidence" is a distortion to be removed, and he proposes ultimate concern as the replacement;^[7] the definition he removes is, in substance, the definition Aquinas and Vatican I give.^{[15, 17]} The essays collected in The Protestant Era define the Protestant principle as the prophetic protest against any absolute claim made for a relative reality, and name the Roman Catholic sacramental system and hierarchy as the paradigm case of such a claim.^[10] The second volume of the Systematic Theology argues that faith cannot guarantee the historical existence or the name of the man Jesus, and that the certainty of faith attaches to the New Being manifest in the biblical picture rather than to the historical person;^[9] the Catechism confesses that the Word became flesh in a particular man at a particular time,^[24] and Paul holds that if Christ has not been raised, faith is empty.^[29] Buber's refusal of mediation is stated in I and Thou itself;^[1] the Council of Trent's canons on the sacraments and its decree on justification answer, under anathema, the claim that no created instrument conveys grace and that Christ's mediation is dispensable.^{[26, 27]}

The claim under diagnosis is: "these are the shared belief of Protestants and Catholics." A legitimacy narrative is tested by the audience it is aimed at and the effect it produces, not by the speaker's state of mind. Three readings are placed side by side so that the conclusion of Section 10 can be checked against each.

The conclusion of Section 10 — that the two statements are false statements, not overstatements — holds under all three readings. That is what makes it robust rather than accusatory: it does not need the instructor to have intended anything, and it survives the case in which he was sincere.

The move described in Section 10 has a name. It is the lowest-common-denominator method: take a rich tradition, strip out what is distinctive, present the residue as "what everyone believes," and treat the stripped parts as optional add-ons. Anyone who protests looks sectarian.

The Catholic tradition has a specific word for treating the content of faith as secondary to the experience of faith. It was condemned as modernism in Pius X's encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907), which describes the modernist account of faith as a religious sense arising from the subconscious and treats dogma as a secondary symbolic expression of that sense,^[30] and in the Holy Office decree Lamentabili Sane of the same year, which condemns the propositions that dogmas are only interpretations of religious experience and that revelation is nothing but the consciousness acquired by man of his relation to God.^[31] Tillich's account of faith, in which ultimate concern is primary and creed and sacrament are symbols that live and die with the concern they express, is close to a textbook instance of the position those documents describe.^[7] The instructor may have been sincere, but the structure of the pitch is the same whether or not he knew it.

The sentence "Catholic readers who engaged him seriously include Thomas O'Meara, Gustave Weigel, and later David Tracy; Balthasar was sharply critical" may be read as if it were evidence that Catholic theology and Tillich's already agree at the level of faith. It is not, and the point matters because names of Catholic readers are exactly the kind of evidence a "shared ground" claim tends to lean on. O'Meara, Weigel, and Tracy engaged Tillich as an interlocutor, which is what serious Catholic theologians do with serious non-Catholic ones.^{[48, 49, 50]} Engagement is not endorsement. The 1964 volume that O'Meara edited was organized precisely to register where Catholic thought could and could not follow Tillich, and Tillich's own afterword acknowledged the distance.^[48]

Balthasar's verdict, that Tillich's system dissolves the particularity of Christ into a general ontology, is the mainstream Catholic assessment.^[42] His critique of the "anthropological reduction" in Love Alone Is Credible is aimed at every method that makes human self-understanding the measure of revelation, of which Tillich's method of correlation is the most systematic modern form.^{[42, 8]} Even Tracy, the most sympathetic, treats Tillich as a method to be corrected rather than a theology to be adopted: Blessed Rage for Order revises the method of correlation into a mutually critical one,^[50] and The Analogical Imagination reinstates analogy — the very category Tillich subordinated to symbol — as the governing form of Catholic theological language.^[51]

This is the practical test for any future "shared ground" claim. Both criteria are drawn from the Catholic definition of faith rather than from any school within it: the one mediator is a scriptural and conciliar confession,^{[28, 27, 22]} and the content of faith is defined at Vatican I and reaffirmed at Vatican II.^{[17, 18]} Both Buber and Tillich fail that test on page one: Buber's opening pages establish that the Thou is met only without intermediary,^[1] and Tillich's opening chapter establishes that faith is ultimate concern rather than assent to any content.^[7]

The two comparisons collapse into a single table on the three questions that decide whether shared ground exists: the definition of faith, mediation, and the status of the finite.

Read across, the table shows why the classroom claim fails at the first level and not the second. On every row the Catholic column affirms a conjunction — trust and assent, presence and content, the finite carrying the infinite — where each of the other two columns affirms one conjunct and denies the other. A Catholic student can profitably read both books; a Catholic student told that both books state his own faith has been told something false about his own faith.