Of course, Christianity is crazy. Of course, it is madness. How could it be anything else? God’s love doesn’t flow from equations, doesn’t fit into the clean lines of reason. Tillich calls it the ground of being, but I feel it more like an earthquake—violent, raw, shaking the foundations of everything I thought I knew. How could this infinite love make sense? It doesn’t, and I don’t want it to. I don’t want a God who fits inside my mind, who can be resolved like a riddle. I want the God who grabs me by the throat and demands that I live.
Tillich tells me to look at the depths—to stand in the trembling chaos of my own existence and find God there. And so I do. I stare into the void, into the infinite silence where answers die and questions reign. And there, in the nothingness, I feel the Something, the pulse of being itself. It doesn’t come as comfort; it comes as a command: Be. Even in your doubt, even in your despair, be. My hands shake. My knees buckle. But I am. Somehow, I am.
He speaks of the ultimate concern, and I feel it like fire in my chest, burning away my small, finite gods. The idols of certainty, of logic, of control—all consumed in the blaze of something greater. This is no gentle love. This is a consuming fire, a love that destroys in order to make whole. It tears at my ego, my defenses, my illusions of self-sufficiency. But oh, how beautiful it is to be undone by love, to be unraveled and rewoven into something truer.
And then there’s the stumbling block—the absurdity of a cross, the insanity of grace. It doesn’t make sense, and it never will. Tillich says it’s a paradox, a tension I must embrace without resolution. And so I do. I fall to my knees before the contradiction, the scandal of it all. A God who dies, a God who loves without condition, a God who demands my all and gives me everything in return. It’s too much. It’s everything.
Christianity doesn’t come to me like a gentle whisper; it crashes into my life like a tidal wave. And as I drown, I realize that this is the only way to live—to let myself be swept away by the madness of a love that makes no sense. Tillich doesn’t offer easy answers, and I don’t want them. I want the courage to be, to stand in the chaos of my existence and cry out to the God who is both mystery and ground. And when I do, I find Him—not as an answer, but as a presence. A love. A being that calls me to be.
© R Gordon Zyne