### So, is there evil in the Godhead?

I would formulate Tillich’s answer very carefully:

> **No evil is present in the Godhead as an independently existing moral or metaphysical principle. But negativity or nonbeing belongs dialectically to the divine life insofar as God eternally overcomes it.**

That is substantially different from saying simply, “God contains evil.”

For Tillich:

**evil = distortion of being**

whereas

**nonbeing = the negative possibility against which being affirms itself.**

Nonbeing is involved in the divine life; **evil as estrangement is not**.

And this connects directly back to his anthropology. Human beings experience nonbeing through **finitude, death, anxiety and limitation**. Those things are not themselves sinful. Evil appears when finite freedom becomes **estranged from its ground**—when the creature tries to establish itself as ultimate instead of participating properly in God.

### Where Tillich becomes vulnerable to criticism

This is actually one of the places where I think Tillich becomes philosophically fascinating but theologically difficult.

If you say that God contains nonbeing and that the divine life depends upon eternally overcoming the negative, a critic can reasonably ask:

**Has Tillich really kept evil completely outside God?**

Suppose evil depends upon nonbeing, and nonbeing is somehow internal to the divine life. There seems to be at least a conceptual pathway:

**God → nonbeing → possibility of estrangement → actual evil.**

Tillich desperately wants to block the conclusion that **God → evil**. He does so by insisting that nonbeing is eternally conquered in God and becomes evil only under the conditions of finite, estranged existence. ([Wiley Online Library][3])

But critics can ask whether that distinction fully works. George Hunsinger, for example, highlights the tension between Tillich's claims that God both **includes** nonbeing and **absolutely transcends** it. ([Sage Journals][2])

And I think **this gets very close to the weakness you identified in Tillich's anthropology in your previous question**. His system wants to say simultaneously:

**finitude is good;

nonbeing accompanies finitude;

freedom makes estrangement possible;

estrangement produces evil;

yet God is the creative ground of the whole structure.**

That raises the uncomfortable question: **if God grounds the very ontological structure within which estrangement becomes possible, how far removed is God ultimately from the possibility of evil?**

Tillich's answer is: *God is the ground of the possibility of finite freedom, not the cause of its distortion*. Moral evil belongs to estranged creaturely freedom. A contemporary discussion of Tillich's theodicy similarly notes that he treats moral evil as the tragic implication of creaturely freedom rather than something God positively creates. ([MLK Institute][5])

But whether that distinction succeeds is precisely where you can press him.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5892046&forum_id=2#50061422)