TILLICH, PAUL 1886-1965

Theologian

Responding to Modernity

Paul Tillich was the most influential Protestant theologian in the United States in the 1950s. His program was to meld traditional Christianity with modern sensibilies regarding science, psychology, sociology, and ethics. His influence was immense, and along with Niebuhr he was instrumental in developing a Christian realism which many religious people felt necessary in the modern scientific and technological world of the 1950s.

Against the Nazis

A professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt, the Prussian-born Tillich was suspended from that position by the National Socialist government in early 1933 and immigrated to the United States later that year. He took pride in asserting that he was "about the first non-Jewish professor dismissed from a German university." When he arrived he was given a visiting professorship at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Tillich became an American citizen in 1940. The post at Union became permanent, and he stayed there until summer 1954, a span of twenty-two years. On 1 July 1954 he was appointed University Professor at Harvard University Divinity School, a position he held for six years.

Culture and Religion

Tillich's work connected a variety of fields to theology and philosophy. He was always on the border. He was concerned with linking culture in its widest sense to religion. He did extensive work in art and depth psychology. But always he was concerned with what he called the Protestant principle, "the protesting voice of the prophet outside the temple calling the people back to God.…" In 1951 he published the first volume of his major work Systemic Theology. He said he had been preparing for thirty years to write it. The second volume was published in 1957 and the concluding volume in 1963.

Existentialism

A more accessible work and one which brought him much attention among the general public was The Courage to Be (1952), which approached existentialism from a religious perspective. His influence was also felt in the Christian response to the cold war arms buildup. A Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America task force, on which Tillich served, concluded that Christian teaching must oppose all unnecessary killing and destruction without surrendering to tyrrany. The important caveats, "unnecessary" and "without surrendering to tyrrany," were crucial moral underpinnings for U.S. policy in the cold war.

Sources:

Langdon B. Gilkey, Gilkey on Tillich (New York: Crossroad, 1990);

Wayne W. Mahan, Tillich's System (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1974);

Bernard Martin, The Existentialist Theology of Paul Tillich (New York: Bookman Associates, 1963);

Wilhelm and Marion Pauck, Paul Tillich: His Life and Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).

Tillich, Paul (1886–1965), Protestant theologian. He held university positions in Germany, but left the country in 1933. He settled in the USA and was a professor in turn at the Union Theological Seminary, New York, at Harvard, and at Chicago.

Tillich was a prolific writer and exercised great influence. His aim was to bridge the gap between Christian faith and modern culture. To do this he employed the ‘method of correlation’, according to which the content of the Christian revelation is stated as answering the questions arising out of the cultural situation. He interpreted this in terms of existentialism, ontology, and Jungian psychology. Probably the most important of his works in his Systematic Theology (1951–64).