Theologian and philosopher, born in Starzeddel, E Germany. Educated in theology and philosophy and ordained a Lutheran minister (1912), he was a chaplain in World War 1, then pursued an academic career, but his religiously grounded Socialism and opposition to Hitler led to suspension from the University of Frankfurt in 1933. Emigrating to the USA, he held posts at Union Theological Seminary (193355), Harvard (195562), and the University of Chicago (19625). He emerged in lectures, sermons, and writings as an apostle to the sceptics, seeking to harmonize Christianity and modern culture. His existentially oriented work, The Courage to Be (1952), focusing on God as object of ultimate concern, was one of several that reached a wide audience, and he became perhaps the century's best-known American theologian. His principal work was Systematic Theology (3 vols, 1951, 1957, 1963).
Paul Johannes Tillich (August 20, 1886 – October 22, 1965) was a German-American theologian and Christian existentialist philosopher. Tillich was, along with contemporary Karl Barth, one of the more influential Protestant theologians of the twentieth century.
Biography
Paul Tillich was born on August 20, 1886, in the province of Brandenburg in eastern Germany in the small village of Starzeddel.
When Paul was 17 his mother died of cancer. Tillich studied at a number of German universities—those of Berlin, Tübingen, Halle, and Breslau—before finally obtaining a degree. Tillich taught theology at the universities of Berlin, Marburg, Dresden, and Leipzig, and philosophy at Frankfurt. Finding himself thus barred from German universities, Tillich accepted an invitation from Reinhold Niebuhr to teach at the Union Theological Seminary in the United States, where he emigrated later that year. Tillich became a US citizen in 1940.
It is at the Union Theological Seminary that Tillich earned his reputation, publishing a series of books that outlined his particular synthesis of Protestant Christian theology with existentialist philosophy (drawing on research in psychology in the process). Between 1952 and 1954 Tillich gave the Gifford lectures at the University of Aberdeen, which resulted in the comprehensive three volume Systematic Theology. Tillich's ashes were interred in 1965 in the Paul Tillich Park in New Harmony, Indiana.
Bultmann's influence
Tillich was influenced by a contemporary German theologian, Rudolf Bultmann, who argued that the Christian world view, as expressed in the Bible, was outdated. Tillich was quite impressed with Bultmann's call for the "demythologization" of the Bible and, in his own theological writings, undertook to replace the mythological expression of the Christian message with a new, existential interpretation.
Theology
Tillich's approach to Protestant theology was highly systematic. Consequently, Tillich's orientation is apologetic, seeking to make concrete theological answers that are applicable to ordinary daily life. Tillich sought to reconcile revelation and reason by arguing that revelation never runs counter to reason (affirming Thomas Aquinas who said that faith is eminently rational), but both poles of the subjective human experience are complementary.
In his metaphysical approach, Tillich was a staunch existentialist, focusing on the nature of being. Nothingness is a major motif of existentialist philosophy which Tillich employed as a means of reifying being itself. Tillich argued that anxiety of non-being (existential anguish) is inherent in the experience of being itself. Following a line similar to Søren Kierkegaard and almost identical to that of Sigmund Freud, Tillich says that in our most introspective moments we face the terror of our own nothingness. Tillich concludes that radically finite beings (which are, at least potentially, infinite in variation) cannot be sustained or caused by another finite or existing being. This Tillich identifies as God. Much of Tillich's phenomenological language with regard to being can be traced back to Martin Heidegger, with whom Tillich was in contact prior to 1933. Tillich also utilized some of the basic framework of Heidegger's fundamental ontology in the discussion on Being and God in the Systematic Theology.
Another name for the ground of being is essence.
Contrasted to essence but dependent upon it is existence. This Tillich takes to be sin.
Tillich's radical departure from traditional Christian theology is his view of Christ. According to Tillich, Christ is the "New Being", who rectifies in himself the alienation between essence and existence. This indicates, for Tillich, a revolution in the very nature of being. Thus for Tillich, Christ is not God per se in himself, but Christ is the revelation of God. Whereas traditional Christianity regards Christ as wholly man and wholly God, Tillich believed that Christ was the emblem of the highest goal of man, what God wants men to become. Thus to be a Christian is to make oneself progressively "Christ-like", a very possible goal in Tillich's eyes. In other words, Christ is not God in the traditional sense, but reveals the essence inherent in all existence, including mine and your own. Thus Christ is not different from you or me except insofar as he fully reveals God within his own finitude, something you and I can also do in principle.
"God does not exist. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him."
This Tillich quotation summarizes his conception of God. He does not think of God as a being which exists in time and space, because that constrains God, and makes God finite. But all beings are finite, and if God is the Creator of all beings, God cannot logically be finite since a finite being cannot be the sustainer of an infinite variety of finite things. Thus God is considered beyond being, above finitude and limitation, the power or essence of being itself.
Tillich stated that since things in existence are corrupt and therefore ambiguous, no finite thing can be (by itself) infinite. Tillich argued that symbols are immensely important to faith because "faith is the state of being ultimately concerned."
Political Views
Tillich became an outspoken socialist in Germany following World War I, writing much on the relation of religion and politics. Although Tillich turned chiefly to psychological, ontological and theological themes during his time in the United States, The Socialist Decision represents the culmination of nearly fifteen years' intense preoccupation with the question of religious socialism. Tillich was also an early member of the famous Frankfurt School, along with thinkers such as Theodor Adorno, Leo Lowenthal, Friedrich Pollock, Karl Mannheim, Kurt Reizler, Carl Mennicke and Adolf Lowe. Tillich was, among these, the leading scholar of religion and politics.
Critical views
Tillich was described as the "last great 19th century theologian" by paleo-orthodox Methodists Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon in their 1989 book Resident Aliens. They sharply differed with Tillich's understanding of the words, work, and person of Jesus Christ, and wrote that Tillich's innovations were little more than a retelling of 19th century Protestant liberal thought.
C. Lewis took issue with Tillich's agreement with Bultmann, that the Christian message needed to be "demythologized," arguing that the mythological terms in which the narrative is expressed are of a far richer and more multi-valent character than Tillich's existential version. Lewis thought that Tillich had unnecessarily demystified the stories, although Lewis' emphasis on myth and Tillich's emphasis on symbol may be interpreted as different ways of expressing the same thing. Nonetheless, Lewis rejected what he saw as Tillich's extreme departure from the traditional story of Christianity.
In additions to the criticisms of Tillich on the part of the religiously orthodox, he has also been assessed by secular humanist thinkers. Sidney Hook wrote about "The Atheism of Paul Tillich":
With amazing courage Tillich boldly says that the God of the multitudes does not exist, and further, that to believe in His existence is to believe in an idol and ultimately to embrace superstition. In this sense Tillich's God is like the God of Spinoza and the God of Hegel. Tillich, however, is one of the most foremost theologians of our time.
Many academic theologians make similar criticisms of Tillich's view of God. Ford accuses Tillich of adopting an impersonal God more akin to Eastern religious conceptions of an impersonal Godhead than the Judaeo-Christian personal one:
In many respects Tillich's writings may be regarded as one long polemic against the view that God is a being. The assertion that God is not a being runs counter to the monotheistic character of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, which conceives of God as a living, personal being.
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