Tillich, Paul

▪ American theologian and philosopher

Introduction

born , Aug. 20, 1886, Starzeddel, Brandenburg, Ger.

died Oct. 22, 1965, Chicago

      German-born U.S. theologian (theology) and philosopher whose discussions of God and faith illuminated and bound together the realms of traditional Christianity and modern culture. Some of his books, notably The Courage to Be (1952) and Dynamics of Faith (1957), reached a large public audience not usually concerned with religious matters. The three-volume Systematic Theology (1951–63) was the culmination of his rigorous examination of faith.

Early life and education

      Born in Starzeddel, a village in the province of Brandenburg, Paul Tillich spent his boyhood years in Schönfliess, a small community east of the Elbe, where his father served as minister and diocesan superintendent in the Prussian Territorial Church. Life in Schönfliess—a walled town founded in the Middle Ages and surrounded by fertile fields and dark forests—left indelible marks on the impressionable boy: a strong sense of historical continuity, a feeling of intimacy with nature and its processes, and a deep attachment to the church as the bearer of sacred meaning in the centre of community life.

      This life-style, epitomized for Tillich in the person of his authoritarian and theologically conservative father, was challenged when Tillich first attended the humanistic secondary school in Königsberg-Neumark, where he was introduced to the classical ideal of free thought, untrammelled by anything except the rules of reason. He accepted that ideal enthusiastically. When his father was transferred to Berlin in 1900, he responded with the same enthusiasm to the kind of freedom that life in a thriving metropolis made possible.

      Tillich's love of freedom, however, did not make him forget his boyhood commitment to a rich and satisfying religious tradition; and how to enjoy the freedom to explore life without sacrificing the essentials of a meaningful tradition became his early and lifelong preoccupation. It appears as a major theme in his theological work: the relation of heteronomy to autonomy and their possible synthesis in theonomy. Heteronomy (alien rule) is the cultural and spiritual condition when traditional norms and values become rigid, external demands threatening to destroy individual freedom. Autonomy (self-rule) is the inevitable and justified revolt against such oppression, which nevertheless entails the temptation to reject all norms and values. Theonomy (divine rule) envisions a situation in which norms and values express the convictions and commitments of free individuals in a free society. These three conditions Tillich saw as the basic dynamisms of both personal and social life.

      His early attempts to solve the problem took the form of working out an independent position in relation to his conservative father; in this context he learned to examine personal experiences in terms of philosophical categories, for the elder Tillich loved a good philosophical argument. But the decisive, seminal encounter with the problem came during his theological studies at the University of Halle (1905–12), where he was forced to match the doctrinal position of the Lutheran Church, based on the established confessional documents, against the theological liberalism and scientific empiricism that dominated the academic scene in Germany at that time.

Development of his philosophy

      In his search for a solution Tillich found help in the writings of the German philosopher F.W.J. von Schelling (Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von) (1775–1854) and the lectures of his theology teacher Martin Kähler. Schelling's philosophy of nature (nature, philosophy of), which appealed to Tillich's own feeling for nature, offered a conceptual framework interpreting nature as the dynamic manifestation of God's creative spirit, the aim of which is the realization of a freedom that transcends the dichotomy between individual life and universal necessity. Kähler directed his attention to the doctrine of justification through faith, laid down by St. Paul and reiterated by Martin Luther.

      Tillich now concluded that this doctrine, which he called the “Protestant principle,” could be given a far wider scope than previously had been thought. Not limited to the classical religious question of how sinful man can be acceptable to a holy God, it could be understood to encompass man's intellectual life as well, and thus all of man's experiences. As the sinner is declared just in the sight of God, so the doubter is possessed of the truth even as he despairs of finding it, and so cultural life in general is subject both to critical negation and courageous affirmation. The rigid formulas of the Lutheran Church could thus be rejected while their essential content was affirmed.

      Tillich's first attempts to work out the details of this insight were in the form of Schelling studies, dissertations for a doctorate in philosophy (1911) and a licentiat in theology (1912). In the latter work especially, Mystik und Schuldbewusstsein in Schellings philosophischer Entwicklung (“Mysticism and Consciousness of Guilt in Schelling's Philosophical Development”), one can discern a probing of the implications of the Protestant principle for the very nature and structure of reality, especially in his explication of Schelling's view of sin and redemption as a cosmic event embracing all existence.

      Ordained a Lutheran cleric on the conclusion of his university studies, Tillich served as a military chaplain during World War I. The war was a shattering experience to him, not only for its carnage and physical destruction but as evidence of the bankruptcy of 19th-century humanism and the questionableness of the adequacy of autonomy as sole guide. The chaotic situation in Germany after the armistice made him certain that Western civilization was indeed nearing the end of an era.

      His practical response to this crisis was to join the Religious-Socialist movement, whose members believed that the impending cultural breakdown was a momentous opportunity for creative social reconstruction, a time that Tillich characterized by the New Testament term kairos, signifying a historical moment into which eternity erupts, transforming the world into a new state of being. But ideas, rather than political activity, were his main interest. At teaching posts in the universities of Berlin, Marburg, Dresden, Leipzig, and Frankfurt he participated eagerly in discussion groups searching for a new understanding of the human situation. He also wrote extensively, publishing more than 100 essays, articles, and reviews in the period 1919–33.

      In most of these writings Tillich was using the insight he had gained at Halle as a norm in analyses of religion and culture, the meaning of history, and contemporary social problems. The remarkable work, Das System der Wissenschaften nach Gegenständen und Methoden (“The System of the Sciences According to Their Subjects and Methods,” 1923), was his first attempt to render a systematic account of man's spiritual endeavours from this point of view. As early as 1925, in Marburg, he was also at work on what was to become his major opus, Systematic Theology, 3 vol. (1951–63).

Departure from Nazi Germany

      Tillich's passionate concern for freedom made him an early critic of Hitler and the Nazi movement, and in retaliation he was barred from German universities in 1933—the first non-Jewish academician “to be so honoured,” as he wryly put it. He then accepted an invitation to join the faculty at Union Theological Seminary in New York, and, despite initial difficulties with a new language and adapting his thought pattern to pragmatic American mental habits, he emerged as an “apostle to the skeptics” in his new homeland during the years following World War II. At Union Seminary (1933–55), Harvard University (1955–62), and the University of Chicago (1962–65), he engaged graduate and undergraduate students in searching dialogue concerning the meaning of human existence. His public lectures and books reached large audiences who did not usually show an interest in religious questions. In his most widely read books, The Courage to Be and Dynamics of Faith, he argued that the deepest concern of humans drives them into confrontation with a reality that transcends their own finite existence. Tillich's discussion of the human situation in these books shows a profound grasp of the problems brought to light by modern psychoanalysis and existentialist philosophy.

Principal work

      The publication of his Systematic Theology made available the results of a lifetime of thought. The most novel feature of this work is its “method of correlation,” which makes theology a dialogue relating questions asked by man's probing reason to answers given in revelatory experience and received in faith—theonomy's answers to autonomy's questions. The dialogue of Systematic Theology is in five parts, each an intrinsic element in the system as a whole: questions about the powers and limits of man's reason prepare him for answers given in revelation; questions about the nature of being lead to answers revealing God as the ground of being; questions about the meaning of existence are answered by the New Being made manifest in Jesus Christ; questions about the ambiguities of human experience point to answers revealing the presence of the Holy Spirit in the life process; and questions about human destiny and the meaning of history find their answers in the vision of the Kingdom of God. Readers of this and other works by Tillich have been impressed by the broad reach of his thought but also baffled by the philosophical terminology that he used in discussing God and faith. Those who see him as an advocate of agnosticism or atheism, however, may have misunderstood his intent. He rejected the anthropomorphic “personal God” of popular Christianity, but he did not deny the reality of God, as the conventional atheist has done. Modern “Christian atheists” who cite Tillich in support of their “God is dead” claim overlook the fact that for Tillich the disappearance of an inadequate concept of God was the beginning of a grander vision of God. Like Spinoza, he was a “God-intoxicated man” who wanted to help his fellow human beings recapture a relevant and dynamic religious faith.

      In his last years Tillich expressed some doubts about the viability of any systematic account of the human spiritual quest. But he never abandoned the insight that came to him at the University of Halle—that all of man's cultural and spiritual life could be illuminated by the “Protestant principle” of justification by faith; he was still working out its implications at his death in 1965.

Assessment

      Tillich was a central figure in the intellectual life of his time both in Germany and the United States. It is generally held that the 20th century has been marked by a widespread breakdown of traditional Christian convictions about God, morality, and the meaning of human existence in general. In assessing Tillich's role in relation to this development, some critics have regarded him as the last major spokesman for a vanishing Christian culture, a systematic thinker who sought to demonstrate the reasonableness of the Christian faith to modern skeptics. Others have viewed him as a forerunner of the contemporary cultural revolution, whose discussions of the meaning of God and faith served themselves to undermine traditional beliefs.

      Tillich himself believed he was a “boundary man,” standing between the old and the new, between a heritage imbued with a sense of the sacred and the secular orientation of the new age. He asserted that his vocation was to mediate between the concerns voiced by faith and the imperatives of a questioning reason, thus helping to heal the ruptures threatening to destroy Western civilization. He believed that from the beginning life had prepared him for such a role, and his long career as a theologian, educator, and writer was devoted to this task with single-minded energy.

Arne Unhjem

Additional Reading

Autobiographical essays may be found in Tillich's writings: The Protestant Era, trans. by J.L. Adams (1948); My Search for Absolutes (1967); On the Boundary (1966); and My Travel Diary: 1936, ed. by J.C. Brauer (1970). A good biographical study is Arne Unhjem, Dynamics of Doubt: A Preface to Tillich (1966).The Gesammelte Werke, 11 vol. (1959–69), a collection of Tillich's writings, makes available his early and mostly untranslated works, including in vol. 1, Frühe Hauptwerke. Systematic Theology, 3 vol. (1951–63), is Tillich's major statement of the meaning of Christian faith, together with The Courage to Be (1952), and The Dynamics of Faith (1957).Two important critical studies are Christoph Rhein, Paul Tillich: Philosoph und Theologe (1957), with emphasis on Tillich's early development; and J.L. Adams, Paul Tillich's Philosophy of Culture, Science, and Religion (1965), the best overall view of Tillich's thought published in English. Other studies include: C.W. Kegley and R.W. Bretall (eds.), The Theology of Paul Tillich (1952); D.H. Kelsey, The Fabric of Paul Tillich's Theology (1967); W.L. Rowe, Religious Symbols and God: A Philosophical Study of Tillich's Theology (1968); R.P. Scharlemann, Reflection and Doubt in the Thought of Paul Tillich (1969); and Wilhelm and Marion Pauck, Paul Tillich, His Life and Thought (1976), the first of a comprehensive 2-vol. study.

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