Paul Tillich
A Brief Biography
When Paul Tillich died in 1965 the New York Times called him "one of Christianity’s most influential theologians."
Perhaps his greatest contribution was the successful interpretation of Christian truth for the age of doubt. Tillich spoke to modernity’s consuming crisis: meaninglessness and its discontents.
In the late 1940s, two world wars had taken their toll, forcing people in the 20th century to confront unspeakable, satanic horrors. Where was God in all that? Meanwhile, Existentialism and Modernity had thrown the baby out with the bathwater. People had questions and no answers: If God is dead, where do you get meaning and purpose? What do you do about guilt? Is there some other concept of forgiveness and grace without a clearly defined deity? And what about death?
Old-time religion had offered such certainty. Now there was only confusion and doubt.
Here’s where Paul Tillich comes in. God wasn’t dead, he said, but old concepts of God were. Moreover, the language used to talk about God no longer meant anything. What we needed were new concepts and new language.
Tillich knew something about language. He had arrived in the United States at age 47 in 1933 with hardly any English. The first public speech he gave here, in January 1934, was unintelligible. But he rose to the challenge.
He knew something about the horrors of war. During the First World War he had served four years in the trenches as a German army chaplain, and had twice been hospitalized for nervous collapse. To a friend he wrote from the front, "I have constantly the most immediate and very strong feeling that I am no longer alive;" and to his family, "we are experiencing the most terrible catastrophes, the end of the world order…"
He had personally witnessed the hijacking of Germany by Hitler’s Brownshirts. Tillich’s book, The Socialist Decision, published in 1932, is one of the most perceptive critiques ever written about both Nazism and Communism. He was professor of theology at the University of Frankfurt-am-Main when 400 stormtroopers arrived to viciously beat Jews and radical students until blood flowed in the halls. Tillich spoke out, demanding that Nazi students be expelled.
Later in life he liked to say, "I had the honor to be the first non-Jewish professor dismissed from a German university" after Hitler assumed dictatorial powers in 1933.
Tillich understood hopelessness and the miracle of hope that can dawn from it. He had a resolute will to create something new out of ruins. In 1936, he founded "Self-Help for Émigrés from Central Europe." He continued his refugee-relief work through the 1950s and was decorated for it by the West German government. He knew about dislocation and relocation. He liked to quote Genesis 12 ("The Lord said to Abram, ‘Leave your country…’").
In a sense, modern man and woman were refugees in the postwar modern world, searching for some way to make sense of it all. Tillich was precisely the person to speak to them.
"I start," Tillich said once of his thought, "with man asking questions about the ultimate meaning of life. People who listen to me are those who declare they don’t understand the Christian symbols that are given by the church and need them translated into modern language."
Articulating his view of religion, he wrote, "Being religious means asking passionately the question of our existence and being willing to receive answers, even if the answers hurt. Such an idea of religion makes religion universally human, but it certainly differs from what is usually called religion.
"It does not describe religion as the belief in the existence of gods or one God, and as a set of activities and institutions for the sake of relating oneself to these beings in thought, devotion and obedience… Religion in its innermost nature is more than religion in this narrower sense. It is the state of being concerned about one’s own being and being universally."
"Faith comprises both itself and the doubt of itself," he said. "To live serenely and courageously in these tensions and to discover finally their ultimate unity in the depths of our own souls and in the depth of divine life is the task and the dignity of human thought."
Unlike most theologians, Tillich was an extraordinary and gifted preacher. Many people knew his ideas only through his sermons. Perhaps his most famous sermon was "You Are Accepted," later published in 1948 in The Shaking of the Foundations.
Here he defined sin as "separation" and grace as "acceptance." In Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus of Jesus as the Christ, Tillich explained, "he found himself accepted in spite of his being rejected. And when he found that he was accepted, he was able to accept himself and to be reconciled to others."
"You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted! If that happens to us, we experience grace
Tillich wrote his seminal book The Courage To Be in the summer of 1950. Two years later it was published and quickly became a best seller. In it he addressed "angst deriving from meaninglessness" and spoke of "the courage to be in spite of" death, fate, meaninglessness, or despair, each of which in various proportions has threatened humankind throughout centuries.
"The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt," Tillich wrote. In other words, the only hope is the hope that appears when the situation is hopeless. And that hope is God.
Of his books, "none better captures the essence of Tillich’s thought than The Courage To Be," Peter J. Gomes wrote in a new introduction to the second edition published in 2000.
"The book became an indispensable classic, without which serious discussion of the meaning of life could not be undertaken, and it is virtually impossible to think of another book published in the twentieth century in the field of religion which had the immediate impact of The Courage To Be. No college reading list was complete without it, and its very title entered into the lexicon of theological conversation."
Gomes continued, "My first encounter with [the book] was in my freshman year at Bates College in 1961, when it appeared on the reading list of Religion 101. Paul Tillich had been my professor’s professor, and he never got over it; an entire theological generation would feel the same."
Tillich’s greatest work, of course, was his three-volume Systematic Theology, in which he attempted to fit all his ideas into a working model of the universe or "correlation." He correlated human questions − arising from situations people found themselves in − with divine answers provided by the symbolism of Christian revelation.
He grouped the questions under three headings: Being, Existence, and Life. By Being he meant a person’s essential nature, from which we are estranged in the same manner as Adam and Eve were estranged from Eden. Existence is the situation that estranged people find themselves in. And Life is the combination of Being and Existence.
God is the answer to questions about Being, Christ is the answer to questions about Existence, and The Spirit is the answer to questions about Life. As Time magazine explained it in 1959, "The three answers correspond to the triune God of Christian dogma − Father, Son and Holy Spirit, just as Being, Existence and Life may be combined to form a picture of man.
"Preceding the central pairing of three questions and three answers is a preliminary correlation of Reason and Revelation, to deal with the epistemological (i.e., how-do-you-know) problem. And following the central grouping is the correlation dealing with the earthly consequences of the divine-human encounter: the question of History, answered by the Christian symbol of the Kingdom of God."
Of course, Tillich had his critics. Switzerland’s Karl Barth was the other theological giant in systematic theology in the aftermath of World War II; his and Tillich’s theologies were so different that one had to choose between them. (Reinhold Niebuhr did not offer a third choice because he was seen as closer to Barth and because his theology was not systematic.)
In the decades since Tillich’s death, "Barth has become the darling of many conservative Christians," says Tom Driver, Paul Tillich Professor of Theology and Culture emeritus.
"Tillich remains the most important liberal theologian of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His thought is therefore crucial in the battle between liberal and conservative theology that is being fought out today in churches and seminaries. Hence, the study of Tillich is INCREASINGLY important."
Driver continues, "Although at the present time liberal religion seems to be losing ground to religious literalism or fundamentalism worldwide, it is imperative that this trend be reversed. Otherwise a series of religious wars threatens both democracy and the safety of the world. In this struggle for minds, Tillich is an immensely valuable resource."
Moreover, Tillich’s early writings (done in Germany before he emigrated) spoke then to totalitarianisms of both the Left and the Right. He was worried about the complacency of many of the churches. "He knew that there had to be a theological analysis and rebuttal of forms of political life that were, as he put it, of a ‘demonic’ character," Driver elaborates. "His analysis of the concept of ‘the demonic’ is astute, non-fanatical, and immensely relevant to a time such as ours when so many calls are being heard for war in the name of God."
Paul Tillich taught at Union from 1933 to 1955 and always spoke of the Seminary as "home," even in his farewell speech at Harvard, where he was University Professor from 1955 to 1962. His last appointment was as Nuveen Professor of Theology, Divinity School, University of Chicago.
He loved teaching and his students loved him. One Union student theorized that if Tillich were to lie feverish in bed, one would need only to remind him of his students, and he would arise, cured, to teach.
Tillich never lost his heavy German accent, which became the stuff of affectionate anecdote still repeated today, for example, "All faces have noses," Tillich’s rendering of "All faiths have gnosis." The year before he died, Tillich was asked by a television interviewer to explain his role in the American theological world. He replied, "I am the gadfly that stin-jes" (stings).
He died in Billings Hospital at the University of Chicago on October 22, 1965. With him was his wife Hannah, whom he had married in 1924. He was 79 years old.
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