Paul Tillich

Life

Tillich was born in 1886 in Starzeddel, a small village in the Province of Brandenburg, Germany (now part of Poland), the son of a Lutheran pastor. He studied theology and philosophy at the universities of Berlin, Tübingen, and Halle, and received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Breslau for his research on the philosopher Schelling. In 1912 he was ordained as a minister in the Lutheran Church. During World War I he served at the front as an army chaplain, and the horrors of war he witnessed there are said to have left a deep mark on his thought.

After the war he taught in Berlin (1919–1924), Marburg (1924–1925), Dresden and Leipzig (1925–1929), and Frankfurt (1929–1933). During this period he took part in the religious socialist movement and criticized the Nazis. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Tillich was dismissed from his professorship, the first non-Jewish scholar to be removed in this way. That same year, at the invitation of Reinhold Niebuhr, he emigrated to the United States, where he taught successively at Union Theological Seminary in New York, Harvard University, and the University of Chicago Divinity School. He became an American citizen in 1940 and died in Chicago in 1965.

Work and Contributions

His major work is the three-volume Systematic Theology (1951–1963). The method of correlation employed in this work serves as the framework for constructing his theology: philosophy first analyzes the questions raised by human existence, such as anxiety, death, and meaninglessness, and theology then answers those questions with the Christian message. Tillich defined faith as ultimate concern, that which a person takes more seriously than anything else. He explained that God is not one being among others but the ground of all being, that is, being-itself. He is also known for interpreting Jesus Christ as the "New Being" and for his "theology of culture," which discerns religious depth throughout culture as a whole, including art, politics, and psychology.

The Courage to Be (1952) and Dynamics of Faith (1957) were widely read even by general readers who ordinarily had little interest in religion. He described himself as a thinker standing "on the boundary" between theology and philosophy, and between church and society. He is also regarded as having had a significant influence on the theological thought of Martin Luther King Jr.

Influence on the Korean Church

In Korea, Tillich is presented, alongside Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann, as one of the representative Protestant theologians of the twentieth century. His major works, including Systematic Theology, Theology of Culture, The Shaking of the Foundations, On the Boundary, and Dynamics of Faith, have been translated into Korean. Attitudes toward his theology vary widely depending on the theological orientation of denominations and seminaries. Christian media have at times treated his doctrine of God critically, associating it with death-of-God theology, a strand of modern theology that proclaimed that "God is dead."

Assessment

Those who regard him highly believe that he built bridges between faith and intellect and between church and culture by expressing traditional Christian symbols in language that secular modern people could understand. By contrast, those who hold that theology must begin from biblical revelation criticize the method of correlation, in which philosophy sets the questions, for making revelation conform to human questions. In evangelical and Reformed circles, his doctrine of God as "being-itself" is seen as obscuring the biblical witness to a personal God. He has also been criticized on the grounds that his tendency to interpret the content of Scripture symbolically weakens its historical factuality.