Paul Tillich

Paul Johannes Tillich (August 20, 1886 – October 22, 1965) was a German-American theologian and Christian existentialist philosopher. Tillich was, along with his contemporaries Rudolf Bultmann (Germany), Karl Barth (Switzerland), and Reinhold Niebuhr (United States), one of the four most influential Protestant theologians of the twentieth century. Tillich is best known for his three-volume Systematic Theology (1951, 1957, 1963) and for his call for replacing “the God of theism” with “the God above the God of theism” (Tillich, 1952, pp. 182-90).

Biography

Bust of Paul Johannes Tillich by James Rosati in New Harmony, Indiana, U.S.A.

Paul Tillich’s life has been chronicled in a biography (Pauk & Pauk, 1976 ), a partially biographical book (Hopper, 1968), an "autobiographical sketch" book by Tillich (Tillich, 1966b), and two autobiographical essays by Tillich (Tillich, 1964, pp. 3-21; Tillich, 1967a, pp. 23-54).

Tillich was born on August 20, 1886, in the small village of Starzeddel in the province of Brandenburg in eastern Germany. He was the oldest of three children, with two sisters: Johanna (b. 1888, d. 1920) and Elisabeth (b. 1893). Tillich’s Prussian father was a conservative Lutheran pastor; his mother was from the Rhineland and was more liberal. When Tillich was four, his father became superintendent of a diocese in Schönfliess, a town of three thousand, where Tillich began elementary school. In 1898 Tillich was sent to Königsberg to begin gymnasium. At Königsberg he lived in a boarding house and experienced loneliness that he sought to overcome by reading the Bible. Simultaneously, however, he was exposed to humanistic ideas at gymnasium.

In 1900, Tillich’s father was transferred to Berlin, Tillich switching in 1901 to a Berlin gymnasium, from which he graduated in 1904. Before his graduation, however, his mother died of cancer in September of 1903, when Tillich was 17. Tillich attended several universities—the University of Berlin beginning in 1904, the University of Tübingen in 1905, and the University of Halle in 1905-07. He received his Doctor of Philosophy degree at the University of Breslau in 1911 and his Licentiate of Theology degree at the University of Halle in 1912.

That same year, 1912, Tillich was ordained as a Lutheran minister in the province of Brandenburg. In September 1914 he married Margarethe ("Grethi") Wever, and in October he joined the German army as a chaplain. Grethi deserted Tillich in 1919 after an affair that produced a child not fathered by Tillich; the two then divorced. Tillich’s academic career began after the war: he became a Privadozent of Theology at the University of Berlin, a post he held from 1919 to 1924. On his return from the war he had met Hannah Werner Gottswchow, then married and pregnant. In March 1924 they married; it was the second marriage for both.

During 1924-25 he was a Professor of Theology at the University of Marburg, where he began to develop his systematic theology, teaching a course on it during the last of his three terms. From 1925 until 1929, Tillich was a Professor of Theology at the University of Dresden and the University of Leipzig. He held the same post at the University of Frankfurt during 1929-33.

While at Frankfurt, Tillich gave public lectures and speeches throughout Germany that brought him into conflict with the Nazi movement. When Hitler became German Chancellor in 1933, Tillich was dismissed from his position. Reinhold Neibuhr visited Germany in the summer of 1933 and, already impressed with Tillich’s writings, contacted Tillich upon learning of Tillich’s dismissal. Neibuhr urged Tillich to join the faculty at New York City’s Union Theological Seminary; Tillich accepted (Tillich, 1964, p. 16).

At the age of 47, Tillich moved with his family to America. From 1933 until 1955 he taught at Union, where he began as a Visiting Professor of Philosophy of Religion. During 1933-34 he was also a Visiting Lecturer in Philosophy at Columbia University. Tillich acquired tenure at Union in 1937, and in 1940 he was promoted to Professor of Philosophical Theology and became an American citizen.

At the Union Theological Seminary, Tillich earned his reputation, publishing a series of books that outlined his particular synthesis of Protestant Christian theology and philosophy. He published On the Boundary in 1936; The Protestant Era, a collection of his essays, in 1948; and The Shaking of the Foundations, the first of three volumes of his sermons, also in 1948. His most important achievements during this period, though, were the 1951 publication of volume 1 of Systematic Theology – this brought Tillich wide acclaim – and the 1952 publication of The Courage to Be. The latter book, called "his masterpiece" in the Pauks’s biography of Tillich (p. 225), was based on his 1950 Dwight H. Terry lectures at Yale and reached a wide general readership.

These works led to an appointment at the Harvard Divinity School in 1955, where he became one of the University’s five University Professors – the five highest ranking professors at Harvard. Tillich’s Harvard career lasted until 1962. During this period he published volume 2 of Systematic Theology (1957) and also published the popularly acclaimed book, Dynamics of Faith (1957).

In 1962, Tillich moved to the University of Chicago, where he was a Professor of Theology until his death in Chicago in 1965. Volume 3 of Systematic Theology was published in 1963. In 1964 Tillich became the first theologian to be honored in Kegley and Bretall's Library of Living Theology They wrote: "The adjective ‘great,’ in our opinion, can be applied to very few thinkers of our time, but Tillich, we are far from alone in believing, stands unquestionably amongst these few" (Kegley and Bretall, 1964, pp. ix-x). A widely quoted critical assessment of his importance was Georgia Harkness' comment, "What Whitehead was to American philosophy, Tillich has been to American theology".

Tillich died on October 22, 1965, ten days after experiencing a heart attack. His ashes are interred in the Paul Tillich Park in New Harmony, Indiana.

Paul Tillich’s gravestone in the Paul Tillich Park, New Harmony, Indiana, United States

Theology

Tillich rejects “the theistic idea of God” and calls for allegiance to “the God above the God of theism” (Tillich, 1952, pp. 182, 186-88, 190). Unlike the God of theism, this higher God is “not a being” (Tillich, l951, p. 237). Tillich italicizes the “a,” suggesting that his meaning is “not one being” but, instead, more than one being. Some interpreters nevertheless hold that the God above God is a being – one being – who Tillich does not want to call a being because God “cannot be placed in a category with other beings” (McKelway, 1964, p. 123). But a substantial majority of Tillich’s interpreters hold that Tillich is an atheist and that the God above God is either metaphysical – pantheistic or mystical – or, according to Wheat, humanity (Wheat,1970, pp. 20-21, 61-146, 163-66). Both pantheism, wherein God includes all beings and everything else in the universe, and humanity agree with the idea that God includes more than one being. The clues to God’s identity emerge in four basic aspects of Tillich’s theology: (1) “the norm,” which is Jesus as the Christ rather than the historical Jesus, (2) symbolism, (3) the method of correlation, and (4) Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectics.

The Norm. In 1911, when he was still a student, Tillich presented to friends some “theses” that “raised and attempted to answer the question” of how Christian theology could proceed “if the non-existence of the historical Jesus should become historically probable” (Hopper,1968, pp.27-28). Tillich’s answer, an answer that became “the norm,” was to base theology not on (1) the historical Jesus, in whose existence Tillich had no real doubts, but on (2) “Jesus as the Christ,” who Tillich considered mythological. (Tillich wrote: “If the Christ – a transcendent divine being – appears in the fullness of time, lives, dies, and is resurrected, this is an historical myth” [Tillich, 1957b, p. 54]. Tillich also expressed disbelief in the virgin birth, Jesus’s miracles, and supernatural salvation – other aspects of the Christ’s divinity, including his being a savior.)

Disbelief notwithstanding, it is the “mythological” Christ, not the real historical Jesus, that Tillich adopts as his norm. A norm is a standard or criterion, something by which something else is judged. Tillich is using “Jesus as the Christ” as a standard by which a theology (his theology) is to be validated or repudiated. “A Christianity which does not assert that Jesus of Nazareth [the historical Jesus] is sacrificed to [replaced by] Jesus as the Christ [as ‘the norm’] is just one more religion among others” (Tillich, 1951, p. 135).

“Jesus as the Christ” rather than the historical Jesus must be the norm because the early Church’s Council of Nicaea (AD 325), and later the Council of Chalcedon (AD 451), declared that the Christ was fully God and fully man rather than part God and part man. “The decision of Nicaea saved Christianity from a relapse to a cult of half-gods” (Tillich, 1957a, p. 144). A Christ who “could only be a half-god who at the same time is half-man” could not serve as the norm (ibid., p. 93). Tillich’s point, a well-hidden point as it happens, is this: If God is a supernatural being, 100 percent God plus 100 percent man is arithmetic nonsense, because the parts of a person can add only to 100 percent, not 200 percent (Wheat, 1970, p. 164). Tillich apparently considers the “God above the God of theism” to be “fully God and fully man.”

Symbolism. A distinctive feature of Tillich’s theology is his transformation of the familiar terms of Christian theology into symbols that represent ideas radically different from what they have traditionally meant. The symbols include God, the Son, the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, innocence, the Fall, sin, salvation, revelation, the Kingdom of God, and even “he” and “who” (referring to God). For example, and regardless of the identity of the God above God, “God is the basic and universal symbol for what concerns us ultimately” and “to say anything about God in the literal sense of the words used means to say something false about him” (Tillich, 1954, p. 109).

The purpose of symbolism, according to Tillich, is to allow him to speak simultaneously to different people ranging from the deeply committed to those whose serious doubts about traditional ideas leave them open to Tillich’s modern message. In a sermon on “The Theologian,” Tillich explained this approach by saying that “the theologian, in his theology, must become all things to all man” (Tillich, 1948b, p. 123). Elaborating, he said, “We must become as though weak [believers in the traditional literal meanings] . . . . by participating – not from the outside, but from the inside –in the weakness of all those to whom we speak as theologians” (ibid., p. 125). Tillich believed that “as long as the pupil lives in a dreaming innocence of critical questions, he should not be awakened” (Tillich, 1959, p. 156). He also believed the doubters could be reached: “I can speak to those people, and they are able to understand me, even when I use the old symbols, because they know that I do not mean them in a literal sense” (Tillich, 1965, p. 191).

Princeton philosopher Walter Kaufmann, who considers Tillich an atheist, criticized this conversion of beliefs to symbols by saying that both Tillich and Reinhold Neibuhr “say No [to traditional beliefs] in ways that sound like Yes” and by calling the result “double-speak . . . designed to communicate contradictory views to different listeners and readers” (Kaufmann, 1961a, pp. 111, 130). Wheat asserts that Tillich uses symbolism “to undermine [Christianity] from within” (Wheat, 1970, p. 54). On the other hand, those who regard Tillich’s “God above God” as semantic quibbling assert that Tillich is simply maintaining a “careful balance” between questioning and faith and that Tillich is essentially a believer (Briesach, 1962, 136-50, 218).

The Method of Correlation. Tillich offers two seemingly conflicting explanations of his “method of correlation.” He first says he is correlating philosophical questions with theological answers. But his Systematic Theology does not employ a question-and-answer format, and Tillich presents no questions for the method to answer. According to Wheat’s analysis (1970, pp. 82-90), this is because “questions” is really a symbol for philosophy (the philosopher asks questions) and “answers” a symbol for theology (theology answers questions): philosophy and theology are being correlated to produce a “philosophical theology” (Tillich, 1948a, pp.83, 92-93) that correlates analogous philosophical and theological concepts that jointly symbolize a Tillichian concept (Wheat, 1970, pp. 82-92, 94, 104, 152-53, 174, 189, 196-98, 200-202, 205, 223-24, 232-40, 264). Therefore, in his second explanation of correlation, Tillich refers specifically to the “correlation” of God (the absolute of theology) and being (the absolute of philosophy), the “correlation” of revelation (theology’s source of wisdom) and reason (philosophy’s source of wisdom), and the “correlation” of the Christ or Son (second member of theology’s Trinity) and existence (second member, or antithesis, of Hegelian philosophy’s thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic). He also describes the three-part Trinity (theology) as a three-part “dialectical” movement (philosophy). Among the more important theology-philosophy correlates identified by Wheat are the following:

• Being and God: Tillich refers to “the correlation of . . . being and God” (Tillich, 1951, p. 163, italics added). These jointly symbolize Tillich’s absolute, the unidentified “God above the God of theism.”
• Trinity and Dialectic: Tillich writes, “The doctrine of the Trinity does not affirm the logical nonsense that three is one and one is three; it describes in dialectical terms the inner movement of the divine life as an eternal separation from itself and return to itself” (Tillich, 1951, p. 56, italics added). Trinity and dialectic both symbolize a three-stage “divine life,” or “thinking” that progresses from Yes to No and back to Yes, a higher Yes – from Yes to the God of theism to No to God to Yes to Tillich’s “God above the God of theism.”
• Father (first member of the Trinity) and thesis or potential essence (first member of a dialectic): both symbolize the initial Yes – Yes to the God of theism.
• Son (second member) and antithesis or actual existence (second member): both symbolize the No to God and to all supernaturalism. That is, they symbolize atheism, separation from God.
• Holy Spirit (third member) and synthesis or actual essence (third member): both symbolize man’s return to Yes (return to essence), but to a higher Yes – Yes to Tillich’s “God above God.”
• Adam’s Original Innocence (unity of God and man) and Hegel’s Spirit’s Unconscious State (potential unity of the metaphysical Spirit): both symbolize belief in the God of theism, belief that points to the potential (future) unity of man with Tillich’s “God above the God of theism.”
• The Fall (man’s separation from God) and movement from thesis to antithesis (the process of separation from unity, i.e., becoming disunited or fragmented): both symbolize man’s transition from theism to atheism, or from potential essence to actual existence.
• Sin (the state of separation from God) and self-estrangement (Hegelian man’s separation from himself through failure to recognize himself in external “objects” that, like man, are essentially the metaphysical Spirit): both symbolize man’s “existential predicament,” or separation from “the God above God” through failure to recognize as God the God man sees.
• Salvation (reunion with God) and movement from antithesis to synthesis, or (reunion with Yes): both symbolize the overcoming of estrangement, or man’s return to “God,” albeit a higher God, through recognition of that God in something external.
• Revelation (theology’s source of wisdom) and reason (philosophy’s source of wisdom): both symbolize the “insight” that the true God is Tillich’s “God above God.”
• The Kingdom of God (a wonderful place to live) and philosophy’s utopias (wonderful places to live: both symbolize the unrealized Tillichian Kingdom of God, where God “is all to all” – the “God above God” to all people.

Tillich’s “method of correlation” (Tillich, 1951, pp. 59-66) is related to his preoccupation with synthesis and to his desire to achieve what he called “a unity [synthesis] of theology and philosophy” (Hopper, 1968, p. 29). Even in his student years, Tillich “hoped that the great synthesis between Christianity [theology] and humanism [philosophy] could be achieved” (Tillich, 1967a, p. 37). At Union Theological Seminary he was given the title Professor of Philosophical Theology (Pauk & Pauk, 1976, p. 289). “Philosophy and theology,” he wrote, “are not separated and they are not identical, but they are correlated” (ibid., p. xxii).

Bibliography

• Adams, James Luther. 1965. Paul Tillich’s Philosophy of Culture, Science, and Religion. New York: New York University Press
• Armbruster, Carl J. 1967. The Vision of Paul Tillich. New York: Sheed and Ward
• Breisach, Ernst. 1962. Introduction to Modern Existentialism. New York: Grove Press
• Ford, Lewis S. 1966. "Tillich and Thomas: The Analogy of Being." Journal of Religion 46:2 (April)
• Freeman, David H. 1962. Tillich. Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co.
• Grenz, Stanley, and Olson, Roger E. 1997. 20th Century Theology God & the World in a Transitional Age
• Hamilton, Kenneth. 1963. The System and the Gospel: A Critique of Paul Tillich. New York: Macmillan
• Hammond, Guyton B. 1965. Estrangement: A Comparison of the Thought of Paul Tillich and Erich Fromm. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
• Hegel, G. W. F. 1967. The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. With intro. J. B. Baillie, Torchbook intro. by George Lichtheim. New York: Harper Torchbooks
• Hook, Sidney, ed. 1961 Religious Experience and Truth: A Symposium (New York: New York University Press)
• Hopper, David. 1968. Tillich: A Theological Portrait. Philadelphia: Lippincott
• Howlett, Duncan. 1964. The Fourth American Faith. New York: Harper & Row
• Kaufman, Walter. 1961a. The Faith of a Heretic. New York: Doubleday
• — 1961b. Critique of Religion and Philosophy. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, Doubleday
• Kegley, Charles W., and Bretall, Robert W., eds. 1964. The Theology of Paul Tillich. New York: Macmillan
• Kelsey, David H. 1967 The Fabric of Paul Tillich’s Theology. New Haven: Yale University Press
• MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1963. “God and the Theologians,” Encounter 21:3 (September)
• Martin, Bernard. 1963. The Existentialist Theology of Paul Tillich. New Haven: College and University Press
• Marx, Karl. n.d. Capital. Ed. Frederick Engels. trans. from 3rd German ed. by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. New York: The Modern Library
• May, Rollo. 1973. Paulus: Reminiscences of a Friendship. New York: Harper & Row
• McKelway, Alexander J. 1964. The Systematic Theology of Paul Tillich: A Review and Analysis. Richmond: John Knox Press
• Modras, Ronald. 1976. Paul Tillich 's Theology of the Church: A Catholic Appraisal. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1976.
• Palmer, Michael. 1984. Paul Tillich's Philosophy of Art. New York: Walter de Gruyter
• Pauk, Wilhelm & Marion. 1976. Paul Tillich: His Life & Thought–Volume 1: Life. New York: Harper & Row
• Rowe, William L. 1968. Religious Symbols and God: A Philosophical Study of Tillich’s Theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
• Scharlemann, Robert P. 1969. Reflection and Doubt in the Theology of Paul Tillich. New Haven: Yale University Press
• Schweitzer, Albert. 1961. The Quest of the Historical Jesus, trans. W. Montgomery. New York: Macmillan
• Soper, David Wesley. 1952. Major Voices in American Theology: Six Contemporary Leaders Philadelphia: Westminster
• Tavard, George H. 1962. Paul Tillich and the Christian Message. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons
• Thomas, George F. 1965. Religious Philosophies of the West. New York: Scribner's, 1965.
• Thomas, J. Heywood. 1963. Paul Tillich: An Appraisal. Philadelphia, Westminster
• Tillich, Hannah. 1973. From Time to Time. New York: Stein and Day
• Tillich, Paul. 1932. The Religious Situation. New York: Holt, 1932 (originally published in Germany in 1925 as Die religiose Lage der Gegenwart )
• — 1936. The Interpretation of History. New York: Scribner’s
• — 1948a. The Protestant Era. trans. James Luther Adams. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
• — 1948b. The Shaking of the Foundations. New York: Scribners
• — 1951. Tillich, Paul. 1951. Systematic Theology, vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
• — 1952. The Courage to Be. New Haven: Yale University Press
• — 1954a. Love, Power, and Justice. New York: Oxford University Press
• — 1954b. The Courage to Be. New Haven: Yale University Press
• — 1955. The New Being. New York: Scribner’s
• — 1957a. Systematic Theology, vol. 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
• — 1957b. Dynamics of Faith. New York: Harper & Row
• — 1959. Theology of Culture, ed. Robert C. Kimball. New York: Oxford University Press
• — 1963a. Systematic Theology, vol. 3. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
• — 1963b. The Eternal Now. New York: Scribner’s
• — 1963c. Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religions. New York: Columbia University Press
• — 1964, “Autobiographical Reflections,” in Kegley, Charles W., and Bretall, Robert W., eds. 1964. The Theology of Paul Tillich. New York: Macmillan
• — 1965. Ultimate Concern: Tillich in Dialogue, ed. D. MacKenzie Brown. New York: Harper & Row

• — 1966a. Morality and Beyond. New York: Harper Torchbooks
• — 1966b. On the Boundary. New York: Scribner’s
• — 1967a. My Search for Absolutes, ed. Ruth Nanda Anshen. New York: Simon and Schuster
• — 1967b. Perspectives on Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Protestant Theology, ed. Carl E. Bratten. New York: Harper & Row
• — 1968. A History of Christian Thought, ed. Carl E. Bratten. New York: Harper & Row
• — 1969. What is Religion?, trans. and intro. James Luther Adams. New York: Harper & Row
• — 1970. My Travel Diary: 1936 Between Two Worlds, ed. & intro. Jerald C. Brauer. New York: Harper & Row
• — 1981. The System of the Sciences, trans. Paul Wiebe. London: Bucknell University Press (originally published in Germany in 1923)
• — 1987. The Essential Tillich, ed. F. Forrester Church (anthology). New York: Macmillan, 1987
• Tucker, Robert. 1961. Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
• Wheat, Leonard F. 1970. Paul Tillich’s Dialectical Humanism: Unmasking the God above God. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press

See also

• Liberal Christianity
• Postmodern Christianity
• Progressive Christianity

External links

• Tillich profile, and synopsis of Gifford Lectures
• North American Paul Tillich Society
• Paul Tillich in the German-language Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon with further reading
• James Rosati's sculpture of Tillich's head in the Paul Tillich Park in New Harmony, Indiana
• Tillich Park Finger Labyrinth. Walk Tillich Park while discerning Tillich's theology. Created by Rev. Ressl after an inspirational walk in Tillich Park in New Harmony, Indiana.
• Sermons and lectures – audio recordings on Compact Disc