Who is Paul Tillich?

PAUL TILLICH

A BRIDGE BETWEEN THE DIALECTICAL AND

SACRAMENTAL IMAGINATIONS

His Biographical Details- His Childhood- His Education- His Career & Family Life

His Contributions- His Notable Works- His Various Theological Ideas- His Preaching

Conclusion

Report Content

Biographical Details

Born 20 August 1886 in Starzeddel, then a province of Brandenburg, Germany (now part of Poland)

Eldest – with sisters Johanna & Elisabeth

Father – Johannes Tillich – a conservative Lutheran pastor of the Evangelical State Church of Prussia’s older Provinces

Mother – Mathilde Dürselen – from the Rhineland and was more liberal

Paul Tillich at 4 – Johannes – superintendent of a diocese in Schönfliess

Biographical Details - Childhood

Schönfliess — a walled town founded in the Middle Ages


Left indelible marks: a feeling of intimacy with nature and a deep attachment to the church as the bearer of sacred meaning


1898 – Königsberg in der Neumark (Chojna) to begin gymnasium

Biographical Details – His Education

1900 – His father was transferred to

Berlin 1901 – Transferred to a Berlin School 1903 – His mother died of cancer 1904 – He graduated at the age of 17


1904 – University of Berlin


1905 – University of Tübingen


1905 to 1907 – University of Halle 1912 – Licentiate of Theology degree


1911 – University of Breslau – Doctor of Philosophy degree


Became a member of Wingolf during College

a Christian fraternity that is the oldest in Germany

Motto – “All things through Him “

HIM – refers to Jesus Christ


1912 – became a minister of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the province of Brandenburg

September 1914 – married Margarethe "Grethi" Wever

October 1914 – joined the German army as military chaplain – helped the soldiers to understand humanistic ways of believing & practicing religion

Biographical Details – His Career & Family Life

1918 – went home after the war1919 – Grethi got pregnant from

someone other than Tillich – they divorced

1919 to 1924 – Privatdozent of Theology - University of Berlin, beginning of academic career


1924 – married Hannah Werner-Gottschow

1924 to 1925 – Professor of Theology -University of Marburg, developed his Systematic Theology


1925 to 1929 – Professor of Theology -University of Dresden and the University of Liepzig


1929 to 1933 – Professor of Theology -University of Frankfurt and gave public lectures and speeches throughout Germany


1933 – got into conflict with the Nazi movement and was dismissed from his position


Summer 1933 – Reinhold Niebuhr visited Germany, offered him to join the faculty of Union Theological Seminary, New York

Tillich accepted


At 47 – Tillich with his family moved to America

1933 to1955 – taught as Visiting Professor of Philosophy of Religion in Union Theological Society


1933 to1934 – taught as Visiting Lecturer -Columbia University

1937 – acquired tenure at Union, promoted as Professor of Philosophical Theology


Then became an American Citizen

His Contributions

Between 1952 to 1954 – gave Gifford lectures at the University of Aberdeen

Resulted to the production of his 3-volume Systematic Theology

His Contributions

1954 – was appointed a position at Harvard University for the books he had written

1962 – moved to the University of Chicago

His Contributions – His Works - Courage To Be - Dynamics of Faith

1952 – book outlining many of his views on existentialism

1957 – book explaining faith as the “ultimate concern”

- Systematic Theology

His Principal Work

expressed his mature view of Theology

for him, Christ is the "New Being," who rectifies in himself the alienation between essence and existence

God, the Unconditioned and Ultimate Concern

Like Immanuel Kant – it is wrong considering that God could be grasped as a limited object of thought - experience

Tillich accounted for the specific character of the religious experience - “unconditioned” meeting of our thinking mind with Being

Existentialism

In spite of Martin Heidegger’s atheism, Tillich found an affinity on his position

He argued that anxiety of non-being (existential anguish) is inherent in the experience of being itself.

People are afraid of their own non-existence, Tillich says that in our most introspective moments we face the terror of our own nothingness.

What can sustain finite beings is being itself, or the "ground of being" which Tillich identifies as God.

This struggle of man’s being with non-being, of man’s call to righteousness and his sinfulness necessarily implicates God whose being alone explains why man still is, and will be in the eventual triumph of faith and grace.

Existentialism

one starts with the incompleteness, the brokenness, and the despair of Man in the existentialist sense and

ends with the completeness, the wholeness, and the unity of GOD in the classical sense

correlative elements must have something in common, must meet at some point

Theology of Correlation

Man (and nature) and God are all involved in the structure of being

God- the structure of being, but God

is not subject to, or determined by, the structure of being

- the inexhaustible depth within this structure


Man- and all of nature participate in

the structure of being- distorts it by his sin


Jesus Christ- the new being wherein God and

man meet decisively - the new being wherein the

essential or ideal structure of being is transparent to its unconditional depth

Systematic TheologyEssence fully shows itself within Christ, but Christ is also a finite man

The gap is healed and essence can now be found within existence –Christ is not God himself, but the revelation of God.

Christ was the emblem of the highest goal of man, what God wants men to become – to be “Christ-like”

Protestant Principle

True religion is that which correctly reveals the infinite, but no religion can ever do so in any way other than through metaphor and symbol

The Bible must be understood symbolically and all spiritual and theological knowledge cannot be other than symbol

"God does not exist. He is being itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him.“

God cannot be conceived as an object, no matter how lofty. We cannot think of God as a being that exists in time and space, because that constrains Him, and makes Him finite.

The Non-Existence of God

PreachingLike Bultmann, Tillich remained convinced that the apparent crisis of faith for many contemporary believers was rather a crisis of culture and language.

PreachingThus he argued: “Many of those who reject the Word of God reject it because the way we say it is utterly meaningless to them. They know the dimension of the eternal but they cannot accept our names for it. If we cling to their words, we may doubt whether they have received a word from the Lord. If we meet them as persons, we know that they have.”

PreachingIn his preaching, he consistently reinterpreted the central Christian symbols in existential terms, speaking of sin as separation, estrangement, or sickness and of grace as reunion, reconciliation and health. The preacher must challenge man to ground his being on God.

Like Barth and Bultmann, he is against liberalism. No rationalistic and scientific approach can take into account the human condition of sinfulness which, if not seen in the condition of grace, is meaningless.

On Other Theologians

With Bultmann, he agrees that only in inquiring into the ultimate existential concern of man, can the text be properly interpreted


does not agree to the unbridgeable gap which Barth sets between God and man

goes beyond Bultmann’s point of contact – not just anthropological but ontological


Tillich’s point of contact rests on the level of being - there is in man’s being an emptiness which causes anxiety to its depth to the point of non-being from which only the grace of God can save him


ConclusionTillich himself believed he was a

“boundary man,” - standing between the old and the

new- Tillich relates how his life has been straddling the limits between theology and philosophy, the church and society, Europe and America, Protestantism and Catholicism, liberalism and neo-orthodoxy, and so on.

Conclusionin his emphasis on the negative

moment within the description of the relationship between the divine and the human

in his insistence on the paradox of “the abounding of sin and the greater abounding of grace” as the “two all determining facts of life

in his underscoring of the ambiguous, estranged and broken dimensions of human existence

Tillich remained rooted in the dialectical imagination

Conclusionbut in identifying the possibility that the gracious presence of God is disclosed within the created and the human

in his method of theology and preaching that searches the point of contact in the human situation for the revelation of God

Tillich revealed dimensions of the sacramental imagination

ConclusionOctober 22, 1965 – died ten days after experiencing a heart attack at age 79

1966 – his ashes were interred in the Paul Tillich Park in New Harmony, Indiana

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Paul_Johannes_Tillich's_gravestone_in_the_Paul_Tillich_Park,_New_Harmony,_Indiana.jpg

Who is Paul Tillich?

Spiritual

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