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Paul Tillich

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Paul Johannes Tillich (August 20, 1886 – October 22, 1965) was a German-American theologian and Christian existentialist philosopher. Tillich was, along with contemporary Karl Barth, one of the more influential Protestant theologians of the twentieth century.

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Biography

Born in Starzeddel (in Guben county in what is now Poland), Tillich studied at a number of German universities—those of Berlin, Tübingen, Halle, and Breslau—before finally obtaining a degree. Shortly thereafter, in 1912, he was ordained minister in the Lutheran Church, and soon took up a career as professor. Except for an interlude as chaplain in the German army during World War I, he taught at a number of universities throughout Germany over the next two decades. Tillich taught theology at the universities of Berlin, Marburg, Dresden, and Leipzig, and philosophy at Frankfurt. However, his opposition to the Nazis cost him his job: he was fired in 1933 and replaced by philosopher Arnold Gehlen, who had joined the Nazi Party that year. Finding himself thus barred from German universities, Tillich accepted an invitation from Reinhold Niebuhr to teach at the Union Theological Seminary in the United States, where he emigrated later that year. Tillich became a US citizen in 1940.

It is at the Union Theological Seminary that Tillich earned his reputation, publishing a series of books that outlined his particular synthesis of Protestant Christian theology with existentialist philosophy (drawing on research in psychology in the process). Between 1952 and 1954 Tillich gave the Gifford lectures at the University of Aberdeen, which resulted in the comprehensive three volume Systematic Theology. A 1952 book outlining many of his views on existentialism, The Courage to Be, proved popular even outside philosophical and religious circles, earning him considerable acclaim and influence. These works led to a prestigious appointment at Harvard University in 1954, where he wrote another popularly acclaimed book, Dynamics of Faith (1957). He was also a very important contributor to modern Just War thought. In 1962, he moved to the University of Chicago, where he continued until his death in Chicago in 1965. Tillich's ashes were interred in 1965 in the Paul Tillich Park in New Harmony, Indiana.

Bultmann's influence

Tillich was influenced by a contemporary German theologian, Rudolf Bultmann, who argued that the Christian world view, as expressed in the Bible, was outdated. Cast, as it was, in mythological terms, Bultmann argued, with references to a three-tiered universe, a heavenly city, a "house of many mansions" which included numerous thrones, and so forth, it depicted a cosmos alien to modern men and women. The result, Bultmann believed, was that many contemporary people tended to reject the Bible and, with it, the message of salvation inherent in its narrative. The solution, he believed, was to recast the story of Christ's redemptive work in modern, philosophical, psychological, and scientific language that would enable today's men and women to ascertain the truth that the mythological language no longer conveyed. Tillich was quite impressed with Bultmann's call for the "demythologization" of the Bible and, in his own theological writings, undertook to replace the mythological expression of the Christian message with a new, existential interpretation.

Theology

Tillich's approach to Protestant theology was highly systematic. He sought to correlate culture and faith such that "faith need not be unacceptable to contemporary culture and contemporary culture need not be unacceptable to faith". Consequently, Tillich's orientation is apologetic, seeking to make concrete theological answers that are applicable to ordinary daily life. This contributed to his popularity because it made him easily accessible to lay readers. In a broader perspective, revelation is understood as the fountainhead of religion. Tillich sought to reconcile revelation and reason by arguing that revelation never runs counter to reason (affirming Thomas Aquinas who said that faith is eminently rational), but both poles of the subjective human experience are complementary.

In his metaphysical approach, Tillich was a staunch existentialist, focusing on the nature of being. Nothingness is a major motif of existentialist philosophy which Tillich employed as a means of reifying being itself. Tillich argued that anxiety of non-being (existential anguish) is inherent in the experience of being itself (In reference to Tillich's philosophy of art see The Scream by Edvard Munch). Put simply, people are afraid of their own death. Following a line similar to Søren Kierkegaard and almost identical to that of Sigmund Freud, Tillich says that in our most introspective moments we face the terror of our own nothingness. That is, we "realize our mortality", that we are finite beings. The question which naturally arises in the mind of one in this introspective mood is what causes us to "be" in the first place. Tillich concludes that radically finite beings (which are, at least potentially, infinite in variation) cannot be sustained or caused by another finite or existing being. What can sustain finite beings is being itself, or the "ground of being". This Tillich identifies as God. Much of Tillich's phenomenological language with regard to being can be traced back to Martin Heidegger, with whom Tillich was in contact prior to 1933. Tillich also utilized some of the basic framework of Heidegger's fundamental ontology in the discussion on Being and God in the Systematic Theology.

Another name for the ground of being is essence. Essence is thought of as the power of being, and is forever unassailable by the conscious mind. As such it remains beyond the realm of thought, preserving the need for revelation in the Christian tradition.

Contrasted to essence but dependent upon it is existence. Existence is that which is finite. Essence is the infinite. Since existence is being and essence is the ground of being, then essence is the ground or source of existence. But because the one is infinite and the other not, then existence (the finite) is fundamentally alienated from the essence. Man is alienated from God. This Tillich takes to be sin. To exist is to be alienated.

Tillich's radical departure from traditional Christian theology is his view of Christ. According to Tillich, Christ is the "New Being", who rectifies in himself the alienation between essence and existence. Essence fully shows itself within Christ, but Christ is also a finite man. This indicates, for Tillich, a revolution in the very nature of being. The gap is healed and essence can now be found within existence. Thus for Tillich, Christ is not God per se in himself, but Christ is the revelation of God. Whereas traditional Christianity regards Christ as wholly man and wholly God, Tillich believed that Christ was the emblem of the highest goal of man, what God wants men to become. Thus to be a Christian is to make oneself progressively "Christ-like", a very possible goal in Tillich's eyes. In other words, Christ is not God in the traditional sense, but reveals the essence inherent in all existence, including mine and your own. Thus Christ is not different from you or me except insofar as he fully reveals God within his own finitude, something you and I can also do in principle.

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

This Tillich quotation summarizes his conception of God. He does not think of God as a being which exists in time and space, because that constrains God, and makes God finite. But all beings are finite, and if God is the Creator of all beings, God cannot logically be finite since a finite being cannot be the sustainer of an infinite variety of finite things. Thus God is considered beyond being, above finitude and limitation, the power or essence of being itself.

Tillich stated that since things in existence are corrupt and therefore ambiguous, no finite thing can be (by itself) infinite. All that is possible is for the finite to be a vehicle for revealing the infinite, but the two should never be confused. This leaves religion in the situation where it should not be taken too dogmatically, because of its conceptual and therefore finite and imperfect nature. 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. Thus the whole of the Bible should be understood symbolically, and all spiritual and theological knowledge cannot be other than symbol. This idea is used by theologians as an effective counterpoint to religious fundamentalism. Tillich argued that symbols are immensely important to faith because "faith is the state of being ultimately concerned." Faith without symbols is a form of idolatry. It is faith in something finite, something that can be expressed without symbols, and something that is fundamentally less than the ultimate.

Critical views

Tillich was described as the "last great 19th century theologian" by paleo-orthodox Methodists Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon in their 1989 book Resident Aliens. They contended that Tillich, though brilliant, failed to take seriously the words, work, and person of Jesus Christ, and that Tillich's innovations were little more than a retelling of 19th century Protestant liberal thought.

C. S. Lewis took issue with Tillich's position which agreed with Bultmann, that the Christian message needed to be "demythologized," arguing that the mythological terms in which the narrative is expressed are of a far richer and more multi-valent character than Tillich's existential version. Lewis thought that Tillich had unnecessarily demystified the stories, although Lewis' emphasis on myth and Tillich's emphasis on symbol may be interpreted as different ways of expressing the same thing. Nonetheless, Lewis rejected what he saw as Tillich's extreme departure from the traditional story of Christianity.

In additions to the criticisms of Tillich on the part of the religiously orthodox, he has also been criticized by secular humanist thinkers. Sidney Hook wrote about "The Atheism of Paul Tillich":

With amazing courage Tillich boldly says that the God of the multitudes does not exist, and further, that to believe in His existence is to believe in an idol and ultimately to embrace superstition. God cannot be an entity among entities, even the highest. He is being-in-itself. In this sense Tillich's God is like the God of Spinoza and the God of Hegel. Both Spinoza and Hegel were denounced for their atheism by the theologians of the past because their God was not a Being or an Entity. Tillich, however, is one of the most foremost theologians of our time.

Corliss Lamont did not specifically refer to Paul Tillich in his [The Philosophy of Humanism], but his complaint about the tendency of theologians and philosophers to redefine God in order to safeguard religious faith from philosophical criticism may be applicable to him:

It is my opinion that these types of redefinition engender considerable intellectual and philosophic confusion. If our supreme aim is to achieve on this earth the good society and the interconnectedness of humankind, together with as close an approach as possible to human omniscience and omnipotence, then we shall get much further by describing our goal as precisely that than by befuddling people through labeling it God.

Bibliography

References

See also

External links

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