57 Facts About Paul Tillich

Paul Johannes Tillich was a German-American Christian existentialist philosopher, religious socialist, and Lutheran theologian who is widely regarded as one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century.

Paul Tillich authored many works in ethics, the philosophy of history, and comparative religion.

Paul Tillich's work continues to be studied and discussed at international conferences and seminars.

Paul Tillich was born on August 20,1886, in the small village of Starzeddel, Province of Brandenburg, which was then part of Germany.

Paul Tillich's Prussian father Johannes Paul Tillich was a conservative Lutheran pastor of the Evangelical State Church of Prussia's older Provinces; his mother Mathilde Durselen was from the Rhineland and more liberal.

When Paul Tillich was four, his father became superintendent of a diocese in Bad Schonfliess, a town of three thousand, where Paul Tillich began primary school.

In 1898, Paul Tillich was sent to Konigsberg in der Neumark to begin his gymnasium schooling.

Paul Tillich was billeted in a boarding house and experienced a loneliness that he sought to overcome by reading the Bible while encountering humanistic ideas at school.

In 1900, Paul Tillich's father was transferred to Berlin, resulting in Paul Tillich's switching in 1901 to a Berlin school, from which he graduated in 1904.

Paul Tillich received his Doctor of Philosophy degree at the University of Breslau in 1911 and his Licentiate of Theology degree at Halle-Wittenberg in 1912.

That same year, 1912, Paul Tillich was ordained as a Lutheran minister in the Province of Brandenburg.

Paul Tillich was hospitalized three times for combat trauma, and was awarded the Iron Cross for bravery under fire.

Paul Tillich later wrote a book entitled From Time to Time about their life together, which included their commitment to open marriage, upsetting to some; despite this, they remained together into old age.

From 1924 to 1925, Paul Tillich served as an Associate 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, Paul Tillich was a Professor of Theology at the Dresden University of Technology and the University of Leipzig.

Along the way Paul Tillich remained in conversation with Erich Przywara.

Reinhold Niebuhr visited Germany in the summer of 1933 and, already impressed with Paul Tillich's writings, contacted Paul Tillich upon learning of his dismissal.

Niebuhr urged Paul Tillich to join the faculty at New York City's Union Theological Seminary; Paul Tillich accepted.

At the age of 47, Paul Tillich moved with his family to the United States.

Paul Tillich acquired tenure at the Union Theological Seminary in 1937, and in 1940 he was promoted to Professor of Philosophical Theology and became an American citizen.

At Union, Paul Tillich earned his reputation, publishing a series of books that outlined his idiosyncratic synthesis of Protestant Christian theology and existential philosophy.

Paul Tillich 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, in 1948.

Paul Tillich's most heralded achievements, though, were the 1951 publication of volume one of the Systematic Theology, and the 1952 publication of The Courage to Be.

In 1961, Paul Tillich became one of the founding members of the Society for the Arts, Religion and Contemporary Culture, an organization with which he maintained ties for the remainder of his life.

Paul Tillich remained at Chicago until his death in 1965.

Paul Tillich died on October 22,1965, ten days after having a heart attack.

Paul Tillich used the concept of being throughout his philosophical and theological work.

Paul Tillich is critical of this mode of discourse, which he refers to as "theological theism," and argues that if God is a being, even if the highest being, God cannot be properly called the source of all being.

In distinction to "theological theism", Paul Tillich refers to another kind of theism as that of the "divine-human encounter".

Paul Tillich is quite clear that this is both appropriate and necessary, as it is the basis of the personalism of biblical religion altogether and of the concept of the "Word of God", but can become falsified if the theologian tries to turn such encounters with God as the Wholly Other into an understanding of God as a being.

Paul Tillich argues that the God of theological theism is at the root of much revolt against theism and religious faith in the modern period.

Paul Tillich is equated with the recent tyrants who with the help of terror try to transform everything into a mere object, a thing among things, a cog in a machine they control.

Paul Tillich becomes the model of everything against which Existentialism revolted.

Paul Tillich reminds us of the point, which can be found in Luther, that "there is no place to which man can withdraw from the divine thou, because it includes the ego and is nearer to the ego than the ego to itself".

Paul Tillich argued, as mentioned, that theological theism is "bad theology".

Paul Tillich is certainly considered its most important part, but as a part and therefore as subjected to the structure of the whole.

Paul Tillich is supposed to be beyond the ontological elements and categories which constitute reality.

Paul Tillich is seen as a self which has a world, as an ego which relates to a thought, as a cause which is separated from its effect, as having a definite space and endless time.

Paul Tillich disagreed with any literal philosophical and religious statements that can be made about God.

Paul Tillich further elaborated the thesis of the God above the God of theism in his Systematic Theology.

Many criticisms of Paul Tillich's methodology revolve around this issue of whether the integrity of the Christian message is really maintained when its form is conditioned by philosophy.

The norm is then subject to change, but Paul Tillich insists that its basic content remains the same: that of the biblical message.

Paul Tillich stated the courage to take meaninglessness into oneself presupposes a relation to the ground of being: absolute faith.

In 1957, Paul Tillich defined his conception of faith more explicitly in his work, Dynamics of Faith.

Paul Tillich relates courage to anxiety, anxiety being the threat of non-being and the courage to be what we use to combat that threat.

Paul Tillich writes that the ultimate source of the courage to be is the "God above God," which transcends the theistic idea of God and is the content of absolute faith.

Paul Tillich was sympathetic towards the young Marx's theory of alienation as well as his idea of historical materialism, but was opposed to rigid understandings of historical determinism that claimed the victory of socialism was inevitable, as espoused by many vulgar Marxists.

Paul Tillich identified three basic origin myths in romantic politics: blood, soil and social group.

Paul Tillich contended that whilst political romanticism could be critical of capitalism and industrial society, it could still be used by the capitalist class to advance their interests.

Paul Tillich viewed liberalism as intertwined with capitalism, arguing that it granted freedom to the capitalist class without liberating the masses, and believing it had a key role in dismantling traditional social bonds, including religious ones, as well as advancing colonialism and slavery.

Paul Tillich considered that the connection between liberalism and capitalism needed to be severed in order for liberalism's aspirations for freedom to be realised, advocating for an embrace of democratic socialism as an alternative.

Paul Tillich related these to three different historical eras: the early centuries of the Christian era; the Reformation; and the 20th century.

Paul Tillich was known as the only faculty member of his day at Union willing to attend the revivals of Billy Graham.

Paul Tillich's students have commented on his approachability as a lecturer and his need for interaction with his audience.

Martin Buber's disciple Malcolm Diamond claims Paul Tillich's approach indicates a "transtheistic position that Buber seeks to avoid", reducing God to the impersonal "necessary being" of Thomas Aquinas.

Paul Tillich has been criticized from the Barthian wing of Protestantism for what is alleged to be correlation theory's tendency to reduce God and his relationship to man to anthropocentric terms.

Some conservative strains of Evangelical Christianity believe Paul Tillich's thought is too unorthodox to qualify as Christianity at all, but rather as a form of pantheism or atheism.