Word: christiane
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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This precarious perch for man's soul is a long way from traditional Christian belief. Paul Tillich. Reinhold Niebuhr said once, "is trying to walk a fence between man's doubts and the traditions of man's faith. He walks the fence with great virtuosity, and if he slips a bit to one side or the other, it is hardly noticed by us humble pedestrians." There are many humble and not-so-humble pedestrians who think that no man who calls himself a Christian has any business on the fence in the first place. A fence...
...thus acclaimed is also denounced by some orthodox Christian believers as not a Christian at all and possibly an outright atheist. Faith, according to Tillich. is not belief in God but "ultimate concern." Hence an atheist is a believer, too, unless he is wholly indifferent to the ultimate questions. Doubt is an in evitable part of faith. Sin is not some thing one commits, but a state of "estrangement" from one's true self. "The importance of being a Christian is that we can stand the insight that it is of no importance." says Tillich; the religious...
...razzle-dazzle paradox of his ideas, Paul Tillich is a solid, serious, dedicated thinker. If his critics say that his theology comes close to draining the meaning from all traditional Christian concepts, he replies that, for all too many Christians, these concepts lost their meaning long ago. What Tillich has been trying to do all his life is to make the Christian message meaningful for 20th century man in all his "estrangement." Tillich's greatest appeal is not to full-fledged believers but to the seekers after faith...
Faith & Doubt. Tillich's views of that drama were decisively shaped by Wingolf, a national fraternity of university stu dents, dedicated to combat with Christian principles the paganism of German fraternity life, which was built around the cult of dueling and the cult of getting drunk...
...which is imposed upon the individual, and religious "autonomy," in which the individual continually seeks and hopes to find. The situation of doubt, says Tillich, is "existential"-that is, inevitably part of the predicament in which man leads his human existence-and this existentialism, he feels, is where the Christian Church is grounded...