Word: protestantism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Last month Paul Tillich, 72, received a special kind of present-a book entitled Religion and Culture: Essays in Honor of Paul Tillich (Harper; $7.50), whose 25 contributors include such groundbreakers as Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, Philosopher Karl Jaspers. Theologians Karl Earth, Emil Brunner, Rudolf Bultmann, Reinhold Niebuhr. Even Roman Catholic...
*This book, published in 1948, gave him a lesson in the semantics of U.S. publishing. His original title, The End of the Protestant Era?, was vetoed by the publishers on the grounds that no book with a question mark in the title sells well. "Then leave off the question mark...
This paradoxical relationship between faith and doubt is a keystone of Tillich's theology. From it he derives what he calls "the Protestant Principle," the necessity of challenging the claim to pure, "unbroken" truth by any institution or church, including Protestantism itself, or even by Scripture. From it he derives his all-important distinction between religious "heteronomy," 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...
Existential Anxiety. Tillich expounds his theology in two forms: his three-volume Systematic Theology (of which the third volume is still in the writing), and what he calls the "dialectical conversation" of his more popular books-The Protestant Era*, The New Being, The Shaking of the Foundations, The Courage To...
The victim of existential anxiety may try to sidestep it by frenetic activity, or by worshiping secular concepts, such as success or nationalism. Or he may try to bury his anxieties in a "heteronomous" religion that offers him readymade certitudes for his uncertainties. In either case, says Tillich, the individual...