Word: theologian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Though Harvard's University Professor* Paul Tillich is a rarefied philosopher and theologian, speaking and writing in a language he had to learn at the age of 47, in a country noted for its impatience with theology, he has come to be regarded by the U.S. as its foremost Protestant thinker. And though his working vocabulary is viscous with such terms as ontology, theonomy, numenous and the Gestalt of Grace, he is now devoting most of his time to teaching any Harvard or Radcliffe undergraduate who signs up for his highly popular courses...
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 theologians are recognizing Tillich as the most challenging Protestant mind of his time. "The sustained brilliance of Tillich is amazing," writes U.S. Theologian Gustave Weigel, a Jesuit, "and his incredibly wide knowledge matches his brilliance. Any witness of the Protestant reality looks for someone to give a unified meaning...
...appearance under the sponsorship of the scholarly Reinhold Niebuhr earned Tillich considerable attention both in and out of the classroom-even though his formidable German accent and even more formidable concepts left hearers with an impression which U.S. Theologian Walter M. Horton has described as "respectful mystification." (It was hours after first listening to Tillich, recalls Horton, "that I realized that the word 'waykwoom,' many times repeated, and the key to the whole lecture, was meant to represent the English word 'vacuum.' ") But gradually, Tillich learned to communicate with America's would-be believers. Gradually...
...Being is Tillich's replacement for the old symbol of "salvation," and he can take off his theologian's mortarboard and write about it with evangelical passion. "We should not be too worried about the Christian religion, about the state of the Churches, about membership and doctrines, about institutions and ministers . . . [These] are of no importance if the ultimate question is asked, the question of a New Reality . . . We should worry more about [this] than about anything else between heaven and earth. The New Creation-this is our ultimate concern; this should be our infinite passion . . . In comparison...
...over the Far East, 19th century Christian missionaries tried to win the heathen with the hymn-huffing harmonium. Now from West German Protestant Theologian Ernst Benz comes an attack on the meek little organ as an instrument of "tyranny and dictatorship" that smothers rather than kindles the spread of Christian music in Asia. Some rebellious young Americans are using the phonograph, Dr. Benz reports, but this "increases the dangerous identification of Christian religion with Western technology." The real need is encouragement of native musicians using native instruments to perform the finest Christian music in their own way. "Freedom fighters must...