Word: tillich
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Berlin in the '20s was perhaps the gayest capital in the world, and Paul Tillich was no stranger to night life. During one of the art students' fancy-dress balls, at which he turned up in a cutaway and turban, he met a handsome girl in long green silk stockings, named Hannah Werner. As Tillich put it recently: "Things went on from there...
Gathering Darkness. Things went on to marriage and a three-month walking trip through Italy, where Art Student Hannah introduced her fascinated husband to the wonders of medieval and Renaissance painting and architecture. "For years afterward," says Tillich, "I dreamed of the 24 hours we spent in Ravenna." Tillich built up an increasingly fruitful career of writing and lecturing; between 1924 and 1933, he taught theology and philosophy at the universities of Marburg, Dresden, Leipzig and Frankfurt. But darkness was closing in: "Gradually life changed around us, became rigid and timid...
...winter of 1931-32, a gang of 300-odd storm troopers invaded the university in Frankfurt and beat up leftist students. Tillich stood horrified in the midst of the melee, and in the investigation that followed took a vociferous part against the Nazi thugs. As soon as Hitler came to power the following year, Tillich read in the newspaper that he had been dismissed from the faculty...
Impressed by some of Tillich's writings on Religious Socialism, socialistic-minded Reinhold Niebuhr of Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary had offered him a post at Union, but Tillich hesitated. He called on the Minister of Education in Berlin. "For a full hour," remembers Tillich, "we discussed the Old Testament and the importance to Christianity of the Jewish tradition. At the end of that hour I knew it was over...
...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...