Word: tillichs
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...Death," Paul Tillich once wrote, ''has become powerful in our time, in individual human beings, in families, in nations . . . But death is given no power over love. Love is stronger. It creates something new out of the destruction caused by death." This message of love is hardly original; it is as old as Christianity-and older. But Tillich asserted it in new ways that were particularly meaningful to his age. He considered himself a Christian theologian; because he was so unorthodox, some preferred to think of him as a philosopher. Beyond either, he was a loving, thinking...
...sold in the hundreds of thousands. Intellectually ambitious housewives learned from him about the "ambiguities" in their lives, and cocktail parties rang with Tillichian talk about "idolatry" and "ultimate concern." Even though his theories were only dimly understood by many laymen, there was good reason for their appeal, for Tillich tirelessly tried to relate theology to contemporary problems. "To do this," says Dean Jerald Brauer of the Chicago University Divinity School, "he had to live on the boundary between the profane and the holy...
...Dead. Paulus Johannes Tillich's long life on that embattled border shaped his thought. He grew up in that far-off 19th century world where stability and security were taken as a matter of course. His father was a stern Lutheran minister in a small town in northern Germany called Schonfliess; his mother had been a schoolteacher from the gemutlich Rhineland. Little Paul, who later remembered encountering the conception of the Infinite at the age of eight, decided at 16 that philosophy was his field and the Evangelical Lutheran ministry was the gateway...
...Tillich had felt the full impact of the holocaust that ushered in the modern world; now in the postwar years he joined in the fun and ferment with which that world began. Amid the night life of gay Berlin, he met and courted handsome Hannah Werner, and they were married in 1924. In daylight hours, he and a group of fellow intellectuals talked out a blueprint for the emancipated future; "religious socialism" was what they called it. For the next decade, Tillich cultivated his vineyard-writing and lecturing, teaching theology and philosophy at various universities...
Symbolic Language. Some God-minded Protestant thinkers concede that this new radical theology has considerable merit. Gordon Kaufman of the Harvard Divinity School believes that the movement is forcing other thinkers to undertake a long-overdue re-examination of the doctrine of God. And Paul Tillich, whose own writings point to a "God above God" that stands beyond the man-made deity of traditional theism, concedes: "I say yes to this movement insofar as it points to something above the symbolic language concerning God." Tillich also says no to the new theologians on the ground that they are abandoning...