Paul Tillich 1886 – 1965

Paul Johannes Tillich was a German-American Lutheran theologian and philosopher of religion and one of the most widely read religious thinkers of the twentieth century. After service as a chaplain on the Western Front in the First World War, he taught at Marburg, Dresden, Leipzig, and Frankfurt before being dismissed by the Nazi government in 1933 as the first non-Jewish professor barred from German universities. He spent the rest of his career at Union Theological Seminary, Harvard, and Chicago. His three-volume Systematic Theology and shorter The Courage to Be became twentieth-century classics.

Paul Tillich was born in 1886 at Starzeddel, a small town in eastern Brandenburg, the son of a Prussian Lutheran pastor. He studied theology and philosophy at Berlin, Tubingen, Halle, and Breslau, took his doctorate in philosophy at Breslau in 1910 and his licentiate in theology at Halle in 1912. After service as a German army chaplain on the Western Front he taught at Berlin, Marburg, Dresden, Leipzig, and from 1929 in the chair of philosophy at Frankfurt.

His refusal to dismiss Jewish colleagues led to his summary dismissal in 1933 and to his emigration to the United States, where Reinhold Niebuhr secured him a post at Union Theological Seminary in New York. From 1955 he held a university professorship at Harvard and from 1962 the Nuveen chair at Chicago. His major works are the early Religious Realization, The Socialist Decision (1933), the postwar Protestant Era, the three volumes of Systematic Theology (1951, 1957, 1963), the popular Courage to Be (1952), and the Dynamics of Faith (1957).

Tillich's method of correlation paired the existential questions of every cultural epoch with theological answers drawn from the symbolic resources of Christian revelation. His treatment of God as Being-itself, of faith as ultimate concern, and of the symbolic character of religious language made him the most widely read Protestant theologian in the postwar English-speaking world. He died at Chicago in October 1965.