Paul Tillich Quotes on God
Paul Tillich’s three-volume Systematic Theology (1951–63) and the more accessible The Courage to Be (1952) and Dynamics of Faith (1957) gave twentieth-century Protestant theology its most influential philosophical engagement with the question of God. The central commitments — the analysis of God as the ground of being rather than a being among beings, the corresponding doctrine that all theological language is symbolic, and the method of correlation through which Christian symbols supply answers to the existential questions disclosed by philosophical analysis of the human situation — articulate a distinctive synthesis of Protestant theology with the existentialist and depth-psychological currents of Tillich’s German background. The framework, developed across Tillich’s exile from Nazi Germany and his career at Union Theological Seminary, Harvard, and Chicago, shaped the postwar American theological mainstream and the broader Protestant engagement with secular philosophical culture.
Quotes
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Attributed to Paul Tillich:
“Faith is being grasped by an ultimate concern.”
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Attributed to Paul Tillich:
“Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is one element of faith.”
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Attributed to Paul Tillich:
“The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.”
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Attributed to Paul Tillich:
“Religion is the substance of culture; culture is the form of religion.”
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“Against Pascal I say: The God of Abraham , Isaac , and Jacob and the God of the philosophers is the same God. He is a person and the negation of himself as a person. Faith comprises both itself and the doubt of itself. The Christ is Jesus and the negation of Jesus .”
Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality (1955), p. 80 -
“One of the unfortunate consequences of the intellectualization of man's spiritual life was that the word "spirit" was lost and replaced by mind or intellect, and that the element of vitality which is present in “spirit” was separated and interpreted as an independent biological force. Man was divided into a bloodless intellect and a meaningless vitality. The middle ground between them, the spiritual soul, in which vitality and intentionality are united, was dropped.”
p. 82 -
“Plato … teaches the separation of the human soul from its “ home ” in the realm of pure essences. Man is estranged from what he essentially is. His existence in a transitory world contradicts his essential participation in the eternal world of ideas .”
The Courage to Be(1952) | p. 127