Paul Tillich Method Of Correlation

[Leonides Suttle]

Tillichs work attracted scholarship from other influential thinkers like Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, H. Richard Niebuhr, George Lindbeck, Erich Przywara, James Luther Adams, Avery Cardinal Dulles, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sallie McFague, Richard John Neuhaus, David Novak, Thomas Merton, Michael Novak, and Martin Luther King Jr. According to H. Richard Niebuhr, "[t]he reading of Systematic Theology can be a great voyage of discovery into a rich and deep, and inclusive and yet elaborated, vision and understanding of human life in the presence of the mystery of God."[7] John Herman Randall Jr. lauded the Systematic Theology as "beyond doubt the richest, most suggestive, and most challenging philosophical theology our day has produced."[8]

Tillich was born on August 20, 1886, in the small village of Starzeddel, Province of Brandenburg, then part of Germany (modern-day Starosiedle, Poland). He had two younger sisters. Tillich's Prussian father, Johannes Tillich, was a conservative Lutheran pastor of the Evangelical State Church of Prussia's older Provinces; his mother, Mathilde Drselen, was from the Rhineland and more liberal.[citation needed]

When Tillich was four, his father was assigned to Bad Schnfliess (now Trzcińsko-Zdrj, Poland), a town of three thousand, where Tillich began primary school. In 1898, Tillich was sent to Knigsberg in der Neumark (now Chojna, Poland) to begin his gymnasium schooling. He was billeted in a boarding house and lonely, so he read the Bible. At school, he discovered humanist ideas.[9]

In 1900, Tillich's father was transferred to Berlin. Tillich switched to a Berlin school in 1901 and graduated in 1904. In September of the preceding year, his mother died of cancer; Tillich was 17. He attended several universities: the University of Berlin beginning in 1904; the University of Tbingen in 1905; and the University of Halle-Wittenberg from 1905 to 1907. He received his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree at the University of Breslau in 1911 and his Licentiate of Theology at Halle-Wittenberg in 1912.[9] His PhD dissertation at Breslau was on Schelling and the history of religion.[10]

From 1924 to 1925, Tillich served as an Associate Professor of Theology at the University of Marburg, where he began to develop his systematic theology, teaching a course on it during the last of his three terms. While at Marburg, Tillich developed a professional relationship with both Rudolf Bultmann and Martin Heidegger.[16] From 1925 until 1929, Tillich was a Professor of Theology at the Dresden University of Technology and the University of Leipzig. Then, succeeding Max Scheler (who had died suddenly in 1928), Tillich held the post of "Professor of Philosophy and Sociology"[17] at the University of Frankfurt from 1929 to 1933. While at Frankfurt Tillich's two assistants (both completing their doctorates under him) were Harald Poelchau and Theodor Adorno (in 1931 Leo Strauss had applied for the same position but was rejected).[18] During that period Tillich also "was instrumental in hiring Max Horkheimer as the Director of the Institut fr Sozialforschung and to a professorship in sociology at the University of Frankfurt."[19] In Winter Term 1930-31 Tillich and Horkheimer together team-taught a course on John Locke; and during the several terms to immediately follow Tillich and Adorno together led seminars on Georg Simmel, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.[20] Along the way Tillich also remained in conversation with Erich Przywara.[21]

While at the University of Frankfurt, Tillich traveled throughout Germany giving public lectures and speeches that brought him into conflict with the Nazi movement. Ten weeks after Adolf Hitler became German Chancellor, on 13 April 1933 Tillich, along with Karl Mannheim and Max Horkheimer, were among the "first batch"[20] of prominent German academic "enemies of the Reich"[22] to be summarily dismissed from their tenured positions for solely ideological and/or racial reasons.[23][24] Reinhold Niebuhr visited Germany in the summer of 1933 and, already impressed with Tillich's writings (they had known one another since 1919),[17] contacted Tillich upon learning of his dismissal. Niebuhr urged Tillich to join the faculty at New York City's Union Theological Seminary; Tillich accepted.[25][26]

Tillich acquired tenure at the Union Theological Seminary in 1937, and in 1940 he was promoted to Professor of Philosophical Theology and became an American citizen.[9]At Union, Tillich earned his reputation, publishing a series of books that outlined his idiosyncratic synthesis of Protestant Christian theology and existential philosophy. He published On the Boundary in 1936; The Protestant Era, a collection of his essays, in 1948; and The Shaking of the Foundations, the first of three volumes of his sermons, also in 1948. His collections of sermons gave him a broader audience than he had yet experienced.

These works led to an appointment at Harvard Divinity School in 1955, where he was University Professor,[28] among the (at the time) five highest ranking professors at Harvard. He was primarily a professor of undergraduates, because Harvard did not have a department of religion for them, but was thereby more exposed to the wider university and "most fully embodied the ideal of a University Professor."[29] In 1959, Tillich was featured on the cover of Time magazine.[30]

In 1961, Tillich became one of the founding members of the Society for the Arts, Religion and Contemporary Culture, an organization with which he maintained ties for the remainder of his life.[31] During this period, he published volume two of the Systematic Theology, as well as the popular book Dynamics of Faith, both in 1957. Tillich's career at Harvard lasted until 1962, when he was appointed John Nuveen Professor of Theology at the University of Chicago. He remained at Chicago until his death in 1965.

Volume three of Tillich's Systematic Theology was published in 1963. In 1964, Tillich became the first theologian to be honored in Kegley and Bretall's Library of Living Theology: "The adjective 'great,' in our opinion, can be applied to very few thinkers of our time, but Tillich, we are far from alone in believing, stands unquestionably amongst these few."[32] A widely quoted critical assessment of his importance was Georgia Harkness' comment: "What Whitehead was to American philosophy, Tillich has been to American theology."[33][34]

Tillich died on October 22, 1965, ten days after having a heart attack. In 1966, his ashes were interred in the Paul Tillich Park in New Harmony, Indiana. His gravestone inscription reads: "And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit for his season, his leaf also shall not wither. And whatsoever he doeth shall prosper." (Psalm 1:3)

For "being" remains the content, the mystery, and the eternal aporia of thinking. No theology can suppress the notion of being as the power of being. One cannot separate them. In the moment in which one says that God is or that he has being, the question arises as to how his relation to being is understood. The only possible answer seems to be that God is being-itself, in the sense of the power of being or the power to conquer nonbeing.[35]

Tillich's preliminary analysis of being ascends from the human subject's asking of the ontological question ("What is being itself?"), upwards to the highest categories of metaphysics.[36] He distinguishes among four levels of ontological analysis: self-world;[37] dynamics and form, freedom and destiny, and individualization and participation;[38] essential being and existential being;[39] and time, space, causality, and substance.[40]

When a doctrine of God is initiated by defining God as being-itself, the philosophical concept of being is introduced into systematic theology ... It appears in the present system in three places: in the doctrine of God, where God is called the being as being or the ground and the power of being; in the doctrine of man, where the distinction is carried through between man's essential and his existential being; and finally, in the doctrine of the Christ, where he is called the manifestation of the New Being, the actualization of which is the work of the divine Spirit.[41]

Throughout most of his work Tillich provides an ontological view of God as being-itself, the ground of being, and the power of being, one in which God is beyond essence and existence.[42] He was critical of conceptions of God as a being (e.g., the highest being), as well as of pantheistic conceptions of God as universal essence. Traditional medieval philosophical theology in the work of figures such as St. Anselm, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham tended to understand God as the highest existing being,[43] to which predicates such as omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, goodness, righteousness, holiness, etc. may be ascribed. Arguments for and against the existence of God presuppose such an understanding of God. Tillich is critical of this mode of discourse, which he refers to as "theological theism," and argues that if God is a being, even if the highest being, God cannot be properly called the source of all being. With respect to both God's existence and essence, moreover, Tillich shows how difficulties beset Thomas Aquinas' attempt to "maintain the truth that God is beyond essence and existence while simultaneously arguing for the existence of God."[44]

Though Tillich is critical of propositional arguments for the existence of God as found in natural theology, as he considers them objectifying of God, he nonetheless affirms the reality of God as the ground of being. A similar line of thought is found in the work of Eric Voegelin.[45] Tillich's concept of God can be drawn out from his analysis of being. In Tillich's analysis of being, all of being experiences the threat of nonbeing. Yet, following Heidegger, Tillich claims that it is human beings alone who can raise the question of being and therefore of being-itself.[46] This is because, he contends, human beings' "infinite self-transcendence is an expression of [their] belonging to that which is beyond nonbeing, namely, to being-itself ... Being-itself manifests itself to finite being in the infinite drive of the finite beyond itself."[47]

3a8082e126