Theologians: A Man of Ultimate Concern

“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 man who managed, in the 79 years that he lived, to encompass with his mind and heart an extraordinary range of the shocks and searchings of an extraordinary period of history. When Paul Tillich died after a heart attack last week at the University of Chicago’s Billings Hospital, there was no doubt that his work would stand as one of the religious landmarks of his time.

He had not only the deep respect of his fellow professionals, but his name was better known to laymen than that of any other contemporary theologian. Students crowded his lectures, and paperback editions of his books 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.”

God Is 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 to it.

The cataclysm of World War I shattered the 29-year-old chaplain’s classical philosophy; walking among the dead and dying at the Battle of Champagne in 1915, he lost his belief that man could ever know the essence of his being. Nietzsche’s proclamation that “God is dead” tolled like a bell in his mind. “I changed from an idealist to a tragic realist,” he said.

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.

Then came the world’s next shock—Hitler. Tillich spoke out against the Nazis and was fired from the University of Frankfurt, the first non-Jewish professor to lose his job. He was offered a post at Manhattan’s Union Theological Seminary by Reinhold Niebuhr, who had been impressed by some of his writings on religious socialism. Tillich was 47. He spoke practically no English. But he decided to go.

Of Real Life. His lectures at Union were practically incomprehensible at first; to his young American students his thought seemed as turbid as his accent, and their reaction was described by one of them as “respectful mystification.” But by the time young America began its great postwar surge of cultural curiosity and self-questioning, Paul Tillich was ready to play an important part in it. For the young and not so young men who came from the foxholes and the fighter-bombers to study at Union for every kind of Protestant ministry, he became the major intellectual pivot of the seminary. After his retirement at 68, he went to Harvard as a University Professor; in that free-ranging post, he consistently filled the largest lecture halls with undergraduates who relished his openness to their questions and challenges from real life.

Real life was Tillich’s theological specialty. However thorny his thinking, it always took off from the human situation—in this sense, Tillich was an existentialist philosopher. He differed in this respect from many other theologians, such as Switzerland’s Karl Barth, who considers Biblical revelation as having been “thrown” at man—take it or leave it—by God. Tillich’s key to salvation is courage—”the courage to be” in the face of the dread possibilities of nonbeing, of life’s uncertainties and ambiguities. God for him is no superman in the sky, but the “ground of being,” the “ultimate concern.” Sin is estrangement from union with God. His theological terms may be Teutonically cumbersome, but they are derived from the suffering and striving of the individual in life on earth.

Easement in Idolatries. Tillich published a dozen “popular” books during his years in America, including The Protestant Era, The Courage to Be and The New Being. In them, the same themes recur again and again: man’s estrangement from God, his anxiety, and his attempt to find easement in “idolatries” such as status, sex, nationalism, Communism, or even the church. Against idolatry Tillich invoked what he called “the Protestant Principle,” which maintains that no human institution, being conditional, can speak for the unconditional divinity. Every Yes has a No attached to it, and no truth of faith is ultimate “except the one that no man possesses it.”

Another important Tillich tenet is that such potent terms as God, Christ, Resurrection are symbols that should not be mistaken for the unknowable things for which they stand—a distinction that sometimes led him into such odd locutions as “the God above God.” On this score, he was the despair of the orthodox, who always wanted to know whether he thought that the tomb was really empty on that first Easter morning. When Pope Pius XII defined the doctrine of the Virgin Mary’s bodily assumption into Heaven, one eminent Jesuit friend of Tillich’s was looking forward to having a lively argument with him on the subject. “But Paul said he saw no difficulty with the doctrine whatsoever,” he reported furiously. “When every doctrine is a symbol, it all evaporates into thin air!”

Questions & Answers. Tillich’s major and far-from-airy legacy is his ponderous, three-volume Systematic Theology. Its structure is what Tillich called a “correlation”—the correlation, that is, of human questions and theological answers. The first volume deals with Being—man’s estranged actual nature—to which the theological answer is God. The second volume deals with Existence —the strained situation in which man lives—to which the annealing answers are found in Christ. The third volume is devoted to two existential-theological pairings: Life and the Spirit, History and the Kingdom of God.

The ambiguities of life, said Tillich, can be partially resolved by the Spirit—the spiritual community that exists both inside and outside the churches and may even include atheists and pagans. But the only complete solution is the nd of history and the triumph of God’s Kingdom.

Going Too Far. Tillich had many untheological interests, notably art, psychoanalysis and science. Three years ago, Paul and Hannah Tillich moved to he University of Chicago, where he was the John Nuveen Professor of Theology at the Divinity School. Summers they spent, as they had for more than 20 years, at East Hampton, Long Island, near the seashore that Tillich always loved. His unpretentious dignity and gentle warmth made friends and admirers for him wherever he moved—but in recent years the seminarians and younger theologians have not been reading him as they used to. More fashionable these days are Bultmann and Bonhoeffer; coming up fast are the “Death of God” theologians (TIME, Oct. 22), whose abandonment of even a symbolic view of God seemed to Tillich to be going too far.

They do, however, pay tribute to Tillich. Said one of the movement’s main figures, Emory University’s Thomas J. J. Altizer, when he heard of Tillich’s death: “I think he has been the only theologian who has made possible theological thinking in a contemporary and realistic way in our history. He was the only one with courage enough to face the secular consciousness and society of the 20th century.”