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.