Theologians: A Man of Ultimate Concern

(2 of 3)

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."