Theologians: A Man of Ultimate Concern

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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."