Paul Johannes Tillich (; German: [ˈtɪlɪç]; August 20, 1886 – October 22, 1965) was a German and American Christian existentialist philosopher, religious socialist, and Lutheran theologian who was one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century. Tillich taught at German universities before migrating to the United States in 1933, where he taught at Union Theological Seminary, Harvard University, and the University of Chicago.
For the general public, Tillich wrote the well-received The Courage to Be (1952) and Dynamics of Faith (1957). His major three-volume Systematic Theology (1951–1963) was for theologians; in many points it was an answer to existentialist critique of Christianity.
Tillich's work attracted scholarship from other influential thinkers like Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, H. Richard Niebuhr, George Lindbeck, Erich Przywara, James Luther Adams, Cardinal Avery 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." John Herman Randall Jr. lauded the Systematic Theology as "beyond doubt the richest, most suggestive, and most challenging philosophical theology our day has produced."
Tillich also authored many works in ethics, the philosophy of history, and comparative religion. His ideas continue to be studied and discussed at international conferences and seminars.
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 Dürselen, was from the Rhineland and more liberal.
When Tillich was four, his father was assigned to Bad Schönfliess (now Trzcińsko-Zdrój, Poland), a town of three thousand, where Tillich began primary school. In 1898, Tillich was sent to Königsberg 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.
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 Tübingen 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 in Theology at Halle-Wittenberg in 1912. His PhD dissertation at Breslau was on Schelling and the history of religion.
During his time at university, he became a member of the Wingolf Christian fraternities in Berlin, Tübingen, and Halle.
In 1912, Tillich was ordained as a Lutheran minister in the Province of Brandenburg. On 28 September 1914, he married Margarethe ("Grethi") Wever (1888–1968), and in October he joined the Imperial German Army as a chaplain during World War I. Grethi deserted Tillich in 1919 after an affair that produced a child not fathered by Tillich; the two then divorced. During the war, Tillich served as a chaplain in the trenches; he buried his closest friend and numerous soldiers in the mud of France. He was hospitalized three times for combat trauma, and was awarded the Iron Cross for bravery under fire. He came home from the war shattered. Tillich's academic career began after the war; he became a Privatdozent of Theology at the University of Berlin, a post he held from 1919 to 1924. On his return from the war, he met Hannah Werner-Gottschow (then married and pregnant). In March 1924, they married; it was the second marriage for both. She later wrote a book entitled From Time to Time about their life together (including their open marriage). Although their lifestyle was upsetting to some, they remained together into old age.
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. 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 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). During that period Tillich also "was instrumental in hiring Max Horkheimer as the Director of the Institut für Sozialforschung and to a professorship in sociology at the University of Frankfurt." 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. Along the way Tillich also remained in conversation with Erich Przywara.
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" of prominent German academic "enemies of the Reich" to be summarily dismissed from their tenured positions for solely ideological and/or racial reasons. Reinhold Niebuhr visited Germany in the summer of 1933 and, already impressed with Tillich's writings (they had known one another since 1919), contacted Tillich upon learning of his dismissal. Niebuhr urged Tillich to join the faculty at New York City's Union Theological Seminary; Tillich accepted.
At the age of 47, Tillich moved with his family to the United States. This meant learning English, the language in which he would eventually publish works such as the Systematic Theology. From 1933 until 1955 he taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he began as a visiting professor of philosophy of religion. During 1933–34 he was also a visiting lecturer in philosophy at Columbia University. Remarkably, "the faculty of Union [had] agreed to a 5% pay cut, at the height of the Great Depression, to bring the 47-year old Tillich and his family to the U.S."
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.
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.
Tillich's most heralded achievements, though, were the 1951 publication of volume one of the Systematic Theology (University of Chicago Press), and the 1952 publication of The Courage to Be (Yale University Press). The first volume of the systematic theology examines the inner tensions in the structure of reason and being, primarily through a study in ontology. These tensions, Tillich contends, show that the quest for revelation is implied in finite reason, and that the quest for the ground of being is implied in finite being. The publication of Systematic Theology, Vol. 1 brought Tillich international academic acclaim, prompting an invitation to give the prestigious Gifford Lectures in 1953–54 at the University of Aberdeen. The Courage to Be, which examines ontic, moral, and spiritual anxieties across history and in modernity, was based on Tillich's 1950 Dwight H. Terry Lectureship and reached a wide general readership.