PAUL TILLICH

Paul Johannes Tillich (August 20, 1886 – October 22, 1965) was a German American Christian existentialist philosopher and theologian. Tillich is widely regarded as one of the most influential theologians of the 20th century.

Tillich was born on August 20, 1886, in the small province  of Bradenburg, which was then part of Germany. He was the oldest of three children, with two sisters : Johanna and Elizabeth. 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 was more liberal. When Tillich was four his father became a superintendent  of a diocese in Bad  Schönfliess, (now Poland), where Tillich began secondary school. In 1898, Tillich was sent to Königsberg to begin gymnasium. At Konigsberg, he lived in a boarding house where he experienced loneliness that he sought to overcome by reading the Bilble . Simultaniously, however, he was exposed to humanistic ideas at school.

In 1900, Tillich’s father was transferred to Berlin, Tillich switching in 1901 to a Berlin school, from which he graduated in 1904. Before his graduation, however, his mother died of cancer in September 1903, when Tillich was 17. Tillich attended several universities—the University of Belin 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 degree at the University of Breslau in 1911 and his Licentiate of Theology degree at Halle-Wittenberg in 1912. During his time at university, he became a member of the Wingolf. The same year Tillich was ordained as Lutheran minister in the province of Brandenburg... Tillich´s academic career began after the war; he became a Privatdozent at the University of Berlin..

From 1924 to 1925, he served as a 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. From 1925 until 1929, Tillich was a Professor of Theology at the Dresden University of Technology and the University of Leipzig. He held the same post at the University of Frankfurt from 1929 to 1933.

While at Frankfurt, Tillich gave public lectures and speeches throughout Germany that brought him into conflict with the Nazi movement. When Adolf Hitler became German Chancellor in 1933, Tillich was dismissed from his position. Reinhold Niebuhr visited Germany in the summer of 1933 and, already impressed with Tillich’s writings, contacted Tillich upon learning of Tillich’s 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 America. This meant learning English, the language in which Tillich would eventually publish works such as the Systematic Theology. From 1933 until 1955 he taught at Union, 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. Tillich acquired tenure at Union in 1937, and in 1940 he was promoted to Professor of Philosophical Theology and became an American citizen.

At the Union Theological Seminary, Tillich earned his reputation, publishing a series of books that outlined his particular synthesis of Protestant Christian theology and existential philosophy

His works led to an appointment at the Harvard Divinity School in 1955, where he became one of the University’s five University Professors – the five highest ranking professors at Harvard. In 1961 Tillich became one of the founding members of the Society for the Arts, Religion and Contemporary Culture, an organization with which he maintained ties the reminder of his life