Paul Tillich was a German-American theologian and philosopher. He had a varied career including being a pastor, professor in Germany until the Nazis came to power, after which he emigrated to the US. He contributed notable works on theology and the relationship between God and humanity. His main ideas included correlating theology with human experience, understanding God as the ground of being rather than a being, and interpreting religious symbols existentially. He sought to bridge dialectical and sacramental ways of thinking through focusing on both human estrangement from God and God's self-revelation.

1. PAUL TILLICH
A BRIDGE BETWEEN THE
DIALECTICAL AND SACRAMENTAL
IMAGINATIONS

2. Report Content
His Biographical Details
- His Childhood
- His Education
- His Career & Family Life
 His Contributions
- His Notable Works
- His Various Theological Ideas
- His Preaching
 Conclusion


3. Biographical Details

Born 20 August 1886 in Starzeddel,
then a province of Brandenburg,
Germany (now part of Poland)

4. Biographical Details Childhood
Eldest – with sisters Johanna &
Elisabeth
 Father – Johannes Tillich – a
conservative Lutheran pastor of the
Evangelical State Church of Prussia’s
older Provinces
 Mother – Mathilde Dürselen – from the
Rhineland and was more liberal
 Paul Tillich at 4 – Johannes –
superintendent of a diocese in


5. Biographical Details Childhood

Schönfliess — a walled town founded
in the Middle Ages

6. Biographical Details Childhood

Left indelible marks: a feeling of
intimacy with nature and a deep
attachment to the church as the
bearer of sacred meaning

7. Biographical Details – His
Education

1898 – Königsberg in der Neumark
(Chojna) to begin gymnasium

8. Biographical Details – His
Education
1900 – His father was transferred
to
Berlin
 1901 – Transferred to a Berlin
School
 1903 – His mother died of cancer
 1904 – He graduated at the age of
17


9. Biographical Details – His
Education

1904 – University of Berlin

10. Biographical Details – His
Education

1905 – University of Tübingen

11. Biographical Details – His
Education


1905 to 1907 – University of Halle
1912 – Licentiate of Theology degree

12. Biographical Details – His
Education

1911 – University of Breslau – Doctor
of Philosophy degree

13. Biographical Details – His
Education
Became a member of
Wingolf during College
 a Christian fraternity
that is the oldest in
Germany
 Motto – ―All things
through Him ―
 HIM – refers to Jesus
Christ


14. Biographical Details – His
Career & Family Life
1912 – became a minister of the
Evangelical Lutheran Church in the
province of Brandenburg
 September 1914 – married
Margarethe "Grethi" Wever
 October 1914 – joined the German
army as military chaplain – helped the
soldiers to understand humanistic
ways of believing & practicing religion


15. Biographical Details – His
Career & Family Life
1918 – went home after the war
 1919 – Grethi got pregnant from
someone other than Tillich – they
divorced
 1919 to 1924 – Privatdozent of
Theology - University of Berlin,
beginning of academic career


16. Biographical Details – His
Career & Family Life
1924 – married Hannah WernerGottschow
 1924 to 1925 – Professor of Theology
-University of Marburg, developed his
Systematic Theology


17. Biographical Details – His
Career & Family Life

1925 to 1929 – Professor of Theology
-University of Dresden and the
University of Liepzig

18. Biographical Details – His
Career & Family Life

1929 to 1933 – Professor of Theology
-University of Frankfurt and gave
public lectures and speeches
throughout Germany

19. Biographical Details – His
Career & Family Life

1933 – got into conflict with the Nazi
movement and was dismissed from
his position

20. Biographical Details – His
Career & Family Life
Summer 1933 –
Reinhold Niebuhr
visited Germany,
offered him to join
the faculty of
Union Theological
Seminary, New
York
 Tillich accepted


21. Biographical Details – His
Career & Family Life
At 47 – Tillich with
his family moved
to America
 1933 to1955 –
taught as Visiting
Professor of
Philosophy of
Religion in Union
Theological
Society


22. Biographical Details – His
Career & Family Life
1933 to1934 –
taught as Visiting
Lecturer Columbia
University
 1937 – acquired
tenure at Union,
promoted as
Professor of
Philosophical
Theology


Then became an
American Citizen

23. His Contributions
Between 1952 to
1954 – gave
Gifford lectures at
the University of
Aberdeen
 Resulted to the
production of his
3-volume
Systematic
Theology


24. His Contributions
1954 – was
appointed a
position at Harvard
University for the
books he had
written
 1962 – moved to
the University of
Chicago


25. His Contributions – His Works
- Courage To Be
Faith

1952 – book
outlining many
of his views on
existentialism
- Dynamics of

1957 – book
explaining
faith as the
―ultimate
concern‖

26. His Principal Work
- Systematic
Theology
expressed his mature view of
Theology
 for him, Christ is the "New Being,"
who rectifies in himself the
alienation between essence and
existence


27. God, the Unconditioned and
Ultimate Concern


Like Immanuel Kant – it
is wrong considering
that God could be
grasped as a limited
object of thought experience
Tillich accounted for the
specific character of the
religious experience ―unconditioned‖
meeting of our thinking

28. Existentialism
In spite of Martin
Heidegger’s atheism,
Tillich found an affinity
on his position
 He argued that
anxiety of non-being
(existential anguish) is
inherent in the
experience of being
itself.


29. Existentialism



People are afraid of their own nonexistence, Tillich says that in our most
introspective moments we face the terror
of our own nothingness.
What can sustain finite beings is being
itself, or the "ground of being" which
Tillich identifies as God.
This struggle of man’s being with nonbeing, of man’s call to righteousness and
his sinfulness necessarily implicates God
whose being alone explains why man
still is, and will be in the eventual triumph

30. Theology of Correlation
 one
starts with the
incompleteness, the brokenness,
and the despair of Man in the
existentialist sense and
 ends with the completeness, the
wholeness, and the unity of GOD
in the classical sense
 correlative elements must have
something in common, must meet

31. Theology of Correlation
Man (and nature) and God are all
involved in the structure of being
 God
- the structure of being, but God is
not subject to, or determined by,
the structure of being
- the inexhaustible depth within this
structure

32. Theology of Correlation
 Man
-
and all of nature participate in the
structure of being
distorts it by his sin
 Jesus
Christ
- the new being wherein God and man
meet decisively
- the new being wherein the essential
or ideal structure of being is
transparent to its unconditional depth

33. Theology of Correlation

34. Systematic Theology
 Essence
fully shows itself within
Christ, but Christ is also a finite
man
 The gap is healed and essence
can now be found within
existence –Christ is not God
himself, but the revelation of God.
 Christ was the emblem of the
highest goal of man, what God

35. Protestant Principle
 True
religion is that which
correctly reveals the infinite, but
no religion can ever do so in any
way other than through metaphor
and symbol
 The Bible must be understood
symbolically and all spiritual and
theological knowledge cannot be
other than symbol

36. The Non-Existence of God
"God does not exist. He is being
itself beyond essence and
existence. Therefore to argue
that God exists is to deny him.“
 God cannot be conceived as an
object, no matter how lofty. We
cannot think of God as a being
that exists in time and
space, because that constrains
Him, and makes Him finite.


37. Preaching
 Like
Bultmann,
Tillich remained
convinced that
the apparent
crisis of faith for
many
contemporary
believers was
rather a crisis of
culture and
language.

38. Preaching
 Thus
he argued:
“Many of those who reject the
Word of God reject it because the
way we say it is utterly
meaningless to them. They know
the dimension of the eternal but
they cannot accept our names for
it. If we cling to their words, we
may doubt whether they have
received a word from the Lord. If

39. Preaching
 In his preaching, he consistently
reinterpreted the central
Christian symbols in existential
terms, speaking of sin as
separation, estrangement, or
sickness and of grace as
reunion, reconciliation and
health. The preacher must
challenge man to ground his

40. On Other Theologians

Like Barth and Bultmann, he is against
liberalism. No rationalistic and
scientific approach can take into
account the human condition of
sinfulness which, if not seen in the
condition of grace, is meaningless.

41. On Other Theologians

With Bultmann,
he agrees that
only in inquiring
into the ultimate
existential
concern of man,
can the text be
properly
interpreted

42. On Other Theologians
 does
not agree to the unbridgeable
gap which Barth sets between God
and man
 goes beyond Bultmann’s point of
contact – not just anthropological but
ontological

43. On Other Theologians
 Tillich’s
point of
contact rests on the
level of being - there
is in man’s being an
emptiness which
causes anxiety to its
depth to the point of
non-being from
which only the grace
of God can save him

44. Conclusion
 Tillich
himself believed he was a
―boundary man,‖
- standing between the old and the
new
-
Tillich relates how his life has
been straddling the limits between
theology and philosophy, the
church and society, Europe and
America, Protestantism and
Catholicism, liberalism and neoorthodoxy, and so on.

45. Conclusion
in his emphasis on the negative
moment within the description of the
relationship between the divine and
the human
 in his insistence on the paradox of ―the
abounding of sin and the greater
abounding of grace‖ as the ―two all
determining facts of life
 in his underscoring of the ambiguous,
estranged and broken dimensions of
human existence
Tillich remained rooted in the
dialectical imagination


46. Conclusion
 but
in identifying the possibility
that the gracious presence of God
is disclosed within the created
and the human
 in his method of theology and
preaching that searches the point
of contact in the human situation
for the revelation of God
Tillich revealed dimensions of
the sacramental imagination

47. Conclusion
 October
22, 1965
– died ten days
after experiencing
a heart attack at
age 79
 1966 – his ashes
were interred in
the Paul Tillich
Park in New
Harmony, Indiana