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Tue 2 Jun, 2009 05:03 am
Paul Tillich
Protestant Theologian
(1886 - 1965)
Being exiled from his native land in 1933 when Hitler rose to power, he studied and taught in North American universities. While there, he wrote some of his most important works, such as The Courage to Be in 1952, and The New Being in 1955, and The Eternal Now in 1963.
Like Kierkegaard, his writings focus on the nature of faith and its relationship to reason, the role of the Church, and the nature of Christianity. Here are some excerpts of his writings:
"God is the answer to the question implied in man's finitude; he is the name for that which concerns man utimately. What ever concerns man utimately becomes god for him, and conversely, it means that a man can be concerned utimately only about that which is god for him."
- Systematic Theology, Volume 1
"Courage is the self-affirmation of being in spite of the fact of nonbeing. It is the act of the individual self in taking the anxiety of nonbeing upon itself by affirming itself either as part of an embracing whole or in its individual selfhood. Courage always includes risk, it is always threatened by nonbeing, whether the risk of losing onself and becoming a thing within the whole of things or of losing one's world in an empty self-relatedness."
- The Courage to Be
"The truth of a religious symbol has nothing to do with the truth of empirical assertions involved in it, be they physical, psychological or historical. A religious symbol possess some truth if it adequately expresses the correlation of revelation in which some person stands. Religious symbols are double-edged. They are directed toward the infinite which they symbolize and toward the finite thorugh which they symbolize it. They force the infinite down to finitude and the finite up to infinity. They open the divine for the human and the human for the divine."
- Systematic Theology, Volume 1
"It is love, human and divine, which overcomes death in nations and generations and in all the horror of our time. Death is given power over everything finite, especially in our period of history. But death is given no power over love. Love is stronger. It creates something new out of the destruction caused by death; it bears everything and overcomes everything."
- The New Being
@Victor Eremita,
We'll get this added soon. Thank you!
@Victor Eremita,
Thanks Justin.
For those interested,
The Courage to Be, is probably going to be the best entry into Tillich, especially if you're interested in his existential theology.
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