Tillich, Paul (1886–1965)

Educated in German universities and having earned a Ph.D. from Breslau University (1911) and a licentiate in theology from Halle University (1912), Paul Tillich was ordained in the Evangelical Lutheran Church (1912) and served as a chaplain during World War I. Tillich taught theology at the University of Berlin (1919–1924), and this was followed by other teaching positions at the universities of Marburg, Dresden, Leipzig, and Frankfurt am Main (1929–1933). After he criticized the Nazi regime, the government barred him from teaching at any German university. Tillich's experiences during World War I and under the Nazi regime gave impetus to his awareness of the tragic nature of historical time. He emigrated to the United States at the invitation of the distinguished theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and he taught on the faculty of Union Theological Seminary with Niebuhr until 1955, when Tillich moved to a position at Harvard University (1955–1962) before finishing his career at the University of Chicago (1962–1965).

Tillich's theology is governed by his method of correlation, which enables him to have an answering theology in which philosophy raises certain existential questions, and theology tries to provide the answers in the context of time. This method, which is also dialectic in the sense that every positive implies a negative, suggests that philosophical questions and theological answers are in mutual interdependence. In short, Tillich uses his method to analyze the human situation and its temporal nature; this analysis gives rise to certain questions, and the Christian message provides the answers to such questions. In response to the philosophical analysis of being and human finitude, the theological answer is, for instance, God, whereas the questions of existence and life are answered respectively by Christ and Spirit, demonstrating the central nature of the doctrine of the Trinity in Tillich's theology.

Tillich develops his thinking about time within the context of his philosophical ontology and especially the ontological categories that include time, space, causality, and substance. These ontological categories constitute the structure of experience itself and are thus present whenever something is experienced. Not only does the mind comprehend and form reality by philosophical categories, rational thinking is inexpressible without using some category. A category, such as time, is a way that finite beings participate in a mixture of being and nonbeing. Time possesses both positive and negative aspects, as do the other categories. Time is, for instance, creative, direct, and irreversible, and it [Page 1254]symbolizes movement and life. from a negative perspective, time represents a moment from a past that is no more and a future that is not yet, whereas the present is a moving boundary line between past and future.

Becoming aware that time is moving one toward death, a person becomes anxious about the transitory nature of human existence. In response to such a threat, a person affirms the present and the threat of nonbeing through an innate, ontological courage that is based in God. Therefore, time is central to human finitude, and the anxiety associated with death reveals the ontological character of time. Moreover, human courage affirms temporality, whereas one would surrender to the annihilating character of time without courage.

...