Tillich essays

Tillich essays Tillich was born into the family of a Lutheran pastor in the village of Starzeddel, Prussia, on Aug. 20, 1886. He studied at the university of Berlin, Tbingen, Halle, and Breslau. In 1912, at the age of 26 he was ordained a minister of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. From 1914 to 1918 he was a chaplain in the German Army. Tillich believed that the traditional concept of God no longer existed and through the rest of his life he worked at redefining the concept of God, directing men to the God beyond God. Tillich taught at several Universities in Germany until 1929 where he was dismissed, when Hitler assumed power, due to his contradictory views with the growing Nazi movement. By 1933 he immigrated to the U.S. and taught at the Union Theological Seminary until 1955. During this time of adapting to a new culture, Tillich is triggered by a single fundamental question of Who am I?. He had great concern in his preservation of his old values and their translation into the terminology of this new culture. Later Tillich went on to teach at Harvard University and the University of Chicago as well as being a guest speaker for several colleges. The comprehensiveness of his thought, which was both traditional and modern and which built bridges from religious faith to secular activities, made Tillich the most influential theologian of his time in North America. Tillich's "method of correlation" related Christian affirmations to the existential questions arising in human life and history. He described himself as living on the boundary between theology and philosophy, church and society, religion and culture, idealism and Marxism, his native and his alien land. He combined such diverse traditions as classical ontology, derived from Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle, with modern romanticism and existentialism. Tillich relies heavily on his Christian faith and his experiences f ...