In his series of lectures, Tillich aims ‘to set out the method and structure of a theological system from an apologetic point of view in continuous correlation with philosophy’. He focuses on the concepts of being and reason, showing how the quest for revelation is integral to reason itself. Explaining his famous doctrine of God as the ‘Ground of Being’, he asserts that because God cannot be made into an object, religious knowledge is, therefore, necessarily symbolic.
Paul Tillich was born on 20 August 1866 in Starzeddel, Germany (now Starosiedle, Poland). A theologian and philosopher, his work connected traditional Christianity and modern culture. An ordained Lutheran minister, he spent two decades lecturing in Germany before becoming a military chaplain during the First World War. His opposition to the Nazi movement led to his dismissal in 1933, and he took up a professorship at Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1954. He became John Nuveen Professor of Theology at the University of Chicago in 1962.
Tillich was featured on the 1959 cover of Time and was the first theologian in Kegley and Bretall’s Library of Living Theology: ‘The adjective “great”, in our opinion, can be applied to very few thinkers of our time, but Tillich, we are far from alone in believing, stands unquestionably amongst these few’. Important works include Das System der Wissenschaften nach Gegenständen und Methoden (The System of the Sciences According to Their Subjects and Methods) (1923), The Protestant Era (1948), The Courage to Be (1952), and The Dynamics of Faith (1957).
