Paul Tillich
Paul Tillich
Paul Johannes Tillichwas a German American Christian existentialist philosopher and Lutheran theologian who is widely regarded as one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionTheologian
Date of Birth20 August 1886
CountryGermany
forgiving remember
Forgiving presupposes remembering.
philosophy philosophical expression
Why does philosophy use concepts and why does faith use symbols if both try to express the same ultimate? The answer, of course, is that the relation to the ultimate is not the same in each case. The philosophical relation is in principle a detached description of the basic structure in which the ultimate manifests itself. The relation of faith is in principle an involved expression of concern about the meaning of the ultimate for the faithful.
loneliness solitude bears
Loneliness can be conquered only by those who can bear solitude.
courage anxiety doubt
The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.
facts accepted accepting
Accept the fact that you are accepted, despite the fact that you are unacceptable.
cynical true-life
Cynically speaking, one could say that it is true to life to be cynical about it.
absence
Fear is the absence of faith.
beautiful kindness mind
I loved thee beautiful and kind, And plighted an eternal vow; So altered are thy face and mind, t'were perjury to love thee now!
cruelty
Cruelty towards others is always also cruelty towards ourselves.
decision risk being-free
Decision is a risk rooted in the courage of being free.
believe men decision
Man is not what he believes himself to be in his conscious decisions.
science religion substance
Culture (science) is the form of religion; Religion is the substance of culture (science).
reality names giving
Faith consists in being vitally concerned with that ultimate reality to which I give the symbolical name of God. Whoever reflects earnestly on the meaning of life is on the verge of an act of faith.
men self years
In a man like Friedrich von Schlegel the courage to be as an individual self produced complete neglect of participation, but it also produced, in reaction to the emptiness of this self-affirmation, the desire to return to a collective. Schlegel, and with him many extreme individualists in the last hundred years, became Roman Catholics. The courage to be as oneself broke down, and one turned to an institutional embodiment of the courage to be as a part.