Word: tillichs
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Wingolf was highly authoritarian in structure; absolute rulers of each chapter were three chargés, and when Tillich became the First Chargé of Wingolf at the University of Halle, he says, "it was, and is, the proudest achievement of my life." But despite authoritarianism, discussion was absolutely free, and it was there ("in the dinner and drinking sessions") that Tillich began to hammer out the problems that later were to become his life work...
This paradoxical relationship between faith and doubt is a keystone of Tillich's theology. From it he derives what he calls "the Protestant Principle," the necessity of challenging the claim to pure, "unbroken" truth by any institution or church, including Protestantism itself, or even by Scripture. From it he derives his all-important distinction between religious "heteronomy," which is imposed upon the individual, and religious "autonomy," in which the individual continually seeks and hopes to find. The situation of doubt, says Tillich, is "existential"-that is, inevitably part of the predicament in which man leads his human existence...
...Night Attack. In August 1914 Paul Tillich was a 28-year-old Lutheran minister in Berlin. The intellectual life seemed the way to truth. "It still seemed possible then to sit in the center of the world and be able to understand everything." But with the outbreak of World War I, the world exploded...
Having married the girl he was going out with (the hasty marriage later ended in divorce), young Tillich marched off to the front as a chaplain. What he saw, he says, "absolutely transformed me." First there was the impact of the "lower classes," with whom he was dealing for the first time; he began to think about their exploitation at the hands of the powers he had taken for granted-the landed aristocracy, the army and the church. "But the real transformation happened at the Battle of Champagne in 1915. A night attack came, and all night long I moved...
Religious Socialism. In the chaos of postwar Germany, Tillich and a group of his fellow intellectuals gathered in Berlin's cafés to discuss the positive possibilities behind the ecstatic iconoclasm of Nietzsche, and to discover new meanings for religion in the great Danish Christian existentialist, Soren Kierkegaard. They saw the uncertainty and ferment around them as a time of kairos-a Greek word for the Scriptural "fullness of time" in which the eternal could penetrate the temporal order. Their prescription for the world was "Religious Socialism." Without a religious foundation, they insisted, "no planned society could avoid...