DID YOU KNOW?

Paul Tillich turned forty-three in 1929 and he finally got what he always wanted.He was given a full professorship (in sociology and philosophy) at the University of Frankfurt, a good university in a decent sized city, teaching exactly what he had always wanted to teach. He became a well-known theologian and was one of the most effective public opponents of the Nazi movement. On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was made Chancellor of Germany, and on April 13 Tillich was fired from his teaching position and replaced by a philosopher who had just joined the Nazi party.

Tillich turned forty-seven that summer and everything that he had worked for had been destroyed. He was a man without a job, country, or a future. Providentially however, Reinhold Niebuhr, the leading American theologian of that time, happened to be in Germany, and invited Tillich to America. Niebuhr taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, which at that time was considered one of the three top graduate theological institutions in the United States (along with Yale University and the University of Chicago). Tillich and his family arrived in New York City on November 4, 1933 and he did not have even a minimum knowledge of the English language, and he also found out almost immediately that the Americans were not at all impressed by his reputation in Germany. Neither Union nor Columbia University regarded him as good enough to teach on their faculties. He was finally somewhat grudgingly given a position at Union as a Visiting Professor of Philosophy, but it was made clear to him that he was only given that position as an act of charity, and that they wanted him to find some other teaching position elsewhere in the United States. Duke University brought him in for an interview, but they did not regard him as being good enough for their faculty either. Meanwhile, the news from home made it clear that Hitler was going to totally destroy Germany and be responsible for the death of millions of people.

Again Tillich was forced to walk through the Dark Night of the Soul. Again he had to start from scratch to develop new meaning for his life, when all the old sureties and so many of the things he loved in life had been destroyed. He was in a strange and alien world, where he was regarded with contempt and trying to start over again. When Tillich spoke in his theology about the power of the New Being to bring new life and meaning out of the abyss of Nonbeing, he was not talking glib theories but reporting what he had learned from his own life struggles. He did not mean that climbing up out of the pit of despair was easy, but he proclaimed over and over that the ground of being was a source of grace and the possibility of New Being. Faith was necessary to walk through the Dark Night of the Soul and emerge into sunlight on the other side, but so was courage. In his memoirs, Tillich talked about serving for many years as the chairman of self-help for Émigrés from central Europe, an organization for giving help to thousands of newcomers, most of them Jews. This activity brought him into contact with many people from the old world that he would have never met otherwise. It opened to view great depths of human anxiety and misery and heights of human courage and devotion that ordinarily are hidden from us. Tillich’s new American students were the brightest of the bright and he greatly broadened their knowledge when he sprinkled his lectures with references to German authors like Fichte, August Wilhelm, Schlegel. Schelling, Goethe and Hegel…