faith

religion
Print Cite Share Feedback 
Written and fact-checked by 

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Last Updated: Jan 19, 2023 • Article History

Charles Sprague Pearce: Religion

See all media

Key People:

Paul Tillich George Santayana Godfrey Of Fontaines Erich Frank

Related Topics:

confession of faith fideism saddha I-Thou leap of faith

See all related content →

faith, inner attitude, conviction, or trust relating human beings to a supreme God or

ultimate salvation. In religious traditions stressing divine grace, it is the inner certainty
or attitude of love granted by God himself. In Christian theology, faith is the divinely
inspired human response to God’s historical revelation through Jesus Christ and,
consequently, is of crucial significance.

No definition allows for identification of “faith” with “religion.” Some inner attitude has
its part in all religious traditions, but it is not always of central significance. For
example, words in ancient Egypt or Vedic India that can be roughly rendered by the
general term “religion” do not allow for “faith” as a translation but rather connote cultic
duties and acts. In Hindu and Buddhist Yoga traditions, inner attitudes recommended
are primarily attitudes of trust in the guru, or spiritual preceptor, and not, or not
primarily, in God. Hindu and Buddhist concepts of devotion (Sanskrit bhakti) and love
or compassion (Sanskrit karuna) are more comparable to the Christian notions of love
(Greek agapē, Latin caritas) than to faith. Devotional forms
of Mahayana Buddhism and Vaishnavism show religious expressions not wholly
dissimilar to faith in Christian and Jewish traditions.

More From Britannica

 Christianity: Faith and reason

In biblical Hebrew, “faith” is principally juridical: it is the faithfulness or truthfulness

with which persons adhere to a treaty or promise and with which God and Israel adhere
to the Covenant between them. In Islam and Christianity, both rooted in this tradition,
the notion of faith reflects that view. In Islam, faith (Arabic īmān) is what sets the
believer apart from others; at the same time, it is ascertained that “None can have faith
except by the will of Allah” (Qurʾān sura 10, verse 100). The First Letter to the
Corinthians in the Christian New Testament similarly asserts that faith is a gift of God
(12:8–9), while the Letter to the Hebrews (11:1) defines faith (pistis) as “the assurance of
things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Some scholars think
that Zoroastrianism, as well as Judaism, may have had some importance in the
development of the notion of faith in Western religion; the prophet Zoroaster (before
the 7th century BCE) may have been the first founder of a religion to speak of a new,
conscious religious choice on the part of man for truth (asha).

In Christianity the intellectual component of faith is stressed by St. Thomas Aquinas.

One of the major issues of the Protestant movement was the theological problem
of justification by faith alone. Martin Luther stressed the element of trust, while John
Calvin emphasized faith as a gift freely bestowed by God. A 19th-century German
theologian, Friedrich Schleiermacher, wrote of the subjective nature of faith. In the 20th
century, theologians, led by Karl Barth, made conscious efforts to turn away from
Schleiermacher’s subjective interpretation.

Notions of religious trust in India, China, and Japan are as a rule different from the

notion of faith in Christianity. The “trust” (Pali saddha, Sanskrit shraddha) described in
the Buddhist Eightfold Path is comparable to the confidence with which a sick person
entrusts himself to a physician. In Chinese traditions xin (“fidelity” or “trustfulness”; the
character depicts a person standing by his spoken word) is considered to be an
important virtue.
This article was most recently revised and updated by  Matt Stefon.
Paul Tillich

 Introduction
 Early life and education
 Development of his philosophy
 Departure from Nazi Germany
 Principal work

 Legacy

Fast Facts

 Paul Tillich summary

 Facts & Related Content
 Quizzes
 Quotes

More

 More Articles On This Topic

 Additional Reading
 Contributors
 Article History

Related Biographies

Johann Clauberg

German philosopher and theologian

Albert Schweitzer

Alsatian-German theologian and physician


 Martin Luther

German religious leader

Jonathan Edwards

American theologian

 See All

HomePhilosophy & ReligionReligious Personages & Scholars

Paul Tillich
American theologian and philosopher
Print Cite Share Feedback 

Alternate titles: Paul Johannes Tillich

Written by 

Arne Unhjem

Fact-checked by 

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Last Updated: Article History

Born:

August 20, 1886 Germany

Died:

October 22, 1965 (aged 79) Chicago Illinois

Subjects Of Study:
 

faith justification theonomy

See all related content →

Summary

Read a brief summary of this topic

Paul Tillich, in full Paul Johannes Tillich, (born August 20, 1886, Starzeddel,
Brandenburg, Germany—died October 22, 1965, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.), German-born
American theologian and philosopher whose discussions of God and
faith illuminated and bound together the realms of traditional Christianity and
modern culture. Some of his books, notably The Courage to Be (1952) and Dynamics of
Faith (1957), reached a large public audience not usually concerned with religious
matters. The three-volume Systematic Theology (1951–63) was the culmination of his
rigorous examination of faith.
Early life and education
Born in Starzeddel, a village in the province of Brandenburg, Paul Tillich spent his
boyhood years in Schönfliess, a small community east of the Elbe, where his father
served as minister and diocesan superintendent in the Prussian Territorial Church. Life
in Schönfliess—a walled town founded in the Middle Ages and surrounded by fertile
fields and dark forests—left indelible marks on the impressionable boy: a strong sense of
historical continuity, a feeling of intimacy with nature and its processes, and a deep
attachment to the church as the bearer of sacred meaning in the centre of community
life.

This lifestyle, epitomized for Tillich in the person of his authoritarian and

theologically conservative father, was challenged when Tillich first attended the
humanistic secondary school in Königsberg-Neumark, where he was introduced to the
classical ideal of free thought, untrammeled by anything except the rules of reason. He
accepted that ideal enthusiastically. When his father was transferred to Berlin in 1900,
he responded with the same enthusiasm to the kind of freedom that life in a thriving
metropolis made possible.

Tillich’s love of freedom, however, did not make him forget his boyhood commitment to
a rich and satisfying religious tradition, and how to enjoy the freedom to explore life
without sacrificing the essentials of a meaningful tradition became his early and lifelong
preoccupation. It appears as a major theme in his theological work: the relation
of heteronomy to autonomy and their possible synthesis in theonomy. Heteronomy
(alien rule) is the cultural and spiritual condition when traditional norms and values
become rigid external demands threatening to destroy individual
freedom. Autonomy (self-rule) is the inevitable and justified revolt against such
oppression, which nevertheless entails the temptation to reject all norms and
values. Theonomy (divine rule) envisions a situation in which norms and values express
the convictions and commitments of free individuals in a free society. These three
conditions Tillich saw as the basic dynamisms of both personal and social life.
Britannica Quiz

 Philosophy 101

His early attempts to solve the problem took the form of working out an independent
position in relation to his conservative father; in this context he learned to examine
personal experiences in terms of philosophical categories, for the elder Tillich loved a
good philosophical argument. But the decisive, seminal encounter with the problem
came during his theological studies at the University of Halle (1905–12), where he was
forced to match the doctrinal position of the Lutheran church, based on the established
confessional documents, against the theological liberalism and scientific empiricism
that dominated the academic scene in Germany at that time.
Development of his philosophy
In his search for a solution, Tillich found help in the writings of the German
philosopher F.W.J. von Schelling (1775–1854) and the lectures of
his theology teacher Martin Kähler. Schelling’s philosophy of nature, which appealed to
Tillich’s own feeling for nature, offered a conceptual framework interpreting nature as
the dynamic manifestation of God’s creative spirit, the aim of which is the realization of
a freedom that transcends the dichotomy between individual life and universal
necessity. Kähler directed his attention to the doctrine of justification through faith, laid
down by St. Paul and reiterated by Martin Luther.

Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content.Subscribe Now

Tillich now concluded that this doctrine, which he called the “Protestant principle,”
could be given a far wider scope than previously had been thought. Not limited to the
classical religious question of how sinful people can be acceptable to a holy God, it could
be understood to encompass a person’s intellectual life as well and thus all human
experiences. As the sinners are declared just in the sight of God, so the doubters are
possessed of the truth even as they despair of finding it, and so cultural life in general is
subject to both critical negation and courageous affirmation. The rigid formulas of the
Lutheran church could thus be rejected while their essential content was affirmed.

Tillich’s first attempts to work out the details of this insight were in the form of Schelling
studies, dissertations for a doctorate in philosophy (1911) and a licentiat in theology
(1912). In the latter work especially, Mystik und Schuldbewusstsein in Schellings
philosophischer Entwicklung (Mysticism and Consciousness of Guilt in Schelling’s
Philosophical Development), one can discern a probing of the implications of the
Protestant principle for the very nature and structure of reality, especially in his
explication of Schelling’s view of sin and redemption as a cosmic event embracing all
existence.

Ordained a Lutheran cleric on the conclusion of his university studies, Tillich served as a
military chaplain during World War I. The war was a shattering experience to him, not
only for its carnage and physical destruction but as evidence of the bankruptcy of 19th-
century humanism and the questionableness of the adequacy of autonomy as sole guide.
The chaotic situation in Germany after the armistice made him certain that Western
civilization was indeed nearing the end of an era.

His practical response to this crisis was to join the Religious-Socialist movement, whose
members believed that the impending cultural breakdown was a momentous
opportunity for creative social reconstruction, a time that Tillich characterized by
the New Testament term kairos, signifying a historical moment into which eternity
erupts, transforming the world into a new state of being. But ideas, rather than political
activity, were his main interest. At teaching posts in the universities of Berlin, Marburg,
Dresden, Leipzig, and Frankfurt he participated eagerly in discussion groups searching
for a new understanding of the human situation. He also wrote extensively, publishing
more than 100 essays, articles, and reviews in the period 1919–33.

In most of these writings Tillich was using the insight he had gained at Halle as
a norm in analyses of religion and culture, the meaning of history, and contemporary
social problems. The remarkable work Das System der Wissenschaften nach
Gegenständen und Methoden (The System of the Sciences According to Their Subjects
and Methods, 1923) was his first attempt to render a systematic account of human
spiritual endeavours from this point of view. As early as 1925, in Marburg, he was also at
work on what was to become his magnum opus, Systematic Theology, 3 vol. (1951–63).
Departure from Nazi Germany of Paul Tillich
Tillich’s passionate concern for freedom made him an early critic of Adolf Hitler and
the Nazi movement, and in retaliation he was barred from German universities in 1933
—the first non-Jewish academician “to be so honoured,” as he wryly put it. He then
accepted an invitation to join the faculty at Union Theological Seminary in New York,
and, despite initial difficulties with a new language and adapting his thought pattern
to pragmatic American mental habits, he emerged as an “apostle to the skeptics” in his
new homeland during the years following World War II. At Union Seminary (1933–
55), Harvard University (1955–62), and the University of Chicago (1962–65), he
engaged graduate and undergraduate students in searching dialogue concerning
the meaning of human existence. His public lectures and books reached large audiences
who did not usually show an interest in religious questions. In his most widely read
books, The Courage to Be and Dynamics of Faith, he argued that the deepest concern of
humans drives them into confrontation with a reality that transcends their own finite
existence. Tillich’s discussion of the human situation in these books shows a profound
grasp of the problems brought to light by modern psychoanalysis and
existentialist philosophy.
Principal work
The publication of his Systematic Theology made available the results of a lifetime of
thought. The most novel feature of this work is its “method of correlation,” which
makes theology a dialogue relating questions asked by probing reason to answers given
in revelatory experience and received in faith—theonomy’s answers to autonomy’s
questions. The dialogue of Systematic Theology is in five parts, each
an intrinsic element in the system as a whole: questions about the powers and limits of
human reason prepare one for answers given in revelation; questions about the nature
of being lead to answers revealing God as the ground of being; questions about the
meaning of existence are answered by the New Being made manifest in Jesus Christ;
questions about the ambiguities of human experience point to answers revealing the
presence of the Holy Spirit in the life process; and questions about human destiny and
the meaning of history find their answers in the vision of the kingdom of God. Readers
of this and other works by Tillich have been impressed by the broad reach of his thought
but also baffled by the philosophical terminology that he used in discussing God
and faith. Those who see him as an advocate of agnosticism or atheism, however, may
have misunderstood his intent. He rejected the anthropomorphic “personal God” of
popular Christianity, but he did not deny the reality of God, as the conventional atheist
has done. Modern “Christian atheists” who cite Tillich in support of their “God is dead”
claim overlook the fact that for Tillich the disappearance of an inadequate concept of
God was the beginning of a grander vision of God. Like Spinoza, he was a “God-
intoxicated man” who wanted to help his fellow human beings recapture a relevant
and dynamic religious faith.

In his last years Tillich expressed some doubts about the viability of any systematic
account of the human spiritual quest. But he never abandoned the insight that came to
him at the University of Halle—that all cultural and spiritual life could be illuminated by
the “Protestant principle” of justification by faith; he was still working out
its implications at his death in 1965.
Legacy
Tillich was a central figure in the intellectual life of his time both in Germany and
the United States. It is generally held that the 20th century was marked by a widespread
breakdown of traditional Christian convictions about God, morality, and the meaning of
human existence in general. In assessing Tillich’s role in relation to this development,
some critics have regarded him as the last major spokesman for a vanishing
Christian culture, a systematic thinker who sought to demonstrate the reasonableness of
the Christian faith to modern skeptics. Others have viewed him as a forerunner of the
contemporary cultural revolution, whose discussions of the meaning of God and faith
served themselves to undermine traditional beliefs.

Tillich himself believed he was a “boundary man,” standing between the old and the
new, between a heritage imbued with a sense of the sacred and the secular orientation of
the new age. He asserted that his vocation was to mediate between the concerns voiced
by faith and the imperatives of a questioning reason, thus helping to heal the ruptures
threatening to destroy Western civilization. He believed that from the beginning life had
prepared him for such a role, and his long career as a theologian, educator, and writer
was devoted to this task with single-minded energy.