Born Aug. 20, 1886, in Starzeddel; died Oct. 22, 1965, in Chicago. German-American Protestant theologian and philosopher. An exponent of dialectical theology.

After World War I, Tillich emerged as a critic of liberal Protestantism and demanded a return to the original ideals of the Reformation. In Germany in the 1920’s he was a leader of the religious socialist movement—a variety of Christian socialism. From 1929 to 1933 he was a professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt, but he emigrated to the USA in 1933 to escape fascist Germany. He was a professor at Harvard University from 1955 to 1962 and at the University of Chicago from 1962 until his death.

Tillich strove to unite the fundamental trends of Protestantism and Christian theology as a whole and to lay the foundations of a new, ecumenical synthesis. He proposed the creation of a theology of culture that would recognize the sanctity of all aspects of life in modern society (see Tillich’s works dealing with psychotherapy, ethics, education, and sociology). Tillich criticized historical Protestantism, which, having replaced the “symbols” of Catholicism with rational conceptions, moral laws, and subjective emotions, threatened the foundations of the church.

In contradistinction to K. Barth, Tillich stressed the religious value of culture and the necessity for religion of preserving human autonomy. For Tillich, god abides in this world as its fundamental and dominant element. One cannot “search for” god as one would any other thing; god does not exist as a specific being. Therefore, according to Tillich, the atheistic protest against god as a perfect being dwelling above the earth is completely valid. Christ, for Tillich, is an image of the “new existence,” which overcomes the demonical mechanisms of personal and social alienation.

Unlike R. Bultmann, Tillich believed that symbols (myths) formed the “natural language” of religion and did not lend themselves to any substitution. His theological method was a characteristic example of an attempt to create, under the conditions of a crisis in religion, a theological system open to the influences of various trends in modern philosophy, psychology, and other fields. Tillich had a considerable impact on both Protestant and Catholic philosophy of the mid-20th century.