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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bread Upon The Water who wrote (192031)	6/18/2012 11:04:29 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 543793

How is it possible to be a Christian based theologian, which at the end of the day requires a leap of faith, and work out of Existentialism? Probably the best short answers to that question are contained in two of Paul Tillich's volumes, The Dynamics of Faith and The Courage to Be. The first is the more accessible--it's a collection of sermons; the second much more serious and, of course, less accessible. Wikipedia has a fairly good summary of his life but not of his work. And underlines a forgotten fact, that he was among the two or three most influential theologians of the twentieth century. I can only think of Karl Barth at the same level; though some would place Reinhold Neibuhr at that level. Listings of twentieth century existentialist theologians, of whom there more than a few, almost always begin with Tillich and Rudolf Bultmann, who, I think, were colleagues at Marburg in the 20s. Bultmann, again I think, stayed in Germany through the 30s and 40s, while Tillich came to the US. Taught at Union Theological Seminary, then at Harvard Divinity School, and, finally, for a brief period before his death, at The University of Chicago Divinity School. If you wished to get genuinely serious about his work (said with a grin), you could step your way into the three volumes of his systematic theology. But that would be akin to deciding you wanted to spend the better part of a long period reading Martin Heidegger's Being and Time.