A homage to Paulus

Thomas Altizer

pp. 23-29

in: Retrieving the radical Tillich, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015

Abstract

Speaking as one who was initiated into faith by reading Paul Tillich, and who had many serious theological dialogues with him in his later life, I am called to pay homage to him as I have not before, and I do so with the conviction that it was Tillich who made radical theology possible in the twentieth century. Of course, Tillich himself was profoundly affected by Schelling's radical theology, and it was Schelling who initiated Tillich into a radical understanding of both Being and the Nothing, including an integral relation between Being and the Nothing—making possible a history of Being itself, as recorded in the three differing editions of the Ages of the World. Tillich's primal work can be understood as a renewal and reconstitution of Schelling's philosophical theology for the late modern world, but it simultaneously demanded a deep confrontation with the radical imagination and the radical politics of that world—making Tillich unique as the genuine theologian of culture.

Cited authors

Schelling Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph

Tillich Paul