1886-1965
Theologian

Responding to Modernity.

Paul Tillich was the most influential Protestant theologian in the United States in the 1950s. His program was to meld traditional Christianity with modern sensibilies regarding science, psychology, sociology, and ethics. His influence was immense, and along with Niebuhr he was instrumental in developing a Christian realism which many religious people felt necessary in the modern scientific and technological world of the 1950s.

Against the Nazis.

A professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt, the Prussian-born Tillich was suspended from that position by the National Socialist government in early 1933 and immigrated to the United States later that year. He took pride in asserting that he was "about the first non-Jewish professor dismissed from a German university." When he arrived he was given a visiting professorship at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Tillich became an American citizen in 1940. The...