Perspectives on 19th and 20th Century Protestant Theology

by Paul Tillich, Carl E. Braaten (Editor)

Hardcover with dust jacket. VG/VG. Previous owners' names

Genres: Philosophy, Theology

245 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

Paul Tillich was a German-American theologian and Christian existentialist philosopher. Tillich was – along with his contemporaries Rudolf Bultmann (Germany), Karl Barth (Switzerland), and Reinhold Niebuhr (United States) – one of the four most influential Protestant theologians of the 20th century. Among the general populace, he is best known for his works The Courage to Be (1952) and Dynamics of Faith (1957), which introduced issues of theology and modern culture to a general readership. Theologically, he is best known for his major three-volume work Systematic Theology (1951–63), in which he developed his "method of correlation": an approach of exploring the symbols of Christian revelation as answers to the problems of human existence raised by contemporary existential philosophical analysis.

Reviews

[Greg Parker · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book took me forever to finish and that expresses something of the density and complexity of the work. Tillich traces the development of certain lines of Protestant theology from Kant to Barth. I wouldn’t say it is always clear but occasionally he provides a fairy concise summary of a figure that is helpful, such as Marx, Nietzsche, Schleiermacher, and Barth.

There are very few ppl I’d recommend this book to. It is stimulating primarily because of who Paul Tillich was and can be slotted alongside Barth’s book on the long nineteenth century. Neither were necessarily good church historians, but occasionally their theological acumen shines brilliantly with a thought that gives you pause for several hours and days.

I’m glad I read it — I’ll certainly return to it as a reference on figures of this time period.