Political Expectation

by Paul Tillich, James Luther Adams

Casebound Hardcover. Previous owner's name penned on ffep. Otherwise pristine

188 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1981

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

[Cool_guy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lutheran Marxism sounds like a gag option on Germany's ideological focus tree in an alternate history video game

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

An astonishment. Tillich somehow manages to combine the best qualities of his systematic theology-- its fearlessness, its quicksilver invention-- with the grounded stakes of his preaching. The essays are mostly from his Weimar period, and so a bit remote for Americans (although intrinsically insightful especially about the relation of Christian and Marxian categories). A late lecture series on utopia is a particular tour de force, including devastating implicit critiques of Niebuhr and Barth and one of the sharpest diagnoses of midcentury America I've ever seen. An early passage reads like a precis of Max Gladstone. Another all but anticipates S3E8 of Twin Peaks. I cannot overstate the timeliness of this work, even though much of it is eighty years old.