Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich was the most influential Protestant theologian-philosopher of the twentieth century, celebrated for translating existentialist categories into a systematic account of Christian faith. Born in Germany and driven into American exile by the Nazis in 1933, he developed a "method of correlation" in which philosophy articulates the existential questions that theology answers.

His three-volume Systematic Theology reimagined God not as a supernatural being but as "the ground of being" — the power of being itself that underlies all existence. The Courage to Be argued that faith is the courage to affirm one's being against the threat of non-being, drawing on Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Schelling. Tillich became a cultural phenomenon in postwar America, equally at home in theological seminars and New York intellectual circles.