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The man thus acclaimed is also denounced by some orthodox Christian believers as not a Christian at all and possibly an outright atheist. Faith, according to Tillich. is not belief in God but "ultimate concern." Hence an atheist is a believer, too, unless he is wholly indifferent to the ultimate questions. Doubt is an in evitable part of faith. Sin is not some thing one commits, but a state of "estrangement" from one's true self. "The importance of being a Christian is that we can stand the insight that it is of no importance." says Tillich; the religious man can "fearlessly look at the vanity of religion." Tillich can rejoice with Nietzsche that "God is dead"—the God of theism—and write of looking beyond him to "the God above God."
Yet for all the razzle-dazzle paradox of his ideas, Paul Tillich is a solid, serious, dedicated thinker. If his critics say that his theology comes close to draining the meaning from all traditional Christian concepts, he replies that, for all too many Christians, these concepts lost their meaning long ago. What Tillich has been trying to do all his life is to make the Christian message meaningful for 20th century man in all his "estrangement." Tillich's greatest appeal is not to full-fledged believers but to the seekers after faith.
His complex pyramid of theology can be regarded from many angles, but the best way to approach it is through Tillich's own life. For his thought was molded by his time.
The Battleground. It is significant that Paul Tillich was born a German, not only because Germany seems to produce philosophers and theologians as Australia produces tennis players, but because few countries in the world have been so shaken by the 20th century. Tillich's parents came from the two main strains of the solid, stolid German middle class: the stark, authoritarian Prussians on his father's side (he was a prominent Lutheran clergyman), the sentimental, gemütlich Rhinelanders on his mother's (she was a schoolteacher). Tillich has been acutely aware of the two temperamental traditions at war within him. "In the East [of Germany]," as he has described it, "a meditative bent tinged with melancholy, a heightened consciousness of duty and personal sin, a strong sense for authority and feudal traditions . . . while the West is characterized by zest of living, sensuous concreteness, mobility, rationality and democracy . . . These contradictory qualities were rooted in me—my life, inward and outward, to be enacted on their battleground."
In the little (pop. 3,000) north German medieval town of Schoenfliess, where Paulus Tillich grew up, "one lived from Advent to Christmas to Pentecost. At Easter we children walked through the town with bundles of birch rods. It was the custom to beat the adults to get Easter eggs from them. Oh, how well I remember the wonderful fragrance of the fresh leaves!" At eight, Paul had his first brush with his future when "I encountered the conception of the Infinite." By the time he was 16, he knew he wanted to be a philosopher, and to this chancy calling the ministry seemed the most convenient opening wedge. "I was interested by the whole theological system, the drama of God and man."