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Faith & Doubt. Tillich's views of that drama were decisively shaped by Wingolf, a national fraternity of university stu dents, dedicated to combat with Christian principles the paganism of German fraternity life, which was built around the cult of dueling and the cult of getting drunk.
Wingolf was highly authoritarian in structure; absolute rulers of each chapter were three chargés, and when Tillich became the First Chargé of Wingolf at the University of Halle, he says, "it was, and is, the proudest achievement of my life." But despite authoritarianism, discussion was absolutely free, and it was there ("in the dinner and drinking sessions") that Tillich began to hammer out the problems that later were to become his life work.
A crucial time for him came when the fraternity was torn by a threatened schism over the question of whether belief in the Apostles' Creed should be a requirement of membership. "After a hard-fought battle, we agreed that these traditional articles of faith could not be made obligatory for the individual. Specific doubts on the part of the individual should be allowable—and even necessary. From this controversy I realized that if Christianity is a man's ultimate concern, he can still be a minister, though he may have many doubts. For doubting is part of being a man, and his own doubts will make him more effective in bringing other doubters to faith."
This paradoxical relationship between faith and doubt is a keystone of Tillich's theology. From it he derives what he calls "the Protestant Principle," the necessity of challenging the claim to pure, "unbroken" truth by any institution or church, including Protestantism itself, or even by Scripture. From it he derives his all-important distinction between religious "heteronomy," which is imposed upon the individual, and religious "autonomy," in which the individual continually seeks and hopes to find. The situation of doubt, says Tillich, is "existential"—that is, inevitably part of the predicament in which man leads his human existence—and this existentialism, he feels, is where the Christian Church is grounded.
The Night Attack. In August 1914 Paul Tillich was a 28-year-old Lutheran minister in Berlin. The intellectual life seemed the way to truth. "It still seemed possible then to sit in the center of the world and be able to understand everything." But with the outbreak of World War I, the world exploded.