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One day in the winter of 1931-32, a gang of 300-odd storm troopers invaded the university in Frankfurt and beat up leftist students. Tillich stood horrified in the midst of the melee, and in the investigation that followed took a vociferous part against the Nazi thugs. As soon as Hitler came to power the following year, Tillich read in the newspaper that he had been dismissed from the faculty.
Impressed by some of Tillich's writings on Religious Socialism, socialistic-minded Reinhold Niebuhr of Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary had offered him a post at Union, but Tillich hesitated. He called on the Minister of Education in Berlin. "For a full hour," remembers Tillich, "we discussed the Old Testament and the importance to Christianity of the Jewish tradition. At the end of that hour I knew it was over."
In the U.S. his appearance under the sponsorship of the scholarly Reinhold Niebuhr earned Tillich considerable attention both in and out of the classroom—even though his formidable German accent and even more formidable concepts left hearers with an impression which U.S. Theologian Walter M. Horton has described as "respectful mystification." (It was hours after first listening to Tillich, recalls Horton, "that I realized that the word 'waykwoom,' many times repeated, and the key to the whole lecture, was meant to represent the English word 'vacuum.' ") But gradually, Tillich learned to communicate with America's would-be believers. Gradually, Tillich's massive theological system began to take shape.
Existential Anxiety. Tillich expounds his theology in two forms: his three-volume Systematic Theology (of which the third volume is still in the writing), and what he calls the "dialectical conversation" of his more popular books—The Protestant Era*, The New Being, The Shaking of the Foundations, The Courage To Be, and others. But in both his systematic theology and his other writings, he deals with the same key themes.
Man, says Tillich, exists in a state of "finitude." He does not know what he is or where he is going. He feels estranged from some great, unknown thing that is demanded of him. He is filled with wonder at the phenomenon of "being," simple astonishment that things are. This wonder presupposes a darker knowledge that they might not be; being is threatened, always and everywhere, by nonbeing.
Therefore Tillich, like Kierkegaard, sees man's existence a state of anxiety. This "existential" anxiety is not to be confused with fear, for it has no object, and fear must have an object. Nor is it to be confused with neurotic anxiety; the neurotic attempts to "avoid non-being by avoiding being."