German-American Protestant theologian whose work tried to make Christian faith intelligible to a modern secular culture that no longer found traditional religious vocabulary available. Tillich was a German army chaplain in the First World War — the experience broke the cultural Protestantism of his youth — taught at Frankfurt alongside Horkheimer and Adorno in the 1920s, was the first non-Jewish professor dismissed by the Nazis in 1933, and finished his career at Union Theological Seminary, Harvard, and Chicago.
Tillich's central theological move is the "method of correlation": theology takes the questions implicit in the human condition (anxiety, finitude, estrangement, meaninglessness) and correlates them with the answers disclosed in the Christian revelation, rather than simply asserting dogmatic content over a bewildered culture. This is a thoroughly existentialist-inflected theology — Søren Kierkegaard is in every paragraph — and it sits close to the concerns of his friends Rollo May in psychology and Reinhold Niebuhr in social ethics.
His popular The Courage to Be (1952) argued that the specific anxiety of modernity is the anxiety of meaninglessness, and that faith is the courage to affirm being-itself in the face of that anxiety. God is not "a being" among other beings but "the ground of being" — an image that his critics found either deeply liberating or a philosophical evasion. His three-volume Systematic Theology (1951–63) is his most rigorous statement. His sermons (The Shaking of the Foundations, The New Being) remain his most widely read work and made him one of the great 20th-century Protestant preachers.