Customer Reviews

The Cambridge Companion to Paul Tillich (Cambridge Companions to Religion)

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The Cambridge Companions to Religion are reliably solid and informative introductions to both basic theological topics (i.e. Jesus, the Gospels) and specific theologians (i.e. Karl Barth, Karl Rahner). While this series is not particularly controversial, and tends not to introduce any radically new ideas, it does represent the best of contemporary scholarship, and provides good, general overviews, which are of use to students and teachers alike. This particular book in the series does a good job of appraising Tillich's highly complex and evolving thought, and fills a very important gap in modern literature on Tillich. The one caveat may be that such a broad introduction may lack depth. However, as with all the Cambridge Companions, each chapter here provides a competent survey of a particular area of Tillich's intellectual life and thought, with plenty of direction as to where the interested reader can continue his or her research.

Today Tillich's most observable legacy may well be that of a spiritually-oriented public intellectual and teacher with a broad and continuing range of influence. Tillich`s chapel sermons (especially at Union) were enthusiastically received (Tillich was known as the only faculty member of his day at Union willing to attend the revivals of Billy Graham). When Tillich was University Professor at Harvard he was chosen as keynote speaker from among an auspicious gathering of many who had appeared on the cover of Time Magazine during its first four decades. Tillich along with his student, psychologist Rollo May, was an early leader at the Esalen Institute. Contemporary New Age catchphrases describing God (spatially) as the "Ground of Being" and (temporally) as the "Eternal Now," in tandem with the view that God is not an entity among entities but rather is "Being-Itself" - notions which Eckhart Tolle, for example, has invoked repeatedly throughout his career - were pioneered by Tillich. The introductory philosophy course taught by the person Tillich considered to be his best student, John E. Smith, "probably turned more undergraduates to the study of philosophy at Yale than all the other philosophy courses put together. His courses in philosophy of religion and American philosophy defined those fields for many years. Perhaps most important of all, he has educated a younger generation in the importance of the public life in philosophy and in how to practice philosophy publicly" (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 24 January 2010). In the 1980s and '90s the Boston University Institute for Philosophy and Religion, a leading forum dedicated to the revival of the American public tradition of philosophy and religion, flourished under the leadership of Tillich's student and expositor Leroy S. Rouner.