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Tillichiana: Tillich never had an existentialist turn, he was an existentialist idealist.
He read Kierkegaard as a student, Nietzsche as a grad student, Schelling all the time, was always a critic of (Ritschl's) liberal theology because he found it too anaemic and moralistic. 1/
He read Kierkegaard as a student, Nietzsche as a grad student, Schelling all the time, was always a critic of (Ritschl's) liberal theology because he found it too anaemic and moralistic. 1/
His idealism is always clear when you see him grounding everything in a transcendental presupposition of all thought. In different writings he uses different conceptual schemes to express the same structural move... 2/
... whether unpreconceivable being (1910, Schelling diss), the Fichtean Ich (1911 Hist. Jesus), truth (1913 ST), the sphere of meaning (1919 Rechtf. Zw.). 3/
One key "hinge" document for understanding this is his 1925 lectures in dogmatics. Here in the first lecture the existentialist "ultimate concern" language is combined with the starting point in the Fichtean Ich ... 4/
"This I, for which one's own empirical I can be foreign [i.e. experiencing one's own history and psychological existence as foreign] has something in itself before which it knows: I cannot draw back from it. It concerns me ultimately." (§1, 27). 5/
There we have both connected, the idealist and the existential. He continues: "Only because this point exists and because nothing exists which one could not lead back to this point is it possible that religion [can] turn to everyone with the expectation to be heard." 6/
His whole apologetic strategy is based on an appeal to the existentially significant idealist foundation of thought. Though, as a reader of Schelling, that ground is always also thought as an abyss (Abgrund) of thought. 7/
So there is no existentialist turn, or rejection of idealism. T's soundbites to the contrary are about his rejection of a certain kind of idealist optimism, vulgar Hegelianism, including the belief that the first world war would birth a great new European future. 8/
Tillich was always existentialist, and always idealist. The only sense in which you could say he became more existentialist is that he decided to interact, very basically, with Heidegger and Sartre in the American systematics. 9/9
