Tillichian spell: Memories of a student mesmerized in the 1950s, The

Theology Today, Oct 1996 by Driver, Tom F

Composing these reminiscences was a labor of love. I did it at the request of the North American Paul Tillich Society, some of whose members, I'm sure, felt they ought to hear from the occupant emeritus of the Paul Tillich Chair at Union Theological Seminary before he fell asleep or came down with Alzheimer's or something, especially as he is one of that diminishing band of veterans who claim to have seen and heard Paul Tillich in the classroom. I decided to ransack my memory for all the Tillich stories that it contained. This, then, is my modest effort to remember my old professor, one toward whom I have always had the most ambivalent feelings.

STUDENT DAYS

When I finished my undergraduate work at Duke University and went to Union Seminary in New York to study for the ministry, in 1950, I knew nothing of Paul Tillich. Since he was already famous, I must have heard of him, but I had read nothing by him and had no impression that I can remember. I was more conscious of Reinhold Niebuhr, President Henry P. Van Dusen, and John C. Bennett. Looking back, I think this means that none of my teachers and friends at Duke, nor the church pastors I knew, had yet assimilated Tillich; so they said little to me about him.

Everyone knows what a time it took for Tillich to find his audience in America. This had mostly to do with the fact that his philosophical thought, and hence his theological vocabulary, was unlike what Americans were used to. But in part, it came from the way he used and pronounced English words.

There's an oft-told story that illustrates both factors. Soon after Tillich came to the United States, two philosophers (I think one of them may have been Theodore Green) went to hear him speak. Tillich lectured about the emptiness, which he called the vacuum, in modern life. As the two philosophers walked away from the hall afterward, one of them asked the other: "What did he say?"

"I don't really know," said the other. "What did he mean by the `wake womb'?"

If some people had trouble understanding Tillich's English, there were speakers of English that he could not understand. Once, I heard Tillich tell a group of scholars, gathered in the Chapter House of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, about his arrival in the United States. As you probably know, Reinhold Niebuhr and Columbia University Professor Horace Friess had arranged for him to come to Morningside Heights when he fled from Hitler's Germany in 1933.

It is said that Tillich learned English on the boat coming over, but I can't vouch for that. Nor do I know who met him at the dock, but he said he came in a taxi to Knox Hall, the faculty residence at Union Seminary, where he was greeted at the front door by Reinhold Niebuhr's wife, Ursula. She welcomed him enthusiastically in her clipped British accent. Tillich told us he thought to himself, "English I know. But ziss iss Chinese!"

Having come to Union Seminary in 1950 very ignorant of Tillich, I was quite unprepared for what happened to me in his classroom. In a word, as soon as the course began, I realized that I was in the presence of the most powerful, the most masterful teacher I had ever experienced. At Duke, and even in high school, I had had some first-rate instructors who moved me deeply and gave me excellent preparation for postgraduate study, but Tillich was in another category altogether.

I came under his spell and stayed there for at least twenty years. In the 1970s, I thought I had exorcized the spell at last, but the older I get the more I think that it remains. He was the kind of teacher you never get over.

Substantively, the way Tillich got to me was to go about answering my questions without my having to ask them. Chalk that up to his intuitiveness, or to his great powers of cultural analysis, or to both at once. He was known as, and called himself, an apologetic theologian. I felt that his apologia was not addressed to unbelievers nearly so much as to persons like me who had been Christian all our lives and had now come to a time when we did not really know what Christianity was about, for it seemed so at odds with our culture. Tillich addressed both the confusion and the doubt of the Christian believer.

I had grown up in liberal Methodism, although that was in the South where the surrounding population tended toward fundamentalism. World War II, during part of which I had been in the Army, shook me out of the complacency of my liberal Christian upbringing, but I did not yet have anything to put in its place. I was ready for some version of what I soon learned to call "crisis theology." But there were several varieties of crisis thought, so the question is why I was so entranced by Tillich's version.

In his own recollections, Langdon Gilkey has said that students at Union did not see any conflict between Niebuhr and Tillich.1 Gilkey was there from 1946 to 1950, while I arrived in September of 1950. Perhaps it was different during his years there. Or perhaps he just means that there was no personal animosity between them. The students in my time were very aware of theological conflicts between them, as the following story, which may be apocryphal, makes clear: