Hitler and the Gods of Marburg

... the existential shaping of theology

[This is an extract (5th of 8) from Through Mud and Barbed Wire, an account of the impact of the First World War on two great thinkers - Paul Tillich (German; serving as a chaplain and grave-digger) and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (French; serving as a stretcher bearer).]

Intellectual health warning…

This extract explores theological and religious ideas that developed in the years following the Great War. They are important in appreciating how Paul Tillich’s life and thought were to develop over the following decades. Those who find the discussion of such topics either precious or emetic might wish to skip this weeks’s extract, as might anyone who avoids thinking about Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Next week we’ll return to the fortress of Douaumont at Verdun.

It is difficult to imagine two environments more different than Verdun in 1916 and the little German town of Marburg in 1924. Delightful, small, rather provincial, but famous for having the oldest Protestant university, established by Philip of Hesse in 1527, it sits comfortably in the hilly country to the north of Frankfurt. Since the Reformation, Marburg and its university have represented solid, Protestant thinking. Not the place you would have chosen for Paul Tillich as a next step in his theological journey, but certainly one that brought together some of the most significant movements in religious thought in the 20^th century.

Paul Tillich

Tillich arrived with his new wife, Hannah, in the spring of 1924, entering a small, enclosed theological world very different from secular Berlin. He had enjoyed the freedom and existential challenge of Berlin, in spite of the destruction and poverty of the immediate post-war years. He had divorced and re-married, lived as a secular, free-thinking philosopher and had maintained the discipline of academic work and writing in the midst of domestic chaos. Following his wartime crises, Tillich had shifted from theology to philosophy in his thinking and feeling. He was no longer a regular attender at a Church (something that did not change until he found himself in Union Theological Seminary in New York and it was pointed out to him that members of staff were expected to do so). His life had become utterly secular, although he was still involved with unpacking theological ideas, exploring them within their historical, cultural and philosophical contexts. He was therefore very uncertain about the wisdom of going to Marburg. Persuaded that it would be good for his career, it was the very opposite of the environment in which he could naturally flourish. Traditional, formal and narrow, it was everything from which he had wanted to escape.

Teaching in Marburg when Tillich arrived were three thinkers who were to have a profound influence not just on Tillich himself but more generally on the ideas of God that developed during the 20^th century: Martin Heidegger, Rudolf Bultmann and Rudolf Otto – an amazing confluence of very different minds. We shall examine their contribution in a moment, but to appreciate just what was happening at that time we also need to look at two other people, one whose religious influence was already changing the face of Protestant theology, the other whose political views were about to explode upon a world made vulnerable by the Great War: Karl Barth and Adolf Hitler.

Karl Barth

At the very time that Tillich had felt that the comfortable, ordered, religious world of his upbringing was coming apart, another thinker, was starting to pen his religious response to exactly the same insight. It was in that summer of 1916 that Karl Barth, then a pastor of Safenwil in Switzerland, started work on his Letter to the Romans, a work that was to attack the widely held assumption that Christianity was merely a matter of internal spiritual and moral progress and that it could not stand back from the political and cultural context in which it found itself, or engage with it critically. This view was exemplified by the fact that, among all the intellectuals who endorsed the Kaiser’s call to war was the great German theologian Adolf von Harnack, who had been Barth’s tutor. The war was presented as a defensive measure to ensure the survival of German culture; and thus as a defence of the homeland of Beethoven, Goethe, Kant and the host of other thinkers, artists and musicians who continued to be celebrated as touching the heart of human experience. But in allowing religion to be aligned with a cultural and military ideology, liberal theology, as represented by Harnack, effectively removed religion’s ability to challenge.

Barth’s fear was that, following the liberal tradition (as exemplified in the work of the 19^th century theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, famous for describing religion as a sense and taste for the infinite, God would become no more than an extension of human thinking and culture. He was utterly opposed to exactly what Ludwig Feuerbach had argued in the previous century; that God was a projection of the highest aspirations of humanity. Ultimately, to use something of a caricature, the Liberal Protestant tradition led to a sense of the Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man and the value of the soul. It was a civilised, non-specific religion. But the implication of that view was that religion had become a cultural product – important, essential perhaps, but a product nevertheless. From within that tradition there is always going to be an emphasis on the ‘eternal’ – the realm of spiritual reality that contrasts with the physical and historical.

According to the liberal approach, if you want to understand religious ideas you need to examine them in their historical context. In other words, it makes no sense to take a statement from a couple of thousand years ago as though it were a definition or scientific proposition to be analysed. To understand any historical claim one would need to ask ‘What did they mean then if they expressed themselves in that way? What was distinctive about this or that belief in the context of the ideas of the time?’ Such questions set theological claims in the context of an ongoing cultural process, but they also help prevent them from being misinterpreted. The problem with this from a religious point of view is that it allows a text to be distanced from the reader – seeing it as an interesting feature of beliefs and values of a particular time, rather than allowing the words themselves to challenge, demanding a response in the present.

The approach Barth was taking in that summer of 1916 was different and dramatic. He rejected the position taken by Schleiermacher, as he rejected the whole liberal approach of Harnack. Instead, he presented the Christian Gospel not as a natural extension of human morality but as something challenging, demanding, disruptive of human social norms. By the time Tillich arrived in Marburg, Barth’s approach had enthused many of the Protestant students he encountered there; it represented an incisive new start, cutting religion free from the flow of cultural and political events. But I suspect there was, and remains, a problem with Barth’s whole approach, to which Tillich was, indirectly, to provide an answer. Barth saw Christianity as presenting a set of teachings and values that were far from those naturally cultivated within society. Yet, by doing so, he effectively blocked the equally important ability of reason to examine and – yes – challenge religious language and forms.

It is also sadly true that, following the logic of his approach, it is possible to end up, in the minds of those far less sophisticated and nuanced than Barth, with crude literalism and fundamentalism – with a religion deaf to common sense, science and human moral intuition, a religion where Scripture always trumps experience. And that, of course, was a major feature of the century after Verdun, a feature that remains with us and is one of the greatest problems with which more moderate religion has to deal - fundamentalism. For if Barth was right in arguing that religion is not simply to be identified with the culture within which it finds itself, it is equally true that it can have no positive impact upon society if it distances itself from it to such an extent that its followers see only a doomed, evil world to whom the godly owe nothing. Redemption out of this wicked world is as dangerous as seeing religion as merely a natural extension of this world’s more kindly attributes. For the literalist, God is not the product of religious sensitivity, nor a term for the ultimate, but is exactly the personal creator-god presented in the Bible. Decontextualised and de-historicised, God stands beyond the world of human experience, to be obeyed and worshipped. But God presented in such a literal way becomes incompatible with the traditional theology of earlier centuries and would have been considered an idol by the more sophisticated Early Fathers of the Church. Presented for much of the 20^th century as traditional belief, biblical literalism is actually a recent phenomenon. It is the product of the modern world, in which the insecure and lost crave the security and direction of the known, the fixed and the guaranteed.

Both the liberal and the literalist approaches have flourished over the last century. On the one hand religion can be presented as endorsing conservative, cultural norms; a religion suited to formal occasions of state, unchallenging, bland, embodying what polite people of good sense hold of value. On the other, you have the fanaticism that is prepared to kill and be killed in the name of a particular interpretation of religion, seeing all those of other persuasions as damned and godless. Both forms have survived into the 21^st century, the one too bland to offer much, the other too narrow and extreme to produce anything other than harm. Common sense and common humanity would suggest that what is needed is a critical mutual engagement between religion and culture, and it was with this that both Tillich and Teilhard were to grapple, which is why they are key to this exploration of the idea of God in the century that has elapsed since the Great War.

…

The bitter patriot

While Paul and Hannah Tillich were settling into life at Marburg, Adolf Hitler was in his prison cell dictating Mein Kampf to Rudolph Hess. It was to be published in 1925, the same year that Tillich published his first work The Religious Situation, which was successful and well-received but sold rather fewer copies.

I was warned that I would not enjoy reading Mein Kampf, that it was poorly written and full of spiteful nonsense and outrageous views. The only positive thing to be said for it was that it funded Hitler’s holiday home at Ober Salzburg in the beautiful Berchtesgarten. It therefore came as a shock to me to find that parts of it seemed both logical and realistic, from a narrowly nationalistic point of view, and not a million miles from arguments that are still presented by the right wing of European politics.

Of course, it is always going to be difficult to get anything like a balanced view of that book, simply because we know the sequel – the nightmare of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust. In the light of such horrors, any attempt to find positive themes in Hitler’s writing would seem almost blasphemous. But it is important to stand back and ask why it was it that Hitler became popular. How was it possible for an intellectual such as Martin Heidegger to come under his influence? Unless we start to understand that, we fail to see the significance of his response to the First World War – a response that still haunts Europe.

Hitler was a puritan, a vegetarian non-drinker, and above all a man of blood and soil, who – as an old fashioned patriot – wanted to motivate and encourage the rebirth of his country. He sought to identify what it needed for strength, direction and purpose, and to understand and overcome those forces that he saw as having brought about its downfall. Mein Kampf includes obscenely vicious passages in which Hitler expresses his hatred of what he sees as a global Jewish conspiracy. Hitler’s hatred of the Jews is visceral but also confused. On the one hand he sees them as controlling finance and media – as moguls who profit from the suffering of ordinary people – but on the other hand he is quietly prepared to say that he has nothing against Jews as individuals. And here, of course, he makes the famous reference to knowing just one Jewish boy at school, whom he regarded as inoffensive and of no great consequence. It is widely assumed, of course, that this refers to Ludwig Wittgenstein, who appears to have been in the same class as Hitler at the Realschule in Linz, Austria, in 1904. Looking at the class photograph, it is clear that one of the boys is little Adolf; the identification of the young Ludwig is more problematic, but in my view – given the almost throw-away reference in Mein Kampf in order to make a general point – it is indeed probable. We know that they were born in the same year, and attended the same school. However, there seems little point in trying to argue that some schoolboy dispute between Hitler and Wittgenstein initiated his anti-Jewish sentiments. It is certainly not what he himself claims in Mein Kampf, and it is clear that his aim is to set up the Jewish community as the scapegoat, upon which he will heap all the causes of Germany’s underlying weakness. Vicious as his views are, they represent an extreme form of a more general tendency, present today as strongly as between the wars, to seek scapegoat groups – particularly now immigrants – as responsible for internal failures within society. It is also important to recognise, following modern scholarship rather than common assumptions, that the path from Mein Kampf in the 1920s to the Holocaust of the 1940s was by no means a straightforward matter of cause and effect.

However, swallowing hard and setting aside the anti-Semitic passages and the future influence the book was to have, the main thrust of Hitler’s argument is that each nation needs to maintain a sense of self-respect, based on ‘blood and soil’ – a sense of the racial stock from which one has come and the place on this earth that one regards as home. He was utterly against universalism and internationalism – reality is local, physical, rooted. He also believed that every nation required strong leadership and a sense of direction, without which it would languish. His intention is to drive society towards a higher and better future, a future that he expressed in terms of bizarre views about the myth of the Aryan race. His pitiless removal of those whom he considered inferior is then seen as an attempt to purify and promote Aryan stock – a necessary clearing away in order to allow the healthy to dominate. Here Darwin’s natural selection is morphed into a moral imperative of the most gruesome kind.

He dictates the book in his prison cell, deprived of the power he craves, with the great Nürnberg rallies, flags and swastikas still a thing of the future, and you sense that he wants to create what is almost a religion – a myth that will have its symbolism, its celebrations, its own morality, even its spirituality. Arguments in Mein Kampf remind us of just how moralistic he was, puritanical and austere in his sense of seriousness. His aim was to establish Germany on the basis of the humanistic ideals of Ancient Greece and Rome, and to reflect the ‘master morality’ of Nietzsche. He was writing against the background of a country suffering from austerity, from a crushing burden of war reparations and an economy in freefall. He desperately wanted to give some reason to be proud to be German. He was determined that, to regain their national pride, young men should maintain strict control over their bodies. He would match any good Catholic for declaring that the only purpose for sex was to breed. His thought was rooted in blood and soil – in the sense (explored by Heidegger) that we are thrown into particular circumstances; we belong in our time and place, an identity threatened by internationalism and intellectualism.

In 1924, Hitler displays a response to war and its aftermath that is the very opposite of Teilhard’s and Tillich’s. Teilhard saw internationalism as taking over from individual nations, so that people would think of themselves first and foremost as citizens of the earth; Tillich mined the rich layers of cultural history to draw out their value. Neither internationalism nor cultural history cut much ice in Mein Kampf.

To each his own experience of war. While at the front, Hitler broods on the need to defend the Fatherland against what he sees as threats from without and rot from within, he also finds – perhaps for the first time in his life – a real sense of comradeship. He was at the Battle of Ypres in October 1914, and by December of that year his company had been reduced from 250 to just 42 men. He was wounded on the Somme on October 16^th 2016, and temporarily blinded by mustard gas in October 1918. Thrown together in such terrible circumstances, men cling to friendship and the small pleasures. Managing to heat up what passed for coffee in the front line provided a moment of relief even if (as we shall see later) it could prove lethal. These things matter; they become symbols of well-being in a cruel and uncertain world.

But they also highlight a point of religious significance – stemming, as so many do, from an observation made by Nietzsche. In The Joyful Science, the madman, mocked for seeking God, turns on the crowd and points out that God is dead, and that together we have murdered him. Then he asks how this deed has been possible, and how we have managed to take a sponge to wipe away the horizon. He senses that the world is becoming colder, that it is loosed from its moorings, drifting through empty space. The Death of God is not presented with a sense of triumph, but as an observation of great seriousness. Without God, we are free but also lost, drifting, without discernible direction or purpose. The challenge – which he introduces in terms of willing that the Übermensch shall be the meaning of the earth, is that we should both accept the world just as it is, and that we ourselves should then give it direction.

This is where Hitler relates to the ideas of God circulating in Marburg. For the Barthians, it is the text that gives direction and establishes a new horizon. God is not extracted from human culture, as the old Liberal tradition had implied, but is present and challenges through the encounter with the biblical text. At the same time, and confronted with the same frailty, experienced in the war and its aftermath, theologians at Marburg were responding differently. Rudolph Bultmann sees a radical separation of the eternal and the temporal. Our personal and emotional focus is located in a different realm from that into which we find ourselves thrown. For Rudolph Otto, however, although we may have wiped away the horizon of conventional theism, there remains the experience of the numinous, confronting human thought and the sense of self-worth, encountered in fear and awe. And for both Bultmann and Tillich God is to be an answer to existential questions – that which we seek when we find ourselves deprived of traditional sources of comfort. God is our ‘ultimate concern’, what we take seriously without reservation. God is located in the void caused by the loss of ‘God.’ But over all these ideas Hitler was soon to attempt to impose a new sense of direction and purpose, require a new commitment, and provide a new mythology and ritual. In its ruthlessness, the Nazi ideology appeared to offer what amounted to a substitute for religion, presenting itself as a source of hope in a world where failure and weakness seemed to define life.

Enough of Hitler! I mention him because his influence was to shape the lives of Paul Tillich and others at Marburg. Hitler identified a need and a weakness and offered a remedy; and this alone must have attracted many to his views, notably, of course, Martin Heidegger.

Martin Heidegger

Nobody at Marburg could have been unaware of Heidegger in those years. He taught there from 1922 to 1928 and his work and terminology was to influence Tillich, although they had almost no direct contact during the three semesters they were teaching alongside one another. Their main interaction was through students who moved between their classes. Later, Heidegger came to be influenced by Hitler, giving him short-lived but enthusiastic support when he was elected Rector of Freiburg in April 1933, just as the Nazi party was being swept into power. He had hoped to provide rational and academic unpinning for the new regime, but was soon disillusioned.

What is astounding about Heidegger’s work is its scope – he wants to unpick much of Western philosophy, going back to the Greeks and explore ‘being-in-the-world’, a state that comes prior to the split between self and world, subject and object. He saw his work as establishing a fundamental ontology, an understanding of what exists, and in doing so he was to develop ideas and a language that were to influence the existentialists. He explores what it is to be really here, now, in this particular place, within a world that is bounded by birth and death. His philosophy is an expression of rootedness rather than speculation. He is concerned with the ontology of Being; with what it is to be as a human being (Dasein) here and now. In Being and Time (published in 1927) Heidegger speaks of life as being ‘thrown’ into a particular time and place, and that is what defines one’s life. We live ‘towards death’, shaped by the fact that we know our life is limited. His understanding of the self is therefore of something which is always ‘rooted’, but which requires direction. It challenged Tillich to explore how religion could be related to existential questions.

Heidegger’s thought exactly fits the experience of war. We are ‘thrown’ into a particular situation and live ‘towards death’. In other words, this finite life is all we get, and we struggle to find meaning and direction within its parameters. He argues that we can do so only by accepting nihilism and then going beyond it. We need to start by admitting that we do not arrive in a world in which meaning and direction are automatically provided; we need to generate them ourselves. But the shattering of meaning is exactly the experience described by those in the trenches – finding the only reality in the immediate companionship of fellow soldiers, the sense that one just goes on living with radical uncertainty, almost giving up on personal hope, constantly living alongside death. This is the starting point for a ‘fundamental ontology’, which is how Heidegger saw his philosophy, an investigation into what it is to be a human being. The individual needs to acknowledge the failure of all external structures of meaning, to acknowledge rootedness in time and place, and on that basis to find courage to give life meaning and direction. The inauthentic accept what is imposed; the authentic live out their sense of meaning. That may be true of the individual, but it is also true of nations.

Rudolph Bultmann

While Tillich and Teilhard were at Verdun, Bultmann was already lecturing on the New Testament in Marburg, but was not thereby removed from the suffering of war, for his youngest brother was killed in 1917, a loss repeated when his sole surviving brother died in a concentration camp under the Nazi regime. At Pentecost 1917, he gave a sermon, in which he referred back to the previous year, and hence to exactly the time when Tillich and Teilhard were facing one another at Verdun. He contrasts that year with the celebrations of his younger days, with houses decked with birch boughs, bells and a procession to the church in a festival of joy, but of Pentecost in 1916 he says:

‘On that day I stood in a military hospital in the midst of the wounded and could hardly bring myself to say that Pentecost should be a festival of joy. Pain and misery stared at me out of large, questioning eyes, and the spirits of strife and alarm, of blood and terror, hovered oppressively through the room. And my thoughts went out to those others who still stood outside in the peril of battle and to those others for whom the boughs of spring have no fragrance and the rays of the sun cast no light.’

Past happiness now seems unreal to him. He speaks of looking into the abyss of life:

‘We look down into a depth of which we never dreamed.’

And this is the heart of the sensitive liberal theologian speaking – the discovery that life itself is both fearsome and mysterious, that it has depths to be plumbed and explored, that it can take us by surprise. And – you sense what is coming – that depth, that mystery of which humanity is capable in both joy and suffering, is the location of the most fundamental of questions: God.

‘Indeed, what is God, if not the infinite fullness of all the powers of life that rage around us and take our breath away, filling us with awe and wonder?’

He wants to hear, beneath the confusing sounds and horrors of the present, a deeper note of reassurance, of God. He wants to find a ‘fundamental tone’ to this ‘confused welter of sounds’.

Then… the crucial thing:

‘If we want to see God, then the first thing we should say to ourselves is that we may not see him as we have conceived him. We must remind ourselves that he may appear to be wholly other than the picture we have made of him; and we must be prepared to accept his visage even if it terrifies us. Can we see him in the present? Has our old picture of him fallen to pieces? If so, then we must first of all be grateful that we have lost our false conception; for the only way we can see him is as he actually is.’

‘God has to be mysterious, a God filled with contradictions; for what unfolds itself within such contradictions is the riches of an infinite creativity.

‘To be sure, it is wanton and shameful to proceed from some fixed concept of God and hastily locate the war and its sufferings in the divine plan for the world, looking upon it as judgment and punishment and on this basis erecting sermons calling men to repentance. But it is just as wanton and undignified to say that God is not present in this war and its horrors.’

In effect, he is pointing to the theological problem in the position that Teilhard takes; he cannot accept this horror as part of God’s plan. On the one hand he sees it as the duty of mankind to ensure that nothing as horrible as this Great War can ever happen again, but on the other he suggests that the war provides an opportunity to stare into the depths of God.

But he also speaks in terms that parallel Tillich’s experience, saying that:

‘the veil that hid the reality of life has been lifted, that the old and illusory concept of God has fallen to pieces.’

…

Life would have been challenging at times for the theologians of Marburg, constantly feeling the need to respond to the popularity of Karl Barth’s thinking among the students. In his ‘Autobiographical Reflections’, Bultmann speaks of the influence of Barth’s new ‘dialectical theology’ especially during the 1920s. He rejected it and refused to give up on the liberal tradition, particularly in understanding scriptures in their original context. He could not accept the insistence of some of Barth’s followers that the scriptures were simply there to challenge, rather than be examined with critical thoughtfulness. In his work, existential philosophy – partly derived from Heidegger – became of ‘decisive significance’ for him and he increasingly came to oppose Barth, in attempting to make philosophy fruitful for theology.

Bultmann also mentions tensions between himself and his colleague Rudolf Otto, which stirred up lively discussions at the university. This is particularly interesting for our story, because Tillich arrived to assist Otto, who had been in poor health, and with whom he had quickly developed friendly relations.

Rudolph Otto

Otto is best known for his book The Idea of the Holy, in which he explored the sense of the ‘other’ in religious experience, the mysterium tremendum or ‘numinous’. For Otto, the fundamental experience of the ‘holy’ is one of an overwhelming power that is both threatening and fascinating. But this view put him at odds with Bultmann.

In an article written in 1936, Bultmann commented on creation myths and pointed out that their intention is to offer some sort of framework within which to make sense of the world. Hence the gods of creation are not ‘mysterium tremendum’ but the very opposite – the power that banishes it. In other words, both Otto and Bultmann see the religious significance of the numinous, but from totally different perspectives. For Otto, the numinous is at the heart of religion; for Bultmann, religion is there to keep the threat of the numinous at bay. One might almost sense the figure of Nietzsche hovering behind their disagreement. In The Birth of Tragedy he distinguishes between two fundamental impulses – the Apollonian and the Dionysian – the one representing order and rationality, the other creation and ecstasy. Bultmann opts for an Apollonian approach, with religion as offering a comfort blanket of rationality to protect the faithful from the threatening abyss into which Dionysus and Otto’s idea of the numinous threaten to plunge us. He sees the essence of religion as offering people ‘an asylum, a sanctuary, to which they might withdraw from the tumult of the visible world’.

Abyss or comfort blanket?

There is no doubt that, during their time together, Tillich was profoundly influenced by Otto. Both rejected what might be regarded as bourgeois or formal religion, and Tillich tended to refer to God as ‘the Unconditioned’, perhaps reflecting Otto’s idea of God as ‘wholly other’. Their idea of God is challenging, and certainly not comfortable or safe; it is the abyss into which we are forced to look when the familiar and comforting is removed – the awesome reality of life itself.

The debate between Bultmann and Otto reflects another major dividing of the ways when it comes to God and religion: the one approach sees religion as offering reassurance, comfort, compensation, a sense that – in spite of all the horrors that this world can throw at us – all will be well in the end; the other sees God as a term for the exploration of the reality of life, a reality that can be destructive as well as creative, that takes into itself the fact of human fragility and the inevitability of death. Although utterly different in their perspectives, Teilhard follows Bultmann in opting for the former, with Omega the final assurance that all is unfolding in the world as it should, while Tillich goes for the latter, enabling God to appear as ‘being itself’, the unsettling and often threatening reality within which we live.

This fundamental divide reflects another, which continues to this day. On the one hand there is the ‘sophisticated’ view of academics and intellectuals – a god compatible with science, culturally embedded, an expression of human qualities taken to an ultimate degree. It is a view that would not shame Feuerbach in the 19^th century – God as the projection of humanity’s highest aspirations. It understands the word ‘God’ to be a shorthand term for a whole range of qualities and intuitions about reality and our response to it. On the other, and often dismissive of the intellectual approach, is the ‘simple’ faith in ‘God’ – the word being used almost as a proper noun – a being with whom one might speak, whose power might well divert shells or cure disease; a being to whom one is committed, even though the implications of his existing might be incompatible with what most people believe most of the time about the ordinary workings of the world.

By the time I came to read Tillich, in the 1960s, the sophisticated branch of the divide had already moved in the direction of Christian Atheism – as in the work of Altizer and Hamilton. It was a form of spiritual and moral challenge that did not require ‘God’ in the literal sense. The problem, however, was that the God that Christian Atheism rejected was, to all intents and purposes, a literalist view of God that was less than 50 years old. What its arguments did not reject was the liberal sense of ‘God’ as a word for the depths of reality. Indeed, the removal of the recently devised ‘literal’ God seemed a prior requirement for any serious exploration of the place of human existence within this world. The world of Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard, or back to Augustine, was far more accessible and ‘real’ than the arguments for or against the existence of God that were presented by Anthony Flew and others. There was almost a delight in showing the failure of such arguments, for setting aside the literal God was a necessary step in understanding what religion might become.

Rudolf Otto had explored religion not as a set of beliefs, but as an experience – the depth and reality of life that could be dark as well as light, threatening as much as uplifting. And that rootedness in real-life experience, along with all the personal, existential questions to which life gives rise, was to become a key feature of Tillich’s theology.

But there we leave the ‘Gods’ of Marburg – all struggling in one way or another to understand the perceived failure of traditional belief in the response to the horrors of the Great War. They were a remarkable group of thinkers to be gathered in a single university – Heidegger, Bultmann and Otto, with Barth always in the theological background. From the richness of their thought, Tillich was to develop his distinctive theology – taking elements of existential analysis (from Heidegger, although, of course, Heidegger was above being labelled an existentialist), of religious experience, of a sense of the depths of life and of the challenge they presented (from Otto), of demythologising and of seeing religious ideas in their cultural context (from Bultmann). And behind them all, the malign influence of Hitler, offering direction and purpose in life to a generation that had become despairing of social and personal value.

In spite of its stifling social narrowness, Marburg offered Tillich an environment where fundamental questions were being asked, and radical views put forward. But however pivotal for his ideas of God, Tillich’s experience of Marburg was short-lived, marked mainly by the publication of The Religious Situation, a popular book that brought his work to a wider audience and the translation of which was to play a part in his escape from Nazi rule. It was also the period in which he started to map out his Systematic Theology, the preoccupation of his later years.

In 1925 he moved on to become Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the Dresden Institute of Technology, a sideways step in terms of his academic career, but one that brought him to a lively city that was far more to his liking than Marburg, and which was later to enable him to become involved as an Adjunct Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Leipzig. Then, in 1929, he was appointed Professor of Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt, the position from which he was dismissed when Hitler came to power.

Thanks for reading! Another extract will be posted next Friday.

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