The Irrelevance and Relevance of the Christian Message
By Paul Tillich
1996
First Published
4.15
Average Rating
89
Number of Pages
'The Irrelevance and Relevance of the Christian Message' is a transcript of Paul Tillich's 1963 Earl Lectures at the Graduate Theological Union. Delivered just two years before his death, these lectures present Tillich's heartfelt and deeply personal understanding of the relevance of Christian preaching and Christian theology. Why, Tillich asks, has the Christian message become seemingly irrelevant to contemporary society? Is the gospel able to give answers to the questions raised by the existentialist analysis of the human predicament? Yes, he answers—but in order to do so Christian teaching and preaching need to undergo dramatic renewal, the root of which requires an affirmation of love as central to Christian identity. Further, we need to recognize that this task is not limited to preachers and theologians; all of us together are responsible for the irrelevance or the relevance of the gospel in our time.
Avg Rating
4.15
Number of Ratings
34
5 STARS
44%
4 STARS
35%
3 STARS
12%
2 STARS
9%
1 STARS
0%
goodreads
Author
Paul Tillich
Author · 24 books
Paul Tillich was a German-American theologian and Christian existentialist philosopher. Tillich was – along with his contemporaries Rudolf Bultmann (Germany), Karl Barth (Switzerland), and Reinhold Niebuhr (United States) – one of the four most influential Protestant theologians of the 20th century. Among the general populace, he is best known for his works The Courage to Be (1952) and Dynamics of Faith (1957), which introduced issues of theology and modern culture to a general readership. Theologically, he is best known for his major three-volume work Systematic Theology (1951–63), in which he developed his "method of correlation": an approach of exploring the symbols of Christian revelation as answers to the problems of human existence raised by contemporary existential philosophical analysis.
