Many years ago when we were living in Chicago and I was finishing up my last year at Concordia College, my wife and I went out with one of her friends from her days at Valparaiso University. This lady’s husband was a seminary student at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. I remember this outing because of the bizarre conversation I had with the man. He was singing the praises of Paul Tillich and I had done a bit of reading in Tillich and for the life of me could not understand why anyone in their right mind, let alone anyone remotely interested in genuine Christianity, not to mention authentic Lutheranism, would want to waste their time studying Tillich and his drivel.

Now, I know there are those out there who will claim that we must
engage these "great minds" of modern "theology." I always looked at
this way, if I was forced to read heretical theology to gain some
appreciable comprehension of what was being said in order to destroy
it, ok, I could live with that, but spending any more time than
absolutely necessary with these kinds of people always has struck me as
a total waste of time; particularly when there are so many riches to be
found in the Early Church Fathers and the Fathers of the Lutheran
Reformation and Age of Lutheran Orthodoxy. Tillich in particular has
always turned my stomach almost as much as the liberal Lutherans
running about breathlessly singing his praises. This young seminarian
could not care one wit for the witness of the New Testament, but was
taken by Tillich. Hopefully, if he ever made it into the pastoral
ministry, he quickly learned how entirely useless Tillich is at the
bedside of a dying person. I was reading in First Things and ran across
this wonderfully succinct rejection of Tillich, R.R. Reno who had, in
the previous issue, written a wonderful call to spend more time with
the Church Fathers. He is writing to respond to several letters
reacting to his article. One person advocated adding Tillich to the
"Church Fathers" who should be read. His excoriation of Tillich was so
delightfully total, yet brief, I just had to post it here.

Paul Tillich certainly knew a great deal about Christian
tradition, but his overall influence on American Protestantism was
largely destructive. He was the master of translating scriptural truths
into vague existential slogans that countless preachers easily
manipulated into a capitulation to the spirit of the age. American Lutheranism has
never recovered from his gloss of justification in Christ as "you are
accepted." His account of the so-called Protestant Principle turns
anti-Romanism into a global rejection of any and all forms of
historical authority, including the creeds and Scripture itself. The
interpretation of faith as the "courage to be" struck me as fastuous
when I was a teenager, and as an adult I have seen Tillich used to
justify any and every attack upon traditional forms of Christian faith
and morals. No, I will not add Paul Tillich to my arsenal, as Valentino
encourages. By my reading, Paul Tillich helps the barbarians maintain
their illusions. His primary role in the twentieth century was to
unburden the consciences of clergy who no longer believed but wanted to
maintain their roles and reputations as men and women of spiritual
seriousness. I have difficulty thinking of a more destructive writer.
Give me the ardent atheism of Richard Dawkins any day over the
pseudo-mystery and easy spiritualism of Paul Tillich.