Paul Tillich: Love of Freedom, existentialism and Paul Tillich, the Realm of Existentialism at DividingLine.com

Tillich's love of freedom, however, did not make him forget his boyhood commitment to a rich and satisfying religious tradition; and how to enjoy the freedom to explore life without sacrificing the essentials of a meaningful tradition became his early and lifelong preoccupation. It appears as a major theme in his theological work: the relation of heteronomy to autonomy and their possible synthesis in theonomy. Heteronomy (alien rule) is the cultural and spiritual condition when traditional norms and values become rigid, external demands threatening to destroy individual freedom. Autonomy (self-rule) is the inevitable and justified revolt against such oppression, which nevertheless entails the temptation to reject all norms and values. Theonomy (divine rule) envisions a situation in which norms and values express the convictions and commitments of free individuals in a free society. These three conditions Tillich saw as the basic dynamisms of both personal and social life.

His early attempts to solve the problem took the form of working out an independent position in relation to his conservative father; in this context he learned to examine personal experiences in terms of philosophical categories, for the elder Tillich loved a good philosophical argument. But the decisive, seminal encounter with the problem came during his theological studies at the University of Halle (1905–12), where he was forced to match the doctrinal position of the Lutheran Church, based on the established confessional documents, against the theological liberalism and scientific empiricism that dominated the academic scene in Germany at that time. --Copyright © Encyclopædia Britannica