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Religious Internationalism: the Ethics of War and Peace in the Thought of Paul Tillich
The purpose of this study is to assemble and assess the ethics of war and peace in the writings of Paul Tillich. It proceeds chronologically, sketching the evolution of Tillich's thought from the period of his World War One chaplaincy in the German Imperial Army through the time of the Cold War, when he was one of the most prominent Protestant theologians in the United States.The material for this study includes two hundred seventy-five primary sources and nearly two hundred secondary sources. Tillich's corpus ranges from lectures and occasional articles to theological treatises, from political and social theory to sermons and radio addresses, from systematic theology to philosophy of history.Chapter one analyzes Tillich's theological roots and his chaplaincy sermons as the starting point for his thoughts on power, nation, and nationalism. Chapter two examines his post war turn to socialist thought and his participation in religious socialism, fueling his cultural analyses and culminating in his forced emigration under Hitler. Chapter three probes the transitional, American inter war period of Tillich's work, giving special attention to his self-described boundary perspective as well as the one treatise he wrote on religion and international affairs. Chapter four is devoted to his Voice of America speeches, written and broadcasted into his former homeland during World War Two. Chapter five covers the same Second World War period, giving special attention to Tillich's message to his English-speaking audience and emphasizing social and world reconstruction.Chapter six turns to the Cold War period and Tillich's apparently lessening interest in political and social theory and interpretation of history, but his simultaneous commitment to paths toward personhood in a internationally bipolar world.The concluding seventh chapter assembles Tillich's ethics of war and peace as an ethic of religious internationalism. It assesses the ethic, offering suggestions for adjustments intended to give it more universal significance. The study concludes that Tillich's thought has provocative contributions to make to current debates regarding civilizational conflict, economics and international justice, trade and globalization, the defense of unprotected minorities, and immigration policy