This year marks the seventieth anniversary of the theologian Paul Tillich’s famous book, The Courage to Be. Widely read in the days when an educated public read books, it is long forgotten.
In it, Tillich surveys the history of anxiety and fear and their relation to courage, religious faith, and the meaning of life.
His closing sentence – “The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt” – became acclaimed as an astute description of the existential need to find a foundation for faith and courage when their foundations were shaking.
His writing profoundly influenced many, even when they didn’t wholly agree with him.
This included Dr Martin Luther King Jr, who, commenting on Tillich’s death in 1965, said:
His Christian existentialism gave us a system of meaning and purpose for our lives in an age when war and doubt seriously threatened all that we had come to hold dear.”