Hannah (Tillich’s wife) leaves the impression Paulus was a prurient person trying to get as many women as possible into bed. This is a distortion of fact and, more seriously, a distortion of his character. Yet people want to hear and see the prurient.
Tillich’s theology revealed a human being involved in a human struggle to understand. It contained a concern with the person of Jesus, encouraged a new look at the church and challenged the preacher during the times when required to preach even when life seemed cruel and sometimes meaningless.
Much of what Paul Tillich has to say is pertinent to any effort to relate Christian theology and ethics to the social problems of our times and embraced a form of socialism. But he showed a full appreciation of the danger, as seen in the Soviet example, of turning socialism into a form of totalitarianism.
Tillich could speak of emptiness and change and, by turning them inside out, find that the whirl had a structure and the void a heart.