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Honesty and Consecration: Paul Tillich’s Criteria for a Religious Architecture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Martin Dudley*
Affiliation:
St George in Owlsmoor, Berkshire

Extract

In my early life [Paul Tillich told a conference of church architects in 1965], I wished to become an architect and only in my late teens the other desire, to become a philosophical theologian, was victorious. I decided to build in concepts and propositions instead of stone, iron, and glass. But building remains my passion, in clay and in thought, and as the relation of the medieval cathedrals to the scholastic systems shows, the two ways of building are not so far from each other. Both express an attitude to the meaning of life as a whole.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1992

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References

1 Tillich’s writings specifically concerned with art and architecture have been gathered together in a book On Art and Architecture [hereafter OAA], ed. John and Jane Dillenberger (New York, 1989). They are: ‘Theology and Architecture’, pp. 188-98; ‘On the Theology of Fine Art and Architecture’, pp. 204-13; ‘Contemporary Protestant Architecture’, pp. 214-20; ‘Honesty and Consecration in Art and Architecture’, pp. 221-8. The opening quotation is on p. 221.

2 OAA, p. 9.

3 Details of their work can be found in Henze, A. and Filthaut, T., Contemporary Church Art (New York, 1956)Google Scholar; Rapp, Dom Urban, ‘Modern Church Architecture’, in Ryan, V., ed., Studies in Pastoral Liturgy, 2 (Dublin, 1963)Google Scholar; Maguire, R. and Murray, K., Modern Churches of the World (London and New York, 1965)Google Scholar; Gieselmann, R., Contemporary Church Architecture (London, 1972), pp. 1024.Google Scholar

4 See the entry by Debuyst, F., ‘Architectural Setting (Modern) and the Liturgical Movement’, in Davies, J. G., ed., A Dictionary of Liturgy and Worship, 1st edn (London, 1972), pp. 3041.Google Scholar

5 The expression appears to have been coined by Malcolm Diamond in Contemporary Philosophy and Religious Thought (New York, 1974), pp. 305-89.

6 , W. and Pauck, M., Paul Tillich: His Life and Thought (London, 1977), p. 228.Google Scholar

7 OAA, p. 215.

8 Ibid., p. 216.

9 See Barth, Karl, ‘The architectural problem of Protestant places of worship’, in Biéler, A., ed., Architecture in Worship (Edinburgh, 1965), pp. 923.Google Scholar

10 OAA, p. 217.

11 Ibid., p. 193.

12 Ibid., p. 213.

13 Ibid., p. 218.

14 OAA, p-192.

15 Tillich, Paul, Systematic Theology, 3 (Digswell Place, 1964), p. 212.Google Scholar

16 OAA, pp. 222-3.

17 Ibid., p. 225.

18 18 Ibid., p. 211.

19 Tillich, Paul, Dynamics of Faith (New York, 1957), pp. 4154 Google Scholar; Johnson, M. E., ‘The Place of Sacraments in the Theology of Paul Tillich’, Worship, 63 (1989), pp. 1731.Google Scholar

20 20 OAA, p. 193.

21 OAA, p.227.

22 Ibid, p. 194.