Abstract

The article examines the development of Paul Tillich’s understanding of Protestantism. Beginning with his 1913 ‘Systematic Theology’, the shifts in his theory of Protestantism, first developed after the First World War and then at the end of the 1920s, are reconstructed. It is demonstrated that, from the outset, Tillich extended the traditional soteriological interpretation of Protestantism into a universal-cosmological theory. Protestantism means not only critique, but also formation.