Abstract

Among the almost fifty speakers at the Davos Seminars from 1928 to 1931 were Paul Tillich and Erich Przywara, S.J. Tillich discussed contemporary philosophies of religion with the Catholic Przywara. While the basic question of these lectures at Davos was the suitable form of religion for the modern person, the speakers often were presenting theologies, Lutheran and Catholic, on grace and nature. Tillich went beyond both the liberal Protestantism of the late nineteenth century and the new dialectical theology of Karl Barth, while Przywara sought to leave behind a sterile neo-medievalism for a new philosophy of revelation drawing on Thomas Aquinas, John Henry Newman, and Max Scheler. Przywara reviewed many of Tillich's writings, and in the 1950s he was invited to contribute an essay to a volume honoring the Protestant theologian who had been forced to immigrate to the United States in 1934. Tillich and Przywara were an early ecumenical encounter