Johannes Oecolampadius was a German Protestant reformer in the Calvinist tradition from the Electoral Palatinate. He was the leader of the Protestant faction in the Baden Disputation of 1526, and he was one of the founders of Protestant theology, engaging in disputes with Erasmus, Huldrych Zwingli, Martin Luther and Martin Bucer. Calvin adopted his view on the Eucharist dispute.
Karl Barth was a Swiss Reformed theologian. Barth is best known for his commentary The Epistle to the Romans, his involvement in the Confessing Church, including his authorship of the Barmen Declaration, and especially his unfinished multi-volume theological summa the Church Dogmatics. Barth's influence expanded well beyond the academic realm to mainstream culture, leading him to be featured on the cover of Time on 20 April 1962.
Fideism is a standpoint or an epistemological theory which maintains that faith is independent of reason, or that reason and faith are hostile to each other and faith is superior at arriving at particular truths. The word fideism comes from fides, the Latin word for faith, and literally means "faith-ism". Philosophers have identified a number of different forms of fideism. Strict fideists hold that reason has no place in discovering theological truths, while moderate fideists hold that though some truth can be known by reason, faith stands above reason.
In theology, apokatastasis is the restoration of creation to a condition of perfection. In Christianity, the term refers to a form of Christian universalism, often associated with Origen, that includes the ultimate salvation of everyone—including the damned and the Devil. The New Testament speaks of the "apokatastasis of all things," although this passage is not usually understood to teach universal salvation. The dogmatic status of apokatastasis is disputed, and some orthodox fathers such as Gregory of Nyssa taught apokatastasis and were never condemned.
Otto Kaiser was a German Old Testament scholar.
"God is dead" is a statement made by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The first instance of this statement in Nietzsche's writings is in his 1882 The Gay Science, where it appears three times. The phrase also appears at the beginning of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
ErichPrzywara was a Jesuit priest, philosopher, and theologian of German-Polish origin, who was one of the first Catholics to engage in dialogue with modern philosophers, especially those of the phenomenological tradition. He is best known for synthesizing the thought of prominent thinkers around the notion of the analogy of being, the tension between divine immanence and divine transcendence, a "unity-in-tension".
Martin Chemnitz was an eminent second-generation German, Evangelical Lutheran, Christian theologian, and a Protestant reformer, churchman, and confessor. In the Evangelical Lutheran tradition he is known as Alter Martinus, the "Second Martin": Si Martinus non fuisset, Martinus vix stetisset goes a common saying concerning him. He is listed and remembered in the Calendar of Saints and Commemorations in the Liturgical Church Year as a pastor and confessor by both the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod.
On the Bondage of the Will by Martin Luther argued that people can achieve salvation or redemption only through God, and could not choose between good and evil through their own willpower. It was published in December 1525. It was his reply to Desiderius Erasmus' De libero arbitrio diatribe sive collatio or On Free Will, which had appeared in September 1524 as Erasmus' first public attack on some of Luther's ideas.
In the history of religion and philosophy, deus otiosus is the belief in a creator God who has entirely withdrawn from governing the universe after creating it or is no longer involved in its daily operation. In Western philosophy the concept of deus otiosus has been associated with Deism since the 17th century, although not a core tenet as often thought.
Lutheran orthodoxy was an era in the history of Lutheranism, which began in 1580 from the writing of the Book of Concord and ended at the Age of Enlightenment. Lutheran orthodoxy was paralleled by similar eras in Calvinism and tridentine Roman Catholicism after the Counter-Reformation.
De libero arbitrio diatribe sive collatio is the Latin title of a polemical work written by Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam in 1524. It is commonly called The Freedom of the Will or On Free Will in English.
Werner August Friedrich Immanuel Elert was a German Lutheran theologian and professor of both church history and systematic theology at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. His writings in the fields of Christian dogmatics, ethics, and history have had great influence on modern Christianity in general and modern Lutheranism in particular.
Oswald Bayer is a German Lutheran theologian, and is Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology at the Evangelical Theological Faculty of the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, Germany. The author of several books in German, he is also an ordained pastor of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Württemberg and president of the senate of the Luther Academy in Ratzeburg. Although Bayer is a major contemporary Lutheran theologian, so far little of his work has been translated from German into English.
Paul Althaus was a German Lutheran theologian. He was born in Obershagen in the Province of Hanover, and he died in Erlangen. He held various pastorates from 1914 to 1925, when he was appointed associate professor of practical and systematic theology at the University of Göttingen, becoming full professor two years later. Althaus was moderately critical of Lutheran Orthodoxy and evangelical-leaning Neo-Lutheranism. He termed it a “mistake” to “defend the authenticity and infallibility of the Bible.”
Wilhelm Pauck was a German-American church historian and historical theologian in the field of Reformation studies whose fifty-year teaching career reached from the University of Chicago and Union Theological Seminary, to Vanderbilt and Stanford universities. His impact was extended through frequent lectures and visiting appointments in the U.S. and Europe. Pauck served as a bridge between the historical-critical study of Protestant theology at the University of Berlin and U.S. universities, seminaries, and divinity schools. Combining high critical acumen with a keen sense of the drama of human history, in his prime Pauck was considered the Dean of historical theology in the United States. In the course of his career he became associated with Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich as friend, colleague, and confidant.
Pandeism, or pan-deism, is a theological doctrine that combines aspects of pantheism with aspects of deism. Unlike classical deism, which holds that the creator deity does not interfere with the universe after its creation, pandeism holds that such an entity became the universe and ceased to exist as a separate entity. Pandeism purports to explain why God would create a universe and then appear to abandon it, and pandeism seeks to explain the origin and purpose of the universe.
Hans Schwarz is a German Lutheran theologian.
The Book of the 24 Philosophers is a philosophical and theological medieval text of uncertain authorship.
Deus revelatus refers to the Christian theological concept coined by Martin Luther which affirms that the ultimate self-revelation of God relies on his hiddenness. It is the particular focus of Luther’s work the Heidelberg Theses of 1518, presented during the Heidelberg disputation of 1518. In Christian theology, God is presented as revealed or Deus revelatus through the suffering of Jesus Christ on the cross. Debate of the term is found in the field of philosophy of religion, where it is contested among philosophers such as J. L. Schellenberg. The term is usually distinguished from Luther's concept of Deus absconditus, which affirms the fundamental unknowability of the essence of God. However, Luther proposed that God is a revelation who uses the fog to obscure himself. This distinction which permeates his theology has been the subject of wide interpretation, leading to controversy between theologians who believe the terms to be either antithetical or identical. These two conflicting strands of thought present the main problem when interpreting Luther’s doctrine of the Revealed God. In recent years the term has been used to inform modern analysis of religious themes such as evolution.
