The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
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List of the most influential people in Religious Studies,
#5601
Heinrich Abeken
1809 - 1872 (63 years)
Heinrich Abeken was a German theologian and Prussiann Privy Legation Councillor in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Berlin. Early life Abeken was born and raised in the city of Osnabrück as a son of a merchant, he was incited to a higher education by the example of his uncle Bernhard Rudolf Abeken. After finishing the college in Osnabrück, he moved in 1827 to visit the University of Berlin to study theology. He combined philosophical and philological studies and was interested in art and modern literature.
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William Griffith Thomas
1861 - 1924 (63 years)
William Henry Griffith Thomas was an Anglican cleric and scholar from the English-Welsh border country. He has been quoted by theologian Alister McGrath in the science-versus-religion debate. Life and work Griffith Thomas was born in Oswestry, Shropshire, England, to a Welsh family. According to the General Register Office marriage record for his parents, his mother was the daughter of William Griffith, a surgeon of Oswestry. She married William Thomas on August 30, 1860. William Thomas was a draper and the son of Thomas Thomas, a farmer. By the 1861 census, Mrs. Thomas was widowed and living in Oswestry with her parents and infant son.
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Henry Orton Wiley
1877 - 1961 (84 years)
Henry Orton Wiley was a Christian theologian primarily associated with the followers of John Wesley who are part of the Holiness movement. A member of the Church of the Nazarene, his "magnum opus" was the three volume systematic theology Christian Theology.
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Carl Stange
1870 - 1959 (89 years)
Carl Stange was a German Protestant theologian and philosopher. In his work, he mainly dealt with issues of ethics and the philosophy of religion. He studied theology, history and philosophy at the universities of Halle, Göttingen, Leipzig and Jena, obtaining his habilitation for systematic theology in 1895 at Halle. In 1903 he became an associate professor at the University of Königsberg, and during the following year, was named a full professor of systematic theology at the University of Greifswald, where in 1911/12 he served as university rector. In 1912 he was appointed professor of syste...
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Johann Wilhelm Petersen
1649 - 1727 (78 years)
Johann Wilhelm Petersen was a German theologian, mystic, and Millennialist. Johann Wilhelm Petersen grew up in Lübeck and studied theology at the Katharineum in Lübeck, as well as in Giessen, Rostock, Leipzig, Wittenberg and Jena. He studied with Philipp Jakob Spener in Frankfurt, and they became friends in 1675. Through his affiliation with Spener, Petersen became interested in Pietism.
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John Baillie
1886 - 1960 (74 years)
John Baillie was a Scottish theologian, a Church of Scotland minister and brother of theologian Donald Macpherson Baillie. Life Son of Free Church minister John Baillie , and his wife, Annie MacPherson, he was born in the Free Church manse in Gairloch, Wester Ross, on 26 March 1886.
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Sibrandus Lubbertus
1556 - 1625 (69 years)
Sibrandus Lubbertus was a Dutch Calvinist theologian and was a professor of theology at the University of Franeker for forty years from the institute's foundation in 1585. He was a prominent participant in the Synod of Dort . His primary works were to counter Roman Catholic doctrine and to oppose Socinianism and Arminianism.
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Johann Georg Rosenmüller
1736 - 1815 (79 years)
Johann Georg Rosenmüller , a German Protestant theologian, was born at Ummerstadt in Hildburghausen, on 18 December 1736. He was appointed Professor of Theology at Erlangen in 1773, Primarius Professor of Theology at Erlangen in 1773, Primarius Professor of Divinity at Giessen in 1783, and was called in 1785 to Leipzig, where he remained until his death in 1815. His two sons were Ernst Friedrich Karl Rosenmüller, and Johann Christian Rosenmüller.
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James Robinson Graves
1820 - 1893 (73 years)
James Robinson Graves was an American Baptist preacher, publisher, evangelist, debater, author, and editor. He is most noted as the original founder of what is now the Southwestern family of companies. Graves was born in Chester, Vermont, the son of Z. C. Graves, and died in Memphis, Tennessee. His remains are interred in Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis.
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Johann Joachim Lange
1670 - 1744 (74 years)
Johann Joachim Lange was a German Protestant theologian and philosopher. Lange was born in Gardelegen and educated in Leipzig, Erfurt and Halle. He was influenced by Christian Thomasius and the pietist August Hermann Francke. He became a professor of theology at Halle in 1709, and opposed the philosophy of Christian Wolff. He died in Halle on 7 May 1744.
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Caspar Schwenckfeld
1489 - 1561 (72 years)
Caspar Schwenkfeld von Ossig was a German theologian, writer, physician, naturalist, and preacher who became a Protestant Reformer and spiritualist. He was one of the earliest promoters of the Protestant Reformation in Silesia.
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Bruno Franz Leopold Liebermann
1759 - 1844 (85 years)
Bruno Franz Leopold Liebermann was a German Catholic theologian. Life Having finished his humanities in the college at Molsheim, he studied theology from 1776 to 1780 in the seminary at Strasbourg, after which, as he was too young for ordination, he was as subdeacon appointed teacher in the college at Molsheim. He became a deacon and a licentiate of theology in 1782, and was ordained priest on 14 June 1783.
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Philipp van Limborch
1633 - 1712 (79 years)
Philipp van Limborch was a Dutch Remonstrant theologian. Biography Limborch was born on 19 June 1633 in Amsterdam, where his father was a lawyer. He received his education at Utrecht, at Leiden, in his native city, and finally at Utrecht University, which he entered in 1652. In 1657 he became a Remonstrant pastor at Gouda, and in 1667 he was transferred to Amsterdam, where, in the following year, the office of professor of theology in the Remonstrant seminary was added to his pastoral charge. He was a friend of John Locke, whose A Letter Concerning Toleration was likely addressed to, and first published by, Philipp van Limborch.
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George Park Fisher
1827 - 1909 (82 years)
George Park Fisher was an American theologian and historian who was noted as a teacher and a prolific writer. Biography He was born in Wrentham, Massachusetts. He graduated from Brown University in 1847, and then studied theology at Yale Divinity School and the Andover Theological Seminary. He graduated from the latter institution in 1851. In 1853 he visited Germany, where he continued his theological studies.
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August Carl Eduard Baldamus
1812 - 1893 (81 years)
August Carl Eduard Baldamus was a German ornithologist. August Baldamus studied theology at the University of Berlin. In 1859 he became professor at the Gymnasium in Köthen where he met Carl Andreas Naumann and his brother Johann Friedrich Naumann both ornithologists. In 1849 he became Pastor in Diebzig, in 1859 moving to the same office in Osternienburg. He retired to Coburg in 1870. Baldamus was the founder of the Deutsche Ornithologen-Gesellschaft and published the ornithological journal Naumannia between 1849 and 1858.
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Johann Ernst Immanuel Walch
1725 - 1778 (53 years)
Johann Ernst Immanuel Walch was a German theologian, linguist, and naturalist from Jena. Life The son of the theologian Johann Georg Walch, he studied Semitic languages at the University of Jena, and also natural science and mathematics. In 1749 he published Einleitung in die Harmonie der Evangelien, and in 1750 was appointed professor extraordinarius of theology. Five years later he became professor ordinarius of logic and metaphysics; in 1759 he exchanged this for a professorship of rhetoric and poetry.
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Henry Alford
1810 - 1871 (61 years)
Henry Alford was an English churchman, theologian, textual critic, scholar, poet, hymnodist, and writer. Life Alford was born in London, of a Somerset family, which had given five consecutive generations of clergymen to the Anglican church. Alford's early years were passed with his widowed father, who was curate of Steeple Ashton in Wiltshire. He was a precocious boy, and before he was ten had written several Latin odes, a history of the Jews and a series of homiletic outlines. After a peripatetic school education he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1827 as a scholar. In 1832 he was 3...
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Jérôme-Hermès Bolsec
1501 - 1584 (83 years)
Jérôme-Hermès Bolsec, also known as Hieronymus Bolsec was a French Carmelite theologian and physician, who became a Protestant and controversialist, later returning to the Catholic Church. Life A sermon which he preached at Paris aroused misgivings in Catholic circles regarding the soundness of his ideas, and Bolsec left Paris. Having separated from the Catholic Church around 1545, he took refuge at the Court of Renée, duchess of Ferrara, who was favourably disposed towards persons holding Protestant views. Here he married, and began the study of medicine around 1550, settling as a physician ...
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Siger of Brabant
1235 - 1284 (49 years)
Siger of Brabant was a 13th-century philosopher from the southern Low Countries who was an important proponent of Averroism. Life Early life Little is known about many of the details of his life. In 1266, he was attached to the Faculty of Arts in the University of Paris at the time when a riot erupted between the French and Picard "nations" of students—a series of loosely organized fraternities. The papal legate threatened Siger with execution as the ringleader of the Picard attack on the French, but no further action was taken.
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Cuthbert
635 - 687 (52 years)
Cuthbert of Lindisfarne was an Anglo-Saxon saint of the early Northumbrian church in the Celtic tradition. He was a monk, bishop and hermit, associated with the monasteries of Melrose and Lindisfarne in the Kingdom of Northumbria, today in north-eastern England and south-eastern Scotland. Both during his life and after his death, he became a popular medieval saint of Northern England, with a cult centred on his tomb at Durham Cathedral. Cuthbert is regarded as the patron saint of Northumbria. His feast days are 20 March and 4 September .
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Saint Remigius
437 - 533 (96 years)
Remigius was the Bishop of Reims and "Apostle of the Franks". On 25 December 496, he baptised Clovis I, King of the Franks. The baptism, leading to about 3000 additional converts, was an important event in the Christianization of the Franks. Because of Clovis's efforts, a large number of churches were established in the formerly pagan lands of the Frankish empire, establishing a distinct Catholic variety of Christianity for the first time in Germanic lands, most of whom had been converted to Arian Christianity.
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Franz Joseph Dölger
1879 - 1940 (61 years)
Franz Joseph Dölger was a German Catholic theologian and church historian. He studied theology at the University of Würzburg, being ordained into the priesthood in 1902. Afterwards he worked as a chaplain in Amorbach and Würzburg, and in June 1904, obtained his doctorate in theology.
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Orson Hyde
1805 - 1878 (73 years)
Orson Hyde was a leader in the early Latter Day Saint movement and a member of the first Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. He was the President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1847 to 1875 and was a missionary of the LDS Church in the United States, Europe, and the Ottoman Empire.
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Willibald Beyschlag
1823 - 1900 (77 years)
Johann Heinrich Christoph Willibald Beyschlag was a German theologian from Frankfurt am Main. Biography He studied theology at the Universities of Bonn and Berlin, afterwards serving as an assistant pastor in Koblenz , then as a pastor in Trier . During the following year, Beyschlag began working as a religious instructor in Mainz. In 1856 he became a court preacher in Karlsruhe, and four years later, he was appointed a professor of practical theology and New Testament exegesis at the University of Halle.
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F. C. Grant
1891 - 1974 (83 years)
Frederick Clifton Grant was an American New Testament scholar. Grant was born on February 2, 1891, in Beloit, Wisconsin. He received a Bachelor of Divinity degree from General Theological Seminary in 1912 and Master of Sacred Theology and Doctor of Theology degrees from Western Theological Seminary in 1916 and 1922 respectively. Grant was Edward Robertson Professor of Biblical Theology at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. In 1951, a Festschrift was published in his honor. The Joy of Study: Papers on New Testament and Related Subjects Presented to Honor Frederick Clifton Grant included contributions from Henry Cadbury, Philip Carrington, and Robert M.
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David Beaton
1494 - 1546 (52 years)
David Beaton was Archbishop of St Andrews and the last Scottish cardinal prior to the Reformation. Career Cardinal Beaton was the sixth and youngest son of eleven children of John Beaton of Balfour in the county of Fife, and his wife Mary, daughter of Sir David Boswell of Balmuto. The Bethunes of Balfour were part of Clan Bethune, the Scottish branch of the noble French House of Bethune. The Cardinal is said to have been born in 1494. He was educated at the universities of St Andrews and Glasgow, and in his sixteenth year was sent to Paris, where he studied civil and canon law. In 1519 King ...
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Wolfgang Friedrich Gess
1819 - 1891 (72 years)
Wolfgang Friedrich Gess was a German Lutheran theologian. Life Gess was a teacher of theology in Basel from 1850 to 1864. After that, he became Professor of Systematic Theology in Göttingen, and frpom 1871 in Breslau. In 1879 he succeeded the deceased General Superintendent in Posen, Friedrich Cranz . Gess entered upon his duties in April 1880 and as general superintendent of the Old Prussian, he headed the Church province of Posen until 1884. He was succeeded by Johannes Hesekiel, and settled down in Wernigerode.
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Hugh James Rose
1795 - 1838 (43 years)
Hugh James Rose was an English Anglican priest and theologian who served as the second Principal of King's College, London. Life Rose was born at Little Horsted in Sussex on 9 June 1795 and educated at Uckfield School, where his father was Master, and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was conferred the degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1817, but missed a fellowship. He was then President of the Cambridge Union Society for the Michaelmas term of 1817. Having been ordained to the diaconate in 1818, he was appointed to a cure in Buxted, Sussex, in 1819. He married Anne Cuyler and was priested later that year.
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Francis Alison
1705 - 1779 (74 years)
Francis Alison was a leading minister in the Synod of Philadelphia during The Old Side-New Side Controversy Biography Early life and education Alison was born in Donegal, Ireland and studied at the University of Glasgow. It appears he arrived in the United States in 1734 or 1735 in order to help the fledgling Presbyterian Church as a minister. He was ordained a full-fledged minister in 1737 and served the New London congregation.
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Daniel Williams
1643 - 1716 (73 years)
Daniel Williams was a British benefactor, minister and theologian, within the Presbyterian tradition, i.e. a Christian outside the Church of England. He is known largely for the legacy he left which led to the creation of Dr Williams's Library, a centre for research on English Dissenters.
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Pierre d'Ailly
1350 - 1420 (70 years)
Pierre d'Ailly was a French theologian, astrologer and cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. Academic career D'Ailly was born in Compiègne in 1350 or 1351 of a prosperous bourgeois family. He studied in Paris at the Collège de Navarre, receiving the licentiate in arts in 1367 and the master’s a year later, and was active in university affairs by 1372. D'Ailly taught the Bible in 1375 and the Sentences of Peter Lombard in 1376–1377, and received the licentiate and doctorate in theology in 1381. He was affiliated with the university, serving as rector in 1384; among his pupils were Jean Gers...
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Leonard Hodgson
1889 - 1969 (80 years)
Leonard Hodgson was an Anglican priest, philosopher, theologian, historian of the early Church and Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford from 1944 to 1958. Early life Hodgson was the son of Walter Hodgson , a shorthand writer to the House of Lords and the House of Commons, and of his wife Lillias Emma, a daughter of William Shaw of County Durham. He was educated at St Paul's School, London, and Hertford College, Oxford, where he took a second in Classical Moderations in 1910, a first in Greats in 1912 and a first in Theology in 1913. He then trained for the ministry at St...
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Pope Innocent II
1100 - 1143 (43 years)
Pope Innocent II , born Gregorio Papareschi, was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 14 February 1130 to his death in 1143. His election as pope was controversial and the first eight years of his reign were marked by a struggle for recognition against the supporters of Anacletus II. He reached an understanding with King Lothair III of Germany who supported him against Anacletus and whom he crowned as Holy Roman emperor. Innocent went on to preside over the Second Lateran council.
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Robert Newton Flew
1886 - 1962 (76 years)
Robert Newton Flew was an English Methodist minister and theologian, and an advocate of ecumenism among the Christian churches. Family and education Robert Newton Flew was born at Holsworthy, Devon, on 25 May 1886, the older son of Josiah Flew , a Wesleyan Methodist minister, and his wife, Florence Jones . Originally from Portland, Dorset, the family moved during Flew's childhood to Wiltshire and Warwickshire, and then to the suburbs of London. There Flew won a scholarship in 1897 to the independent school Christ's Hospital, followed by a "postmastership" to Merton College, Oxford, where he read classics and theology.
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John Brown
1784 - 1858 (74 years)
John Brown was a Scottish minister and theologian, known for his exegesis as a preacher. Life The grandson of John Brown of Haddington, he was born at Whitburn, Linlithgowshire. He studied at Glasgow university, and afterwards at the divinity hall of the Burgher branch of the Secession church at Selkirk, under George Lawson. In 1806 he was ordained minister of the Burgher congregation at Biggar, Lanarkshire, where he laboured for sixteen years. While there he had a controversy with Robert Owen the socialist.
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Galusha Anderson
1832 - 1918 (86 years)
Galusha Anderson was an American theologian and university president. Biography Anderson was born at Bergen, Genesee County, New York. His father was of Scotch descent and a strict Presbyterian. At a young age he converted to the Baptist faith and was determined to become a minister. Anderson was educated at the University of Rochester, graduating with high honors in 1854, and the Rochester Theological Seminary, graduating in 1856. His ministry began as pastor of the Baptist Church in Janesville, Wisconsin. After two years, he moved to St. Louis to be the pastor of Second Baptist Church.
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Claudius Buchanan
1766 - 1815 (49 years)
Claudius Buchanan FRSE was a Scottish theologian, an ordained minister of the Church of England, and an evangelical missionary for the Church Missionary Society. He served as Vice Provost of the College of Calcutta in India.
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Felix Fabri
1441 - 1502 (61 years)
Felix Fabri was a Swiss Dominican theologian. He left vivid and detailed descriptions of his pilgrimages to Palestine and also in 1489 authored a book on the history of Swabia, entitled Historia Suevorum.
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Nicolaus von Amsdorf
1483 - 1565 (82 years)
Nicolaus von Amsdorf was a German Lutheran theologian and an early Protestant reformer. As bishop of Naumburg , he became the first Lutheran bishop in the Holy Roman Empire. Biography He was born in Torgau, on the Elbe.
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Bernardino Ochino
1487 - 1564 (77 years)
Bernardino Ochino was an Italian, who was raised a Roman Catholic and later turned to Protestantism and became a Protestant reformer. Biography Bernardino Ochino was born in Siena, the son of the barber Domenico Ochino, and at the age of 7 or 8, in around 1504, was entrusted to the order of Franciscan Friars. From 1510 he studied medicine at Perugia.
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Erich Sauer
1898 - 1959 (61 years)
Erich Sauer was a German dispensationalist Christian theologian associated with the Plymouth Brethren. His various books have sold around one million copies. Early life Sauer was born in Berlin in 1898, his mother was already a Christian and he attended Open Brethren congregations.
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Emil Fuchs
1874 - 1971 (97 years)
Emil Fuchs was a German theologian, the son of Georg Friedrich Fuchs and Auguste Louise Wilhelmine Lonni Hauss. A religious socialist, Fuchs was one of the first Lutheran pastors to join the Social Democratic Party of Germany. As a devoted pacifist, he later joined the Religious Society of Friends . He was a Fellowship holder at Woodbrooke College , Selly Oak, Birmingham from 1934 to 1935.
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Friedrich Bleek
1793 - 1859 (66 years)
Friedrich Bleek , was a German Biblical scholar. Life At 16 Bleek's father sent him to the gymnasium at Lübeck, where he became so interested in ancient languages that he abandoned his idea of a legal career and resolved to devote himself to the study of theology. After spending some time at the university of Kiel, he went to Berlin, where, from 1814 to 1817, he studied under De Wette, Neander and Schleiermacher. So highly were his merits appreciated by his professors — Schleiermacher was accustomed to say that he possessed a special charisma for the science of Introduction — that in 1818 afte...
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Johann Christoph Döderlein
1746 - 1792 (46 years)
Johann Christoph Döderlein or Doederlein was a German Protestant theologian. As professor of theology at Jena from 1782, he was celebrated for his varied learning, for his eloquence as a preacher, and for the important influence he exerted in guiding the transition movement from strict orthodoxy to a freer theology. His most important work Institutio theologi christiani nostris temporibus accommodata was published in 1780.
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Hans Meiser
1881 - 1956 (75 years)
Hans Meiser was a German Protestant theologian, pastor and from 1933 to 1955 the first 'Landesbischof' of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bavaria. Today Meiser's political stance between 1933 and 1945 is intensely studied and debated within the parameters of Germany's Culture of Remembrance. In his unsuccessful attempt to maintain his 'landeskirche' and its independence he decided to make several compromises with the Nazi state. His attitude towards Judaism is also controversial in light of studies of the Shoah.
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Cornelis Tiele
1830 - 1902 (72 years)
Cornelis Petrus Tiele was a Dutch theologian and scholar of religions. Life Tiele was born at Leiden. He was educated at Amsterdam, first studying at the Athenaeum Illustre, as the communal high school of the capital was then named, and afterwards at the seminary of the Remonstrant Brotherhood.
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Christian David
1692 - 1751 (59 years)
Christian David was a German Lutheran missionary, writer and hymnwriter. He travelled as a missionary of the Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine, the Moravian Church, to Greenland and to Native Americans. He is known as the author of hymn stanzas that were included in "Sonne der Gerechtigkeit" in 1932.
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Nahum Norbert Glatzer
1903 - 1990 (87 years)
Nahum Norbert Glatzer was an Austrian and American scholar of Jewish history and philosophy from antiquity to mid 20th century. Life Glatzer was born in Lemberg, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire . At the start of World War I his family moved westward to Bodenbach in Silesia where Norbert attended Gymnasium. At age 17, his father sent him to study with Solomon Breuer in Frankfurt, Germany with the intention that he would become a Rabbi. After encountering the circle of Jewish intellectuals, including Franz Rosenzweig, around Rabbi Nehemiah Anton Nobel he decided against the rabbinate. ...
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Gustav Baron
1847 - 1914 (67 years)
Gustav Baron was Croatian theologian, university professor and rector of the University of Zagreb. He studied theology in Vienna and Zagreb. He was ordained for a priest in 1873. He received his Ph.D in 1876 at the Faculty of Theology of the Royal University of Franz Joseph I. He was professor and chair of the Archiepiscopal Gymnasium in Zagreb. He became a docent at the Faculty of Theology in 1877, and a full professor in 1881. He served as the dean of the faculty in two mandates.
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Martin Delrio
1551 - 1608 (57 years)
Martin Anton Delrio SJ was a Dutch Jesuit theologian. He studied at numerous institutions, receiving a master's degree in law from Salamanca in 1574. After a period of political service in the Spanish Netherlands, he became a Jesuit in 1580.
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