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List of the most influential people in Theology,

#1851

Filippo Santoro

Filippo Santoro

#171549

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Filippo Santoro is an Italian Roman Catholic prelate. He was made archbishop of Taranto in 2011. In 2023, he resigned as archbishop

#1852

John Barwick

#154381

Overall Influence

John Barwick was an English theologian. Life Barwick took his name from Berwick, where he appears to have been born or brought up. From Berwick he seems to have removed to the Franciscan schools at Oxford, at which university he became a Doctor of Theology, and is enumerated as the twenty-second reader of divinity belonging to that order in the early years of the fourteenth century. He appears to have studied at Paris likewise; for we are told by Dempster and Bale that he also went by the name of Breulanlius; and this Breulanlius is mentioned towards the end of the fifteenth century by the al...

#1853

Jean Margain

#173726

Overall Influence

1931 - 2012 (81 years)

Jean Margain was a French Hebraist. He is known by his Semitic and Samaritan studies. Life Education Margain got his Doctor of Arts in 1988 with his thesis Les particules dans le Targum samaritain de Genèse-Exode: jalons pour une histoire de l'araméen samaritain at Université Paris III.

#1854

ʻAlí-Muhammad Varqá

#86340

Overall Influence

1912 - 2007 (95 years)

ʻAlí-Muhammad Varqá was a prominent adherent of the Baháʼí Faith. He was the longest surviving Hand of the Cause of God, an appointed position in the Baháʼí Faith whose main function is to propagate and protect the religion on the international level.

#1855

Eduard Nielsen

#192235

Overall Influence

1923 - 2017 (94 years)

Eduard Mikael V. Nielsen was a Danish theologian. He was a professor at the University of Copenhagen from 1956 to 1991. He was a fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters from 1987.

#1856

John Meehan

#177659

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

John Meehan SJ is a Canadian Jesuit priest, historian and academic. He is Director of the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History at Trinity College, University of Toronto. He was president and vice-chancellor of the University of Sudbury in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada from September 2019 until 2021. He was formerly rector of the Church of the Gesù in Montreal and president of Campion College in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.

#1857

Inés Talamantez

#110119

Overall Influence

Inés M. Talamantez was an ethnographer and scholar of religion. She was professor of religious studies at University of California, Santa Barbara . She was an expert on Native American religion and philosophy.

#1858

Juan Ignacio Larrea Holguín

#27011

Overall Influence

1927 - 2006 (79 years)

Juan Ignacio Larrea Holguín , was archbishop of Guayaquil for ten years, and the first member of the prelature of Opus Dei in Ecuador. He was also a distinguished lawyer, frequently consulted about Ecuadorian Civil law and the author of more than 60 books about jurisprudence.

#1859

Anne van der Meiden

#160920

Overall Influence

1929 - 2021 (92 years)

Anne van der Meiden was a Dutch theologian, translator, and professor at Utrecht University. He translated the bible into Tweants dialect.

#1860

Julián Carrón

#99105

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Julián Carrón is a Spanish Catholic priest, and theologian and the former leader of the Italian Communion and Liberation movement.

#1861

Edvard Kovač

#129680

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Fr. Edvard Kovač is a Slovenian theologian, philosopher and author. He is a member of the Order of Friars Minor and professor at the University of Ljubljana Theological Faculty and the Catholic University of Toulouse.

#1862

Bernadette Porter

#90088

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Sister Dr. Bernadette Mary Porter is a British Roman Catholic nun, educator and academic administrator. She was educated at Merrow Grange Grammar School , Digby Stuart College and King's College London . She served as Vice-Chancellor, Roehampton University from 1999 to 2004, having previously held various posts at Roehampton Institute.

#1863

José Antonio Dammert Bellido

#167618

Overall Influence

1917 - 2008 (91 years)

José Antonio Dammert Bellido was a Peruvian bishop of the Roman Catholic Church. Bellido was born in Lima, Peru and ordained a priest on December 21, 1946. Bellido was appointed Auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Lima, along with Titular Bishop of Amathus in Palaestina, on April 14, 1958 and ordained bishop May 15, 1958. On March 15, 1962 he was appointed Bishop of Diocese of Cajamarca and would remain in post until his retirement on December 1, 1992.

#1864

Barhadbshabba of Hulwan

#188398

Overall Influence

Barḥadbshabba of Ḥulwān was a 7th-century theologian and Christian bishop of the Church of the East who wrote many religious works and a history of the School of Nisibis which is of historical interest.

#1865

Niels Jørgen Cappelørn

#130505

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Niels Jørgen Cappelørn is a Danish theologian, Søren Kierkegaard scholar and former director of Søren Kierkegaard Research Center at the University of Copenhagen. He has written and edited a number of books on Kierkegaard, and was editor of Index til Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, bind XIV-XVI . He was Director of the Danish Bible Society from 1980 to 1993.

#1866

Jorunn Økland

#130326

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Jorunn Økland is a Norwegian gender studies expert and biblical scholar with a background in Classics. She is currently Director at the Norwegian Institute at Athens and Professor of Gender Studies in the Humanities at the University of Oslo , and former Director of its Centre for Gender Research . Her fields of expertise are Pauline Studies, ancient mediterranean material culture, feminist critique of religion, gender and sacred texts, Bible translation, and cultural/secular uses of the Bible.

#1867

Richard of Campsall

#191317

Overall Influence

Richard of Campsall was an English theologian and scholastic philosopher, at the University of Oxford. He was a Fellow of Balliol College and then of Merton College. He is now considered a possible precursor to the views usually associated with William of Ockham.

#1868

John Trillo

#133012

Overall Influence

1915 - 1992 (77 years)

Albert John Trillo was a Church of England bishop. John Trillo grew up in Cricklewood, North London, and was educated at the Quintin School and King's College, London. On leaving school he worked in the film industry, for British Lion, and obtained his BA degree as a part-time student. He was ordained in 1938 and was a curate at Christ Church, Fulham before becoming the priest in charge of St Michael's, Cricklewood. From 1945 he worked for the Student Christian Movement, pioneering its work in Yorkshire grammar schools and becoming its secretary. From 1950-1955 he was rector of Friern Barn...

#1869

Richard Baxter

1615 - 1691 (76 years)

Richard Baxter was an English Nonconformist church leader and theologian from Rowton, Shropshire, who has been described as "the chief of English Protestant Schoolmen". He made his reputation in the late 1630s by his ministry at Kidderminster in Worcestershire, when he also began a long and prolific career as theological writer.

#1870

Johann Philipp Gabler

Johann Philipp Gabler

1753 - 1826 (73 years)

Johann Philipp Gabler was a German Protestant Christian theologian of the school of Johann Jakob Griesbach and Johann Gottfried Eichhorn. Gabler was born at Frankfurt-am-Main. In 1772 he entered the University of Jena as a theological student. In 1776 he was on the point of abandoning theology when the arrival of Griesbach inspired within him a new enthusiasm for the subject. After having been successively Repetent in the University of Göttingen and teacher in the public schools of Dortmund and Altdorf , he was appointed second professor of theology at the University of Altdorf in 1785, the...

#1871

C. I. Scofield

1843 - 1921 (78 years)

Cyrus Ingerson Scofield was an American theologian, minister, and writer whose best-selling annotated Bible popularized futurism and dispensationalism among fundamentalist Christians. Biography Childhood Cyrus Scofield was born in Clinton Township, Lenawee County, Michigan, the seventh and last child of Elias and Abigail Goodrich Scofield. Elias Scofield's ancestors were of English and Puritan descent, but the family was nominally Episcopalian. Abigail Scofield died three months after Cyrus's birth, and his father twice remarried during Cyrus's minority. Details of his early education are u...

#1872

Andreas Karlstadt

Andreas Karlstadt

1486 - 1541 (55 years)

Andreas Rudolph Bodenstein von Karlstadt , better known as Andreas Karlstadt, Andreas Carlstadt or Karolostadt, in Latin, Carolstadius, or simply as Andreas Bodenstein, was a German Protestant theologian, University of Wittenberg chancellor, a contemporary of Martin Luther and a reformer of the early Reformation.

#1874

Herman Bavinck

1854 - 1921 (67 years)

Herman Bavinck was a Dutch Calvinist theologian and churchman. He was a significant scholar in the Calvinist tradition, alongside Abraham Kuyper, B. B. Warfield, and Geerhardus Vos. Biography Background Bavinck was born on 13 December 1854 in the town of Hoogeveen in the Netherlands to a German father, Jan Bavinck , who was the minister of theologically conservative, ecclesiastically separatist Christian Reformed Church . After his high school education, Bavinck first went to the Theological School in Kampen in 1873, but then moved on to Leiden for further training after one year in Kampen....

#1875

Heinrich Bullinger

Heinrich Bullinger

1504 - 1575 (71 years)

Heinrich Bullinger was a Swiss Reformer and theologian, the successor of Huldrych Zwingli as head of the Church of Zürich and a pastor at the Grossmünster. One of the most important leaders of the Swiss Reformation, Bullinger co-authored the Helvetic Confessions and collaborated with John Calvin to work out a Reformed doctrine of the Lord's Supper.

#1876

Franciscus Gomarus

Franciscus Gomarus

1563 - 1641 (78 years)

Franciscus Gomarus was a Dutch theologian, a strict Calvinist and an opponent of the teaching of Jacobus Arminius , whose theological disputes were addressed at the Synod of Dort . Life Gomarus was born in Bruges. His parents, having embraced the principles of the Reformation, emigrated from Bruges to the Electorate of the Palatinate in 1578, in order to enjoy freedom to profess their new faith, and they sent their son to be educated at Strasbourg under Johann Sturm. He remained there three years, and then went in 1580 to Neustadt, from which the professors of Heidelberg had been driven by the elector-palatine because they were not Lutherans.

#1877

Michał Sopoćko

1888 - 1975 (87 years)

Michael Sopoćko was a Polish Roman Catholic priest and professor at Vilnius University. He is best known as the spiritual director of Faustina Kowalska. He was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI in 2008.

#1878

Saint Stephen

1 - 36 (35 years)

Stephen is traditionally venerated as the protomartyr or first martyr of Christianity. According to the Acts of the Apostles, he was a deacon in the early Church at Jerusalem who angered members of various synagogues by his teachings. Accused of blasphemy at his trial, he made a speech denouncing the Jewish authorities who were sitting in judgment on him and was then stoned to death. Saul of Tarsus, later known as Paul, a Pharisee and Roman citizen who would later become a Christian apostle, participated in Stephen's martyrdom.

#1879

Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet

Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet

1627 - 1704 (77 years)

Jacques-Bénigne Lignel Bossuet was a French bishop and theologian renowned for his sermons and other addresses. He has been considered by many to be one of the most brilliant orators of all time and a master French stylist.

#1880

Edward Bouverie Pusey

Edward Bouverie Pusey

1800 - 1882 (82 years)

Edward Bouverie Pusey was an English Anglican cleric, for more than fifty years Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Oxford. He was one of the leading figures in the Oxford Movement, with interest in sacramental theology and typology.

#1881

Martin Grabmann

Martin Grabmann

1875 - 1949 (74 years)

Martin Grabmann was a German Roman Catholic priest, medievalist and historian of theology and philosophy. He was a pioneer of the history of medieval philosophy and has been called "the greatest Catholic scholar of his time."

#1882

Luis de Molina

1535 - 1600 (65 years)

Luis de Molina was a Spanish Jesuit priest and scholastic, a staunch defender of free will in the controversy over human liberty and God's grace. His theology is known as Molinism. Life From 1551 to 1562, Molina studied law in Salamanca, philosophy in Alcalá de Henares, and theology in Coimbra. After 1563, he became a professor at the University of Coimbra, and afterward taught at the University of Évora, Portugal. From this post he was called, at the end of twenty years, to the chair of moral theology in Madrid, where he died.

#1883

Hasan al-Basri

642 - 728 (86 years)

Abu Sa'id ibn Abi al-Hasan Yasar al-Basri, often referred to as Hasan of Basra for short, or as Hasan al-Basri, was an ancient Muslim preacher, ascetic, theologian, exegete, scholar, judge, and mystic. Born in Medina in 642, Hasan belonged to the second generation of Muslims, all of whom would subsequently be referred to as the tābiʿūn in Sunni Islamic piety. He became one of "the most celebrated" of the tābiʿūn, enjoying an "acclaimed scholarly career and an even more remarkable posthumous legacy in Islamic scholarship."

#1884

Pierre Poiret

1646 - 1719 (73 years)

Pierre Poiret Naudé was a prominent French mystic and Christian philosopher. He was born in Metz and died in Rijnsburg. Life and accomplishments After the early death of his parents, he supported himself by the engraver's trade and the teaching of French, at the same time studying theology, in Basel, Hanau, and, after 1668, Heidelberg. At Basel he was captivated by Descartes' philosophy, which never quite lost its hold on him. He read also Thomas à Kempis and Tauler, but was especially influenced by the writings of the Dutch Mennonite mystic Hendrik Jansen van Barrefelt , whose works were pu...

#1885

William Howard Durham

1873 - 1912 (39 years)

William Howard Durham was an early Pentecostal preacher and theologian, best known for advocating the Finished Work doctrine. Early life and career Durham was born in 1873 in rural Kentucky and joined his family's Baptist church; however, he would only experience conversion later. He joined the Holiness movement and by 1901 founded the North Avenue Full Gospel Mission, a store-front church in Chicago.

#1886

Samson Raphael Hirsch

Samson Raphael Hirsch

1808 - 1888 (80 years)

Samson Raphael Hirsch was a German Orthodox rabbi best known as the intellectual founder of the Torah im Derech Eretz school of contemporary Orthodox Judaism. Occasionally termed neo-Orthodoxy, his philosophy, together with that of Azriel Hildesheimer, has had a considerable influence on the development of Orthodox Judaism.

#1887

Johann Gerhard

1582 - 1637 (55 years)

Johannes Gerhard was a Lutheran church leader and Lutheran Scholastic theologian during the period of Orthodoxy. Biography He was born in the German city of Quedlinburg. During a dangerous illness, at the age of fourteen he came under the personal influence of Johann Arndt, author of Das wahre Christenthum, and resolved to study for the church. He entered the University of Wittenberg in 1599, and studied philosophy and theology. A relative then persuaded him to change his subject, and he studied medicine for two years. In 1603, he resumed his theological reading at Jena, and in the following year received a new impulse from J.W.

#1888

Joachim Jeremias

1900 - 1979 (79 years)

Joachim Jeremias was a German Lutheran theologian, scholar of Near Eastern Studies and university professor for New Testament studies. He was abbot of Bursfelde, 1968–1971. He was born in Dresden and spent his formative years in Jerusalem, where between 1910 and 1918 his father, Friedrich Jeremias , worked as Provost of the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer. He studied Lutheran theology and Oriental languages at the universities of Tübingen and Leipzig. In Leipzig he obtained both a "Doctor philosophiae " and a "Doctor theologiae " degree , followed by his Habilitation . His mentor was the re...

#1889

Hermann Gunkel

1862 - 1932 (70 years)

Hermann Gunkel , a German Old Testament scholar, founded form criticism. He also became a leading representative of the history of religions school. His major works cover Genesis and the Psalms, and his major interests centered on the oral tradition behind written sources and in folklore.

#1890

Luke the Evangelist

Luke the Evangelist

Luke the Evangelist is one of the Four Evangelists—the four traditionally ascribed authors of the canonical gospels. The Early Church Fathers ascribed to him authorship of both the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles. Prominent figures in early Christianity such as Jerome and Eusebius later reaffirmed his authorship, although a lack of conclusive evidence as to the identity of the author of the works has led to discussion in scholarly circles, both secular and religious.

#1891

Jean Gerson

1363 - 1429 (66 years)

Jean Charlier de Gerson was a French scholar, educator, reformer, and poet, Chancellor of the University of Paris, a guiding light of the conciliar movement and one of the most prominent theologians at the Council of Constance. He was one of the first thinkers to develop what would later come to be called natural rights theory, and was also one of the first individuals to defend Joan of Arc and proclaim her supernatural vocation as authentic.

#1892

John Courtney Murray

John Courtney Murray

1904 - 1967 (63 years)

John Courtney Murray was an American Jesuit priest and theologian who was especially known for his efforts to reconcile Catholicism and religious pluralism and particularly focused on the relationship between religious freedom and the institutions of a democratically-structured modern state.

#1893

Menno Simons

1496 - 1561 (65 years)

Menno Simons was a Roman Catholic priest from the Friesland region of the Low Countries who was excommunicated from the Catholic Church and became an influential Anabaptist religious leader. Simons was a contemporary of the Protestant Reformers and it is from his name that his followers became known as Mennonites.

#1894

Athenagoras of Athens

133 - 190 (57 years)

Athenagoras was a Father of the Church, an Ante-Nicene Christian apologist who lived during the second half of the 2nd century of whom little is known for certain, besides that he was Athenian , a philosopher, and a convert to Christianity.

#1895

J. Vernon McGee

1904 - 1988 (84 years)

John Vernon McGee was an American ordained Presbyterian minister, pastor, Bible teacher, theologian, and radio minister. Biography Childhood, education, and early ministry McGee was born in Hillsboro, Texas, to itinerant parents, John McGee and Carrie McGee . His father held many jobs, his last one being an engineer at a cotton mill in Oklahoma, where he died in 1918 when Vernon was 14 years old. After his father's death, Vernon's family relocated to Tennessee. Before entering the ministry, Vernon worked as a bank teller.

#1896

Johann Adam Möhler

Johann Adam Möhler

1796 - 1838 (42 years)

Johann Adam Möhler was a German Roman Catholic theologian and priest associated with the Catholic Tübingen school. He was born at Igersheim in the Bailiwick of Franconia of the Teutonic Order , and after studying philosophy and theology in the lyceum at Ellwangen, entered the University of Tübingen in 1817. Ordained to the priesthood in 1819, he was appointed to a curacy. He returned to Tübingen where he became privatdozent in 1825, an associate professor of theology in 1826 and a full professor in 1828.

#1897

Albert Benjamin Simpson

Albert Benjamin Simpson

1843 - 1919 (76 years)

Albert Benjamin Simpson , also known as A. B. Simpson, was a Canadian preacher, theologian, author, and founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance , an evangelical denomination with an emphasis on global evangelism that has been characterized as being Keswickian in theology.

#1898

Harold Ockenga

1905 - 1985 (80 years)

Harold John Ockenga was a leading figure of mid-20th-century American Evangelicalism, part of the reform movement known as "Neo-Evangelicalism". A Congregational minister, Ockenga served for many years as pastor of Park Street Church in Boston, Massachusetts. He was also a prolific author on biblical, theological, and devotional topics. Ockenga helped to found the Fuller Theological Seminary and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, as well as the National Association of Evangelicals .

#1899

Michel-Louis Guérard des Lauriers

1898 - 1988 (90 years)

Michel-Louis Guérard des Lauriers was a French Dominican theologian and, later in life, a Traditionalist Catholic bishop who supported sedevacantism and sedeprivationism and was excommunicated by the Holy See.

#1900

Charles Augustus Briggs

Charles Augustus Briggs

1841 - 1913 (72 years)

Charles Augustus Briggs , American Presbyterian scholar and theologian, was born in New York City, the son of Alanson Briggs and Sarah Mead Berrian. He was excommunicated from the Presbyterian Church for heresy due to his liberal theology regarding the Bible.

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