The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
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List of the most influential people in Theology,
#2101
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.
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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.
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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 .
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Georg Christian Knapp
1753 - 1825 (72 years)
Georg Christian Knapp was a German Protestant theologian. Biography He was born in Glaucha, now a part of Halle, and received his early education in the orphan school at Halle , of which his father was director. He later studied theology at the Universities of Halle and Göttingen. In 1777 he was an associate professor at Halle, where in 1782 he became a full professor of theology. In 1785 he was appointed Kondirektor of the Franckesche Stiftungen , where beginning in 1799, along with August Hermann Niemeyer, he served as co-director. He died in Halle.
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Ignatius Knoblecher
1819 - 1858 (39 years)
Ignatius Knoblecher , also known by his Arabian nickname Abuna Soliman , was a Slovene Roman Catholic missionary in Eastern North Africa. He was one of the first explorers of the White Nile basin. Life Knoblecher was born in the small village of Škocjan in Lower Carniola. He studied at the secondary school in Rudolfswerth , at the lyceum and the theological seminary in Laibach , and at the College of Propaganda in Rome. On 9 March 1845 he was ordained a priest, and a year later graduated as a doctor of theology.
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Joseph Sittler
1904 - 1987 (83 years)
Joseph Andrew Sittler was an American Lutheran minister and theologian who taught at Maywood Seminary, eventually merged into the Divinity School of the University of Chicago and the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. He was also active in the Christian ecumenical movement, working with World Council of Churches and the National Council of Churches.
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Daniel Sidney Warner
1842 - 1895 (53 years)
Daniel Sidney Warner was an American church reformer and one of the founders of the Church of God and other similar church groups in the holiness movement. He called for evangelism, the preaching of entire sanctification, and the unity of Christians.
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Isaak August Dorner
1809 - 1884 (75 years)
Isaak August Dorner was a German Lutheran church leader. He was a meditating theologian in nineteenth-century Germany who served as a professor of theology at the University of Berlin and had an international influence.
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Salomo Glassius
1593 - 1656 (63 years)
Salomo Glassius was a German theologian and biblical critic born at Sondershausen, in the principality of Schwarzburg-Sondershausen. In 1612 he entered the University of Jena. In 1615, with the intent of studying law, he moved to Wittenberg. Due to illness, he returned to Jena after a year. Here, as a student of theology under Johann Gerhard, he directed his attention especially to Hebrew and the cognate dialects. In 1619 he was made an adjunctus of the philosophical faculty. He later was appointment as Professor of Hebrew.
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Frédéric Louis Godet
1812 - 1900 (88 years)
Frédéric Louis Godet was a Swiss Protestant theologian. Biography Godet was born on 25 October 1812 in Neuchâtel. His father, Paul-Henri, who was a lawyer, died early. His mother, Eusébie née Gallot, a pious, strong and intelligent pastor's daughter, who founded a girls' school, devoted herself to his early training.
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Gottfried Christian Friedrich Lücke
1791 - 1855 (64 years)
Gottfried Christian Friedrich Lücke was a German theologian. Luecke was born at Egeln near Magdeburg, where his father was a merchant. He studied theology at Halle and Göttingen. In 1814 he received the degree of doctor in philosophy from Halle; in 1816 he moved to the Friedrich Wilhelm University, Berlin, where he became licentiate in theology, and qualified as Privatdozent.
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Johann Konrad Dippel
1673 - 1734 (61 years)
Johann Konrad Dippel, also spelled Johann Conrad Dippel , was a German Pietist theologian, physician, alchemist and occultist. Life Dippel was born at Castle Frankenstein near Mühltal and Darmstadt, and therefore once at his school the addendum Franckensteinensis and once at his university the addendum Franckensteina-Strataemontanus was used.
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Sebastian Castellio
1515 - 1563 (48 years)
Sebastian Castellio was a French preacher and theologian; and one of the first Reformed Christian proponents of religious toleration, freedom of conscience and thought. Introduction Castellio was born in 1515 at Saint-Martin-du-Frêne in the village of Bresse of Dauphiné, the country bordering Switzerland, France, and Savoy. Under the Savoyard rule his family called itself Chateillon, Chatillon, or Chataillon. Having been educated at the age of twenty at the University of Lyon, Castellio was fluent in both French and Italian, and became an expert in Latin, Hebrew and Greek as well. Subseque...
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Anselm of Laon
1050 - 1117 (67 years)
Anselm of Laon , properly Ansel , was a French theologian and founder of a school of scholars who helped to pioneer biblical hermeneutics. Biography Born of very humble parents at Laon before the middle of the 11th century, he is said to have studied under Saint Anselm at Bec, though this is almost certainly incorrect. Other potential teachers of Anselm have been identified, including Bruno of Cologne and Manegold of Lautenbach. By around 1080, he had moved back to his place of birth and was teaching at the cathedral school of Laon, with his brother Ralph. Around 1109, he became dean and chancellor of the cathedral, and in 1115 he was one of Laon's two archdeacons.
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Cleland Boyd McAfee
1866 - 1944 (78 years)
Cleland Boyd McAfee was an American theologian, Presbyterian minister and hymn writer, best known for penning the gospel hymn, "Near to the Heart of God," and its tune called "McAfee". He wrote the song after the concurrent deaths of two of his young nieces, caused by diphtheria. He also is believed to be the creator of the acronym TULIP, which represents the Five Points of Calvinism.
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John of Shanghai and San Francisco
1896 - 1966 (70 years)
John of Shanghai and San Francisco was a prominent Eastern Orthodox ascetic and hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia who was active in the mid-20th century. He was a pastor and spiritual father of high reputation and a reputed wonderworker to whom were attributed powers of prophecy, clairvoyance and healing. He is often referred to as "St. John the Wonderworker".
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Louis Segond
1810 - 1885 (75 years)
Louis Segond was a Swiss theologian who translated the Bible into French from the original texts in Hebrew and Greek. He was born in Plainpalais, near Geneva. After studying theology in Geneva, Strasbourg and Bonn, he was pastor of the Geneva National Church in Chêne-Bougeries, then from 1872, Professor of Old Testament in Geneva.
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P. T. Forsyth
1848 - 1921 (73 years)
Peter Taylor Forsyth, also known as P. T. Forsyth, was a Scottish theologian. Biography The son of a postman, Forsyth studied at the University of Aberdeen and then in Göttingen . He was ordained into the Congregational ministry and served churches as pastor at Bradford, Manchester, Leicester and Cambridge, before becoming Principal of Hackney College, London in 1901.
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Nicolaus Hunnius
1585 - 1643 (58 years)
Nicolaus Hunnius was an orthodox Lutheran theologian of the Lutheran scholastic tradition. Hunnius was born at Marburg, the third son of Egidius Hunnius. At the age of fifteen he entered the University of Wittenberg, where he studied philology, philosophy, and theology. In 1609 he joined the philosophical faculty and lectured in philosophy and theology. He followed the same theological direction as his father, inherited his temper and talent as a polemist, and was like him, possessed of great learning. In virtue of his ability Elector John George I. of Saxony appointed him, in 1612, superin...
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Milton Steinberg
1903 - 1950 (47 years)
Milton Steinberg was an American rabbi, philosopher, theologian and author. Life Born in Rochester, New York, he was raised with the combination of his grandparents' traditional Jewish piety and his father's modernist socialism. He graduated as valedictorian of his class at DeWitt Clinton High School and then majored in Classics at City College of New York which he graduated from summa cum laude in 1924. Steinberg received his doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University in 1928 and then entered the Jewish Theological Seminary of America where he was ordained. In seminary, he was strongly...
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Walther Zimmerli
1907 - 1983 (76 years)
Walther Theodor Zimmerli was a Swiss academic theologian in the Reformed tradition and an Old Testament scholar. Life After finishing secondary school in Schiers, Zimmerli studied theology at the universities of Zurich, Berlin and Göttingen. After passing his practical exams at the end of April 1930, he worked in the Theological Faculty at the University of Göttingen as the assistant to Professors Hemperl and Rahlfs and earned his Licentiate in Theology in 1932.
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Michel de Certeau
1925 - 1986 (61 years)
Michel de Certeau was a French Jesuit priest and scholar whose work combined history, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the social sciences as well as hermeneutics, semiotics, ethnology, and religion. He was known as a philosopher of everyday life and widely regarded as a historian who had interests ranging from travelogues of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to contemporary urban life.
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Johann Friedrich König
1619 - 1664 (45 years)
Johann Friedrich König was a German Lutheran theologian, born in Dresden. From 1656 he was a professor at the university of Rostock. He died in Rostock, aged 44.
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Rudolf Smend
1851 - 1913 (62 years)
Rudolf Smend --"the Elder"-- was a German theologian born in Lengerich, Westphalia. He was an older brother to theologian Julius Smend , and the father of Carl Friedrich Rudolf Smend , an authority on constitutional and ecclesiastical law, and the grandfather of noted Old Testament historian Rudolf Smend who spent his life at the University of Goettingen as one of two chairs of Old Testament .
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Erik Pontoppidan
1698 - 1764 (66 years)
Erik Ludvigsen Pontoppidan was a Danish author, a Lutheran bishop of the Church of Norway, a historian, and an antiquarian. His Catechism of the Church of Denmark heavily influenced Danish and Norwegian religious thought and practice for roughly the next 200 years after its 1737 publication.
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Albert Hauck
1845 - 1918 (73 years)
Albert Heinrich Friedrich Stephan Ernst Louis Hauck was a German theologian and church historian. Hauck began studying theology in 1864 in Erlangen, and then from 1866 in Berlin, where he was taught by Leopold von Ranke, the father of the source and methods-based German historiography; Hauck later commented that von Ranke was the greatest man he'd ever known. He passed the state exam in 1868 in Ansbach. In 1870 he became vicar in Munich, moved to Feldkirchen in 1871, and in 1875 was appointed priest for the parish of Frankenheim.
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Julius Wegscheider
1771 - 1849 (78 years)
Julius August Ludwig Wegscheider , was a German Protestant theologian. Life Wegscheider was born at Küblingen . He studied theology at the University of Helmstedt, where he was a pupil of Heinrich Philipp Konrad Henke. From 1795 to 1805, he worked as a tutor to the family of a wealthy Hamburg merchant. In 1805 he presented a dissertation titled Graecorum mysteriis religioni non obtrudendis at the University of Göttingen. He then served as a professor of theology at the University of Rinteln , and at the University of Halle from 1810 onwards.
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Heinrich Müller
1631 - 1675 (44 years)
Heinrich Müller was a German devotional author, Protestant writer of hymns, a Lutheran minister and theologian and a professor at the University of Rostock from 1647 to 1650. He famously denounced the font, the pulpit, the confessional, and the altar as "the four dumb idols of the Lutheran Church". He died in Rostock, aged 43.
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Joseph Clifford Fenton
1906 - 1969 (63 years)
Joseph Clifford Fenton was a Catholic priest who promoted conservative theology. He was a professor of fundamental dogmatic theology at the Catholic University of America and editor of the American Ecclesiastical Review . A strong opponent of liberal beliefs, he was a significant American Catholic theologian of the 20th century. He served as a peritus for Cardinal Ottaviani at the Second Vatican Council, where his position was overruled. He was also secretary of the Catholic Theological Society of America.
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Bartolomé de Medina
1527 - 1580 (53 years)
Bartolomé de Medina, O.P. was a Spanish theologian born in Medina de Rioseco, Spain. A member of the Dominican Order and a student of Francisco de Vitoria, he was professor of theology at the University of Salamanca and a member of the School of Salamanca. He is best known as the originator of the doctrine of probabilism in moral theology, which holds that one may follow a course of action that has some probability, even if the opposite is more probable.
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Noah Porter
1811 - 1892 (81 years)
Noah Thomas Porter III was an American Congregational minister, academic, philosopher, author, lexicographer and an outspoken anti-slavery activist. Porter Mountain, of the Adirondack Mountains, was named for him after he was the first to climb it in 1875. He was President of Yale College .
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Henry Scott Holland
1847 - 1918 (71 years)
Henry Scott Holland was Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford. He was also a canon of Christ Church, Oxford. The Scott Holland Memorial Lectures are held in his memory. Family and education Holland was born on 27 January 1847 at Ledbury, Herefordshire, the son of George Henry Holland of Dumbleton Hall, Evesham, and Charlotte Dorothy Gifford, the daughter of Lord Gifford. He was educated at Eton where he was a pupil of the influential Master William Johnson Cory, and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a first-class degree in greats. During his Oxford time he was greatly influenced by T. H.
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Justus Jonas
1493 - 1555 (62 years)
Justus Jonas, the Elder , or simply Justus Jonas, was a German Lutheran theologian and reformer. He was a Jurist, Professor and Hymn writer. He is best known for his translations of the writings of Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon. He accompanied Martin Luther in his final moments.
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Peter Damian
1007 - 1072 (65 years)
Peter Damian, OSB was an Italian reforming Benedictine monk and cardinal in the circle of Pope Leo IX. Dante placed him in one of the highest circles of Paradiso as a great predecessor of Francis of Assisi and he was declared a Doctor of the Church on 27 September 1828. His feast day is 21 February.
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Gustav Adolf Deissmann
1866 - 1937 (71 years)
Gustav Adolf Deissmann was a German Protestant theologian, best known for his leading work on the Greek language used in the New Testament, which he showed was the koine, or commonly used tongue of the Hellenistic world of that time.
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Ralph Cudworth
1617 - 1688 (71 years)
Ralph Cudworth was an English Anglican clergyman, Christian Hebraist, classicist, theologian and philosopher, and a leading figure among the Cambridge Platonists who became 11th Regius Professor of Hebrew , 26th Master of Clare Hall , and 14th Master of Christ's College . A leading opponent of Hobbes's political and philosophical views, his magnum opus was his The True Intellectual System of the Universe .
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Otto Brunfels
1488 - 1534 (46 years)
Otto Brunfels was a German theologian and botanist. Carl von Linné listed him among the "Fathers of Botany". Life After studying theology and philosophy at the University of Mainz, Brunfels entered a Carthusian monastery in Mainz and later resettled to another Carthusian monastery at Königshofen near Strasbourg. In Strasbourg he got in contact with a learned lawyer Nikolaus Gerbel . Gerbel drew Brunfels' attention to the healing powers of plants and thus gave the impetus to the further botanical investigations.
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Táhirih
1817 - 1852 (35 years)
Táhirih As a young girl she was educated privately by her father and showed herself a talented writer. Whilst in her teens she married the son of her uncle, with whom she had a difficult marriage. In the early 1840s she became a follower of Shaykh Ahmad and began a secret correspondence with his successor Kazim Rashti. Táhirih travelled to the Shiʻi holy city of Karbala to meet Kazim Rashti, but he died a number of days before her arrival. In 1844 aged about 27, in search of the Qa'im through the Islamic teachings she figured his whereabouts. Independent to any individual she became acquainted with the teachings of the Báb and accepted his religious claims as Qa'im.
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Karl Budde
1850 - 1935 (85 years)
Karl Ferdinand Reinhard Budde was a German theologian, born in Bensberg, and a well-known authority on the Old Testament. Biography He studied theology, philosophy and history at the universities of Bonn and Berlin, obtaining his habilitation for Old Testament studies at Bonn in 1873. He was inspector of the Evangelisches Theologisches Stift in Bonn from 1878 to 1885, and in the meantime, became an associate professor of Old Testament theology at the University of Bonn . In 1889 he attained a full professorship at Strassburg, and from 1900 to 1921 served as president of Old Testament theology and exegesis at the University of Marburg.
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Domingo Báñez
1528 - 1604 (76 years)
Domingo Báñez was a Spanish Dominican and Scholastic theologian. The qualifying Mondragonensis sometimes attached to his name seems to refer to the birthplace of his father, Juan Báñez, at Mondragón in Guipúzcoa.
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Magnús Eiríksson
1806 - 1881 (75 years)
Magnús Eiríksson was also the Old Norse name of Magnus IV of Sweden.Magnús Eiríksson was an Icelandic theologian and a contemporary critic of Søren Aabye Kierkegaard and Hans Lassen Martensen in Copenhagen.
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Henry of Ghent
1217 - 1293 (76 years)
Henry of Ghent was a scholastic philosopher, known as Doctor Solemnis , and also as Henricus de Gandavo and Henricus Gandavensis. Life Henry was born in the district of Mude, near Ghent. He is supposed to have belonged to an Italian family named Bonicolli, in Dutch Goethals, but the question of his name has been much discussed . He studied at Ghent and then at Cologne under Albertus Magnus. After obtaining the degree of doctor he returned to Ghent, and is said to have been the first to lecture there publicly on philosophy and theology.
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Al-Shawkani
1759 - 1839 (80 years)
Muḥammad ibn Ali ibn Muḥammad ibn Abd Allah, better known as al-Shawkānī , was a prominent Yemeni Sunni Islamic scholar, jurist, theologian and reformer. Shawkani was one of the most influential proponents of Athari theology and is revered as one of their canonical scholars by Salafi Muslims. His teachings played a major role in the emergence of the Salafi movement. Influenced by the teachings of the medieval Hanbali scholar Ibn Taymiyya, Al-Shawkani became noteworthy for his staunch stances against the practice of Taqlid , calls for direct interpretation of Scriptures, opposition to Kalam as...
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John McCloskey
1810 - 1885 (75 years)
John McCloskey was an American senior-ranking prelate of the Catholic Church. He was the first American-born Archbishop of New York from 1864 until his death in 1885, having previously served as Bishop of Albany . In 1875, McCloskey became the first American cardinal. He served as the first president of St. John's College, now Fordham University, beginning in 1841.
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Johann Karl Ludwig Gieseler
1792 - 1854 (62 years)
Johann Karl Ludwig Gieseler, KH was a Protestant German church historian. Biography He was born at Petershagen, near Minden, where his father, Georg Christof Friedrich, was preacher. In his tenth year he entered the orphanage at Halle, from which he duly passed to the university, his studies being interrupted in October 1813 by a period of military service, during which he was enrolled as a volunteer in a regiment of chasseurs. On the conclusion of peace he returned to Halle, and, having in 1817 taken his degree in philosophy, he became assistant head of the Minden gymnasium, and in 1818 w...
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Johann Friedrich Abegg
1765 - 1840 (75 years)
Johann Friedrich Abegg was a German theologian. He was the brother of many siblings in a family of preachers, and was adopted in 1786 as candidate for the preacher office in the Electorate of the Palatinate. He visited the college in Heidelberg from 1789 to 1794 and also worked as extraordinary professor of philology since 1791. In 1794 he started to practise as priest, first in Boxberg, then in Leimen and Heidelberg in the parishes St. Peter and Heiliggeist.
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Joachim Lütkemann
1608 - 1655 (47 years)
Joachim Lütkemann was a German Lutheran theologian and writer of devotional literature. Life Joachim Lütkemann was the son of Samuel Lütkemann, an apothecary from Demmin who had become mayor, and his wife Katharina, née Zander. After attending school in Demmin, he went to university in Greifswald in 1624, then in 1626 to the Marienstiftsgymnasium in Stettin. From 1629–1634he then studied philosophy and theology at the University of Strasbourg, where he was especially influenced by the teachings of Johann Conrad Dannhauer and Johann Schmidt, and later by those of Philipp Jakob Spener. After a ...
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Joseph Wittig
1879 - 1949 (70 years)
Joseph Wittig was a German Catholic theologian and writer born in Neusorge, a village in the district of Neurode, Silesia. In 1903 he received his doctorate of theology from the University of Breslau, and was ordained a priest by Cardinal Georg von Kopp . Subsequently, he worked as a chaplain in Lauban, and from 1904 studied Christian art and architecture in Rome as a member of the German Archaeological Institute. In the meantime, he took part in a study trip to North Africa. being accompanied by theologian Franz Joseph Dölger . After returning to Germany, he served as a chaplain in Patschkau...
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Leontius of Byzantium
480 - 543 (63 years)
Leontius of Byzantium was a Byzantine Christian monk and the author of an influential series of theological writings on sixth-century Christological controversies. Though the details of his life are scarce, he is considered by some a groundbreaking innovator in Christian theological reflection for having introduced Aristotelian definitions into theology.
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Muhammed Hamdi Yazır
1878 - 1942 (64 years)
Muhammed Hamdi Yazır also known as Elmalılı Hamdi Yazır and Elmalılı was a Turkish Maturidi theologian, logician, Qur'an translator, Qur'anic exegesis scholar, Islamic legal academic, philosopher and encyclopedist.
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