Wilhelm Pauck

Wilhelm Pauck ( born January 31, 1901 in Laasphe, † September 3, 1981 in Palo Alto ) was a German -American Protestant church historian.

Life

Pauck studied from 1920-1924 in Berlin. There he joined in 1921 at the Berlin Wingolf. He studied with Ernst Troeltsch, Karl Holl and Adolf von Harnack. When promoted to a licentiate in 1925 he spent on the recommendation of Holl one academic year at the Chicago Theological Seminary. Subsequently, the Chicago Divinity School invited him to become followers of the Church historian Henry H. Walker. The seminar was affiliated with the University of Chicago, whose Professor Pauck should be for 27 years, interrupted only by an exchange year at the University of Frankfurt am Main 1948-49. In 1928 he was ordained in the Hyde Park Congregational Church. The appeal to the Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1953 brought him into close contact with a group to which, inter alia, Roland H. Bainton also, H. Richard Niebuhr and Reinhold Niebuhr were. After retirement in 1967 Pauck taught until 1972 at Vanderbilt University Divinity School.

Work and significance

Pauck was disappointed with the lack of interest of the American liberal theologian Karl Barth. In 1931 he published the work, Karl Barth, Prophet of a New Christianity with the aim to defend Barth's critique of liberal theology. However, while he supported the criticism of Barth's liberal theology, he rubbed at his lack of understanding of the historical-critical biblical scholarship and could not share his theology of revelation. Barth was annoyed and asked him to be followers of the theology of Paul Tillich.

Pauck had Tillich, like he was a member of the Berlin Wingolf, met in 1921 in Berlin. As Tillich in 1933 came to America, they became friends. Pauck was for many years Tillich's companion and his " Guide to America." Unlike Tillich he had little difficulty engage intellectually in the American life world. Finally Pauck wrote with his second wife Marion a biography of Tillich.

Although less well known than Paul Tillich, he was an important American theologian. His theology was described as mediation attempt between the ideas of the Reformation and the idea of Harnack, Schleiermacher and Tillich.

Writings

• The kingdom of God on earth. Utopia and reality; A Untersuchg to Butzer " De regno Christi " and the English state church of the 16th century, Berlin 1928
• The Heritage of the Reformation, Oxford 1961
• Luther: Lectures on Romans, London in 1961 [ The Library of Christian Classics XV ]
• Harnack and Troeltsch: Two Historical Theologians, Oxford 1968
• Paul Tillich, His Life and Thought, Volume 1: His Life, Stuttgart 1978