Adolf Schlatter

Adolf Schlatter (16 August 1852 – 19 May 1938) was a world-leading Protestant theologian and professor specialising in the New Testament and systematics at Greifswald, Berlin and Tübingen. Schlatter has published more than 400 scholarly and popular pieces during his academic career. In his work "The Nature of New Testament Theology. The Contribution of William Wrede and Adolf Schlatter", Robert Morgan writes: "Schlatter ... was considered a conservative, and is perhaps the only 'conservative' New Testament scholar since Bengel who can be rated in the same class as Baur, Wrede, Bousset and Bultmann". There has been a Schlatter Renaissance in the English-speaking world since the second half of the 20th century with scholars like Andreas Köstenberger and Robert Yarbrough taking the lead. Yarbrough rediscovered Schlatter, the latter being one of the leading evangelical voices in Germany, at a time when classical liberalism literally swept through large section of the Lutheran theological faculties of Germany.

Schlatter, born in St. Gallen to a pietistic preacher, studied philosophy and theology in Basel and Tübingen between 1871 and 1875, gaining his post-doctoral teaching qualification (Habilitation) in 1880. The process leading up to the latter qualification was in fact a relatively complex and dramatic phase in Schlatter's career. As we will see below, significant events during this time illustrate how dominant, biased, and discriminating liberal paradigms in German universities were at the time. Robert Yarbrough explains:

"Standing between Adolf Schlatter and completion of his doctoral dissertation (Habilitation) in Bern, Switzerland, was a mountain range of unforseeable obstacles ... Schlatter was ... shaken by the hostile reception from professor Nippold. But he was not easily deterred ... After submitting his dissertation ... Schlatter had to wait to be granted the privilege of taking an imposing battery of exams ... Since the faculty was anything but thrilled with Schlatter’s application, the exam procedure they decided on was intentionally quite strict: in addition to oral examinations in five subjects, Schlatter would have to write eight assigned essays under supervised conditions! Only if he passed all of these ‘magna cum laude’ ... would the faculty be willing to confer on him the right to lecture ... these regulations were ... never applied to anyone else after that! ... Schlatter was able to sit his exams in December 1880 ... he passed in praiseworthy fashion according to faculty resolution. His overall mark of ‘magna cum laude’ was never bested in subsequent decades ..." p. 71-84.

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