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Adolf Schlatter
Adolf Schlatter (1852–1938). Born on August 16, 1852, in St. Gallen, Switzerland, to Stephan, a pharmacist and lay Baptist preacher, and Wilhelmine Schlatter, Adolf Schlatter was a Swiss Protestant theologian, scholar, and occasional preacher whose work profoundly shaped New Testament studies. Raised in a pietistic family, he converted early, influenced by his grandmother Anna Schlatter-Bernet, a noted ecumenist. He studied theology and philosophy at Basel and Tübingen (1871–1875), earning his Habilitation in 1880. Ordained in the Swiss Reformed Church, he briefly served as a deacon in Neumünster, Zürich (1875–1876), and pastor in Kesswil-Uttwil (1876–1880), preaching sermons rooted in biblical exegesis. His academic career overshadowed his pastoral work, with professorships at Bern (1881–1888), Greifswald (1888–1893), Berlin (1893–1898), and Tübingen (1898–1922), where he mentored figures like Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Barth. Schlatter authored over 400 works, including The Faith in the New Testament (1885), The History of the Christ (1921), and Do We Know Jesus? (1937), emphasizing empirical theology and Christ’s centrality. In Berlin, he challenged Adolf von Harnack’s liberalism, advocating scriptural authority. Married to Susanna Schoop in 1878, he had five children; she died in 1907. His later years, marked by distress over Nazism, saw controversial ties to Gerhard Kittel and a 1935 pamphlet criticized for anti-Semitic tones, though he opposed Nazi paganism. Schlatter died on May 19, 1938, in Tübingen, saying, “Jesus is the center of all theology.”
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Adolf Schlatter emphasizes that the disciples did not base their faith in Jesus on internal mystical experiences but on the objective truth of what God did through Christ. The early Christians understood faith through sober reasoning and the tangible evidence of God's actions, rather than seeking emotional enhancements or mystical visions. The disciples' conviction of encountering the risen Jesus was not rooted in subjective visionary states but in the external event of Easter, which provided the foundation and power for their lives.
The Facts of the External Resurrection of Christ
If the disciples had looked for the basis of their faith in Jesus to the internal movements of their soul, the church would have turned into a gathering of mystics who spent their time trying to produce within them the ecstatic condition by which the Christ would become visible also to them. The idea, however, that it was Christianity's calling to enhance its emotions to such a degree that it would culminate in a vision of Jesus wherein the assurance of salvation was rooted or completed is not interwoven with early Christian history. The disciples always and solely, by a sober use of the idea of truth, understood faith in such a way that what happened showed them what God was and did, so that the objectiveness of an accomplished fact would present the basis for their conviction and the goal for their will. The Easter account did not create the effort in the disciples to retreat into their inner lives and to seek there the revelation of God that world history denied them. Conversely, their lives rather received its basis and its power from the event that came to them externally. If the disciples' conviction of having seen Jesus once more subsequent to his death was derived from visionary states of being, the consequences of this process would have had to be revealed in the entire state of piety. As a result, we would have received in the place of Christianity a religion in which the individual elevated himself to God one way or another.
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Adolf Schlatter (1852–1938). Born on August 16, 1852, in St. Gallen, Switzerland, to Stephan, a pharmacist and lay Baptist preacher, and Wilhelmine Schlatter, Adolf Schlatter was a Swiss Protestant theologian, scholar, and occasional preacher whose work profoundly shaped New Testament studies. Raised in a pietistic family, he converted early, influenced by his grandmother Anna Schlatter-Bernet, a noted ecumenist. He studied theology and philosophy at Basel and Tübingen (1871–1875), earning his Habilitation in 1880. Ordained in the Swiss Reformed Church, he briefly served as a deacon in Neumünster, Zürich (1875–1876), and pastor in Kesswil-Uttwil (1876–1880), preaching sermons rooted in biblical exegesis. His academic career overshadowed his pastoral work, with professorships at Bern (1881–1888), Greifswald (1888–1893), Berlin (1893–1898), and Tübingen (1898–1922), where he mentored figures like Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Barth. Schlatter authored over 400 works, including The Faith in the New Testament (1885), The History of the Christ (1921), and Do We Know Jesus? (1937), emphasizing empirical theology and Christ’s centrality. In Berlin, he challenged Adolf von Harnack’s liberalism, advocating scriptural authority. Married to Susanna Schoop in 1878, he had five children; she died in 1907. His later years, marked by distress over Nazism, saw controversial ties to Gerhard Kittel and a 1935 pamphlet criticized for anti-Semitic tones, though he opposed Nazi paganism. Schlatter died on May 19, 1938, in Tübingen, saying, “Jesus is the center of all theology.”