Helmut Thielicke

Helmut Thielicke (4 December 1908 in Wuppertal – 5 March 1986 in Hamburg) was a German Protestant theologian and rector of the University of Hamburg from 1960 to 1978.

Thielicke grew up in Wuppertal, where he went to a humanistic Gymnasium and took his Abitur in 1928. After this he began to study philosophy and theology in Erlangen, but soon had to undergo an operation on his thyroid. Despite the negative outcome of this operation (pulmonary embolism, tetanus), which were still causing complications 4 years later, he finished his studies and in 1932 he got his doctorate in philosophy with "Das Verhältnis zwischen dem Ethischen und dem Ästethischen" (The relationship between the ethical and the aesthetic).

After his health improved, Thielicke listened to Karl Barth in Bonn, whom he criticized, mainly because of Barth's exclusion of natural anthropology. Eventually he did his doctor's degree in theology in 1934 with a work under the supervision of Paul Althaus in Erlangen. He took his postdoctoral lecture qualification with "Offenbarung, Vernunft und Existenz. Studien zur Religionsphilosophie Lessings" (Revelation, reason and existence; studies in Lessing's religious philosophy) in 1935 under the growing pressure of the Nazi-Regime, which refused him an appointment to Erlangen in view of his activity within the "Confessing Church". In 1936 he obtained a professorship in systematic theology in Heidelberg, where he met Marie-Luise Herrmann, to whom he was married in 1937. They had four children.

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