Paul Althaus

Paul Althaus (4 February 1888 – 18 May 1966) was a German Lutheran theologian. He was born in Obershagen in the Province of Hanover, and he died in Erlangen. He held various pastorates from 1914 to 1925, when he was appointed associate professor of practical and systematic theology at the University of Göttingen, becoming full professor two years later. Althaus was moderately critical of Lutheran Orthodoxy and evangelical-leaning Neo-Lutheranism. He termed it a “mistake” to “defend the authenticity and infallibility of the Bible.”

In 1933, when a professor of theology at the University of Erlangen, and probably the leading Luther authority of his day, he welcomed the emergence to power of Adolf Hitler - "Our Protestant churches have greeted the turning point of 1933 as a gift and miracle of God".

Paul Althaus, son of the Protestant theologian Adolf Paul Johannes Althaus (1861-1925), studied Protestant theology in Tübingen and Göttingen. In Tübingen he was especially influenced by Adolf Schlatter. In Göttingen his doctorate was supervised by Eduard Stange, and he passed his habilitation there in 1913/'14. In the First World War he served as a military chaplain. From 1919 Althaus was an ordinary professor in systematic theology at Rostock University. In 1925 he took up the chair in systematic and New Testament theology in Erlangen. From the summer semester of 1929 he was an honorary member of the Christian student union of Erlangen. He exclusively taught systematic theology until 1932, after which he also taught New Testament theology. Althaus held the position of university preacher from 1932 to 1964 . Between 1926 and 1964 he was president of the Luther-Gesellschaft.

Having welcomed the National Socialist rise to power as a 'divine gift and miracle' in 1933, he nonetheless served after the end of the Second World War as the inaugural head of the internal university denazification commission. However, on 31 January 1947, after his involvement in National Socialism became public, he was removed from his post by the American military government in the course of its own denazification process. In 1948 he was once again granted permission to teach in the University of Erlangen, where he worked until his retirement in 1966. In 1953 he was elected as a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

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