Adolf Schlatter

Who was Adolf Schlatter?

Adolf Schlatter was a world-leading Evangelical theologian and professor specialising in the New Testament and systematics at Greifswald, Berlin and Tübingen. Oxford scholar Robert Morgan suggests that Schlatter is the only "conservative" that ranks among the likes of F.C. Baur, William Wrede and Rudolph Bultmann in terms of genius and academic output. 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" p. 27. 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.