Heinrich Hansen

Who was Heinrich Hansen?

Heinrich Hansen was a German Lutheran theologian and the father of the Lutheran High Church movement in Germany.

Hansen was born in Klockries near Lindholm as a son of a teacher. In Kiel and Erlangen he studied theology, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic and in particular the Old Testament under August Klostermann. He worked since 1887 as a pastor in Schleswig-Holstein: in Reinfeld, Lindholm, on the island Pellworm, in Kropp and in Olderup near Husum.

Hansen wrote Latin hymns and worked on a Low German Bible translation and published a Low German hymnal. By the study of the old Lutheran theologians, particularly Martin Chemnitz, and the Roman Catholic theologian Johann Adam Möhler, he came to an Evangelical Catholic view about church. In the Reformation jubilee year of 1917—exactly 100 years after Claus Harms— Hansen published 95 theses in Latin and German, as a sharp criticism against contemporary Protestantism. His theses influenced the foundation of "Hochkirchliche Vereinigung" in October 1918. Hansen is well known as a co-founder and the first chairman of Hochkirchliche Vereinigung. He died in Breklum.