Heinrich Emil Brunner

Nationality

Switzerland

Date of Birth

1889

Date of Death

1966

Political
Preference

Emil Brunner was a Swiss Reformed theologian. Brunner studied theology in Zurich and Berlin. A member of the ecumenical Life and Work Movement, Brunner participated in the World Conference on Church, Community and State, also known as the Oxford Conference, in 1937. This conference led to the creation of the World Council of Churches (WCC), which was founded after World War II. An opponent of the portrayal of Jesus Christ in liberal theology, Brunner insisted on his centrality to salvation and Christ’s role as God incarnate. His theology made him a member of the so-called neo-orthodox movement, sometimes known as dialectical theology, that arose after World War I and stood in opposition to liberal theology. Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr have also been attributed to the neo-orthodox movement. With Niebuhr, he stood at the cradle of the Commission of the Churches of International Affairs, and they clashed with each other on the question whether communism could be equated as a totalitarian political system with Nazism and fascism at the CCIA’s inaugural conference at Cambridge in 1946.

In 1948, Brunner held a speech when the World Council of Churches (WCC) was inaugurated in Amsterdam. His ecumenical theology was translated and widely read in the United States and he was visiting professor at Princeton, as well as at the International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan.