Heinz-Dietrich Wendland

Nationality

Germany

Date of Birth

1900

Date of Death

1992

Political
Preference

Heinz-Dietrich Wendland was born in a pastor’s family and studied theology and philosophy in Berlin, Hamburg and Heidelberg. Wendland was a Protestant theologian and social ethicist and was one of the most important representatives of the conservative social-ethics academics. Wendland was active in the ecumenical movement in Germany and argued for a prominent role of the church to progressive reform social institutions based on guiding principles of “justice, freedom, peace”.

From 1925 to 1929 Wendland worked at the New Testament seminary in Berlin under Adolf Wendland Deissmann. At the same time, he taught social ethics as a lecturer at the Evangelical Social School. Already as a student kept himself busy with meaning of the message of the Kingdom of God and the meaning of social ethics as a task of the church. Wendland moved to Heidelberg where he was press spokesman for Rector Willy Andreas during his rectorate and worked from 1934 to 1936 as a student pastor. During this time, Wendland was asked by Bishop Heckel as coordinator for the German preparations of the Oxford Conference. Wendland organized study lectures in several universities, however was soon replaced by Gerard May and demoted to Kiel, where he received a new chairmanship at the Christian Albrechts University. Ultimately, however, no Germans were allowed to attend the Oxford conference by the Nazi authorities, a restriction that put great strain on ecumenical relationships between churches in Germany and those abroad.

From 1939 Wendland served as a military pastor. He returned from Soviet captivity in 1949 and took over the first German chair for Christian social sciences at the Westphalian Wilhelms University in Münster in 1955, which he held until 1970. Wendland became one of the few German theologians who shared the motives of a theology of revolution.

Wendland has also been a member of the German Ecumenical Study Committee and the Evangelical Marxism Commission since 1950, which included Günter Brakelmann, Trutz Rendtorff, Hermann Ringeling and Christian Walther. In 1957 he was a co-founder of the Journal for Evangelical Ethics. In the Ecumenical Working Group of Protestant and Catholic Theologians he worked as a member for years and contributed to publications.