Career
An influential teacher, pastor (since 1932), and professor (1946-1971), he was also a leading participant in several official ecumenical dialogues for more than forty years. The author of a weighty dogmatics text, five additional important books, and numerous essays, sermons, and addresses, this second-generation "ecumenical pioneer of the 20th Century" (Gassmann) was the central systematic-historical theologian at Heidelberg University between 1946 and his death in 1984.