Obituary: Professor Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt: Voice of Conscience for German Christianity

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FRIEDRICH-WILHELM MARQUARDT died a gentle death, sitting with his wife on a park bench in Berlin. But his life was anything but quiet. From the very beginning of his career as one of the most prolific German Christian theologians of the 20th century, he had been a troublemaker within German Protestantism.

His doctoral dissertation, published in 1967, was entitled Die Entdeckung des Judentums fur die christliche Theologie: Israel im Denken Karl Barths ("The Discovery of Judaism for Christian Theology: Israel in the thought of Karl Barth"). It demanded that the great Barth re-examine his attitude towards post-biblical Judaism which not only related to the Crucified Jesus …