August Neander

Neander was born in Göttingen as David Mendel. His father, Emmanuel Mendel, was said to have been a Jewish peddler. While very young, his parents separated and he moved with his mother to Hamburg. After completing grammar school (Johanneum), he enrolled in a gymnasium where he discovered Plato. Some of his fellow students included Wilhelm Neumann, writer Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, and poet Adelbert von Chamisso.

Neander's conversion from Judaism to Christianity was the largest change in his life and had a heavy impact upon both himself and his writing. Neander, along with his brothers and sisters, followed later by their mother, eventually left the synagogue and embraced Christianity. In his own personal conversion, Neander was influenced by the Apostle John, due to the similarity in the sentiment of John's writings to those of Plato. Neander's conversion has been likened to the conversion of Saint Paul of Tarsus, due to the impact that his new faith had on his person, his work, his relationship with his students, and his attitude toward church history. He was baptized on 25 February 1806 at the age of 17 and adopted the name of Neander, or "new man" on becoming a Protestant Christian.

Neander studied divinity at the University of Halle under Friedrich Schleiermacher. Before the end of his first year, the events of the War of the Fourth Coalition forced Neander to move to Göttingen where he continued his studies, specialising in Plato and Plutarch, and studying theology under GJ Planck. At this point Neander decided that the original investigation of Christian history would form the great work of his life. After university, he returned to Hamburg and passed his examination for the Christian ministry. However, after eighteen months, he decided on an academic career at Heidelberg where two vacancies had occurred in the theological faculty of the university. He became a teacher of theology in 1811 and became a professor the following year.

Neander died in Berlin on 14 July 1850, worn out and nearly blind. He died whilst dictating a page of his General History of the Christian Religion and Church. His grave is preserved in the Protestant Friedhof I der Jerusalems – und Neuen Kirchengemeinde (Cemetery No. I of the congregations of Jerusalem's Church and New Church) in Berlin-Kreuzberg, south of Hallesches Tor. After his death, five volumes representing his various lecture series on the History of Dogma (Theologische Vorlesungen) were edited by Justus Ludwig Jacobi in 1857–64.

Neander's principal work was the General History of the Christian Religion and Church (Allgemeine Geschichte der christlichen Religion und Kirche). Each volume contrasted an era of ecclesiastical history with the church in Neander's own time. His guiding principle in dealing both with history and with the contemporary condition of the church was "that Christianity has room for the various tendencies of human nature, and aims at permeating and glorifying them all; that according to the divine plan these various tendencies are to occur successively and simultaneously and to counterbalance each other, so that the freedom and variety of the development of the spiritual life ought not to be forced into a single dogmatic form" (Otto Pfleiderer).