Why Bother with Dusting Off and Updating Deinzer?

Reflections on Writing a New Biography of Loehe

Abstract

To come to life as a human discipline, history needs generous infusions of biography, and biographies of non-evildoers are best written by those with sympathy for their subjects. Loehe was fortunate to have as his major biographer a spiritual son and professional colleague with whom he shared the tragedy of the childhood loss of a father. Johannes Deinzer’s great biography of Loehe, Wilhelm Löhe’s Leben, is an indispensable resource for any standard biography to be written for the English-speaking world. A new biography of Loehe for readers in the US and Canada will need to comb Loehe’s copious correspondence and relate his theological and pastoral accomplishments to the spiritual situation of contemporary North American Lutheranism.