August Tholuck

Standard-bearer of the Great Awakening within the university; known as “the father of the students”

The theology chair at the University of Halle was once held, for an entire era, by rationalism. In 1826, August Tholuck arrived and stayed for more than fifty years. As the standard-bearer of the Great Awakening within the university, he led the theology faculty step by step back to evangelical faith, and came to be known as “the father of the students.”

A chair grown cold

The University of Halle opened in 1694, and its theology faculty was Pietist-led from the start. In the eighteenth century, it was the largest theological faculty in Germany, training some six thousand church workers, with at least sixty students going on to overseas mission work.

The wind gradually shifted. Baumgarten brought Wolff's philosophy into theology; Semler (1725–1791), known as “the father of German rationalism,” was one of the founders of historical-critical biblical scholarship; Schleiermacher taught here for three years (1804–1807) before the university closed for war and he moved on to Berlin. The chair in this city of Pietism had changed its air.

The father of the students

In 1826, Tholuck arrived, and never again left the city: fifty-one years, until 1877. The Great Awakening entered the university, and he was its standard-bearer; the theology faculty that rationalism had occupied returned, step by step under his hand, to evangelical faith. They called him “the father of the students” — a title written not on any letter of appointment, but on the lives of people.

Three things can be set side by side around the time of his arrival in Halle: in November 1825, the theology student George Müller was born again at an evening prayer meeting in a merchant's home in the city, and later cared for tens of thousands of orphans in Bristol through prayer; in 1826, Tholuck arrived; in 1827, Charles Hodge of Princeton came to study at Halle and became his close friend. A conversion at a prayer meeting, teaching from a lecture chair, a friendship that crossed an ocean — that is what the years of awakening looked like.

On the extension

Hodge once traveled a long way from Princeton and found a close friend in this city; today, people still come to Halle from even farther away, to study, to work. Our Chinese-speaking fellowship is among them — a contemporary stroke in this picture of faith. The gospel can grow cold in a city, and it can warm again; Tholuck's fifty years are one such warming in Halle's memory. We worship here in Chinese, standing on the extension of that same line.

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