ABSTRACT
Gerhard Sauter was born on May 4, 1935, in Kassel, Germany. His father, Hermann Sauter, served as a minister in a little industrial town near Kassel. He had been called there to reconcile the parish that was split into several factions, especially of rigid evangelicals and Pentecostals. Religious disagreement was intensified by political controversies in the 1930s. In 1954-59 Sauter studied theology and philosophy at the universities of Tubingen und Gottingen. Theology as a discipline of reasoning is characterized by an intrinsic rationality that is valid whether its communication is internal or external. While theologians make themselves understandable to those who do not assent to what they argue, they cannot submit the rationality of their arguments to any vague universality, even to universal moral values. An area of doing theology that always stimulated Sauter is to write 'sermon-meditations' as developed especially by Hans Joachim Iwand, one of my predecessors in Bonn and a Lutheran theologian leading in the Confessing Church.
