The Wauwatosa Theology: John Philip Koehler and His Exegetical Methodology

Abstract

Wauwatosa is a suburb of the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It was there that a particularly fascinating bit of twentieth-century church history was played out between 1900 and 1929. Three theological professors, J.P. Koehler, August Pieper, and John Schaller, headquartered in Wauwatosa sought to influence a generation of students preparing for the ministerium of the Wisconsin Synod of the Lutheran church. Short-lived and generally scorned, the Wauwatosa Theology is clothed in a comic-tragic story. Its rise and fall is contemporaneous with the rise and fall of its chief framer, John Philip Koehler.