Philip Melanchthon
German theologian, humanist and reformer (1497–1560), born Philipp Schwartzerdt in Bretten — 'Melanchthon' being the humanist Greek translation of his German surname, 'black earth' — professor of Greek at Wittenberg at twenty-one thanks to the recommendation of his great-uncle, the eminent Hebraist Johannes Reuchlin, and Martin Luther's closest intellectual collaborator throughout the Reformation, complementing the reformer's more visceral, combative character with his own conciliatory temperament and classical humanist training. It was Melanchthon, not Luther, who gave nascent Protestant theology its first systematic, academically rigorous exposition in the Loci Communes (1521), considered the first work of Lutheran dogmatics, and his exquisite command of classical Greek and Latin — he had published a Greek grammar at seventeen — proved essential in reforming the German university curriculum, earning him the title 'Praeceptor Germaniae' ('the teacher of Germany'). His moment of greatest historical significance came in 1530, when he drafted the Augsburg Confession, presented to Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Augsburg as an official, measured exposition of Lutheran faith, deliberately seeking conciliatory language that might open the door to reconciliation with Rome — a reconciliation never realised but one that made the document the founding confession of faith of Lutheranism, still in force today across all the Lutheran churches of the world. A man of more moderate temperament than Luther, he suffered throughout his life the tensions between his conciliatory vocation and the demands of the confessional struggle of his time, and after Luther's death he led the more moderate wing of Lutheranism, opposed by strict Lutherans in internal theological disputes that marked the second generation of the Reformation.