Werner August Friedrich Immanuel Elert (19 August 1885 – 21 November 1954) was a German Lutheran theologian and professor of both church history and systematic theology at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. His writings in the fields of Christian dogmatics, ethics, and history have had great influence on modern Christianity in general and modern Lutheranism in particular. Biography Elert was born on 19 August 1885 in the town of Heldrungen in the Prussian Province of Saxony (present-day Thuringia), but he grew up in northern Germany. The Elert family had originally come from Rarfin in Pomerania, near Kolberg on the Baltic Sea. They belonged to the "Old Lutherans" who had rejected the 1817 Prussian Union of Churches. Elert's parents were August Elert and Friederike, née Graf, Elert. After attending the Realgymnasium in Harburg and the Gymnasium in Husum, he studied theology, philosophy, history, German literature, psychology and law in Breslau, Erlangen, and Leipzig. He earned doctorates in philosophy and theology at Erlangen. After working as a tutor for a short time in Livonia, he served as a pastor from 1912 to 1919 in Seefeld, Pomerania. During World War I he served as a military chaplain on several fronts. In 1919 Elert became director of the Old-Lutheran Theological Seminary in Breslau. In 1923 he was appointed to the chair of church history at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen (now called the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg). With the death of Philip Bachman in 1932, he was appointed to the chair of systematic theology. In the academic year 1926/27 he was elected rector of the University, and in 1928-29 and 1935-43 he served as the dean of the theological faculty. Throughout his years in Erlangen, he was active in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bavaria. Elert frequently participated in ecumenical meetings, including the first World Lutheran Conference (where he delivered a paper) and the Second Assembly of the Lutheran World Federation in 1952. In 1927 he gave a major address ("The Call to Unity") at the Lausanne Conference, the first meeting of the "Faith and Order" ecumenical movement. Elert retired in 1953. He died in Erlangen on 21 November 1954 in his 70th year, due to complications from stomach cancer. In 1912 Elert married Annemarie (née Froböss, b. 1892), who was the daughter of church official Georg Froböss. They had three children: two sons, both of whom died on the Eastern front in World War II, and