Emil Brunner was a Swiss theologian. He was educated in Switzerland and served in the Swiss army in 1914. Later he became a pastor and then professor of theology at Zürich. He participated extensively in the work of the World Council of Churches and also for a time in the Moral Re-Armament movement. He lectured on theology in many countries, notably in the United States, Japan, and Scotland.

Brunner's earliest theological positions were typical of Swiss and German Protestantism before 1914. He accepted the liberal theological emphasis on the social and ethical aspects of the Gospel, as well as its stress upon the rational alliance between philosophy and theology. Even in his earliest theological writings he exhibited his personal interest in philosophy in a well-informed discussion of Edmund Husserl, Das Symbolische in der religiösen Erkenntnis (Tübingen, 1914). But after World War I he embarked...