Helmut Rex

Helmut Herbert Hermann Rex , until 1946 Helmut Rehbein , (born February 15, 1913 in Potsdam , † March 16, 1967 in Dunedin , New Zealand ) was a German-New Zealand Protestant theologian.

Life and activity

Rehbein was a son of the civil servant Hermann Carl Heinrich Rehbein and his wife, Martha Lucie Hedwig, née Haupt. The family had lived in Berlin since 1919, where Rehbein attended school in Lichterfelde.

From 1941 to 1935 Rehbein studied Protestant theology at the University of Berlin , where Alfred Bertholet , Wilhelm Lütgert , Leonhard Fendt and Hans Lietzmann were among his teachers. The work of the theologian Rudolf Bultmann also had a great influence on him at this time .

In the years 1936 to 1938 he prepared for his theological exam and worked as an aspiring clergyman in various congregations. Rejecting the Nazi system that was established in 1933 , he joined the Confessing Church in 1935 .

Due to the contradiction between his religious attitude and the existing conditions in National Socialist Germany as well as due to the refusal of the Evangelical Church in Germany to allow him to marry his fiancée Renate Jaeger - who according to the National Socialist definition was half-Jewish - Rehbein left Germany at the end of 1938 / Early in 1939 and traveled to Great Britain via Switzerland. There he met his fiancée, who had also fled from Germany and whom he married on February 14, 1939 in Edmonton near London.

With the help of the Presbyterian Church , Rehbein and his fiancée were able to travel to New Zealand shortly before the outbreak of World War II . Because we as Germans because of the war in which New Zealand as part of the British Empire War opponent was the German Reich him unable to give a job as a pastor believed - - There he was from the Presbyterian Church a tutoring position in the Theological Hall at Knox College in Transfer Dunedin. Since he proved himself in this position, he was appointed a permanent lecturer in church history in 1947. In 1953, Rex became the first professor at the Theological Hall.

After his emigration, Rehbein was classified by the National Socialist police as an enemy of the state: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people who, in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles - where he was mistakenly suspected - by the Wehrmacht, special SS commandos following the occupation troops should be located and arrested with special priority. In his entry on the list, he was particularly accused of evasion of military service.

In 1946 Rehbein changed his last name to Rex. In 1948 he received a master’s degree from the University of Otago and in 1954 he was awarded a doctorate by the University of Tübingen . His master's thesis dealt with the Danish philosopher Sören Kierkegaard .

Rex was an advocate of a tolerant and spiritually open Christianity. With this in mind, Rex was involved in enforcing the decision within the New Zealand Presbyterian Church in 1952 to grant the Presbyterian Maori Synod formal autonomy, an early measure of equality for the Native American minority within New Zealand society. Rex also campaigned for a benevolent attitude towards social minorities such as homosexuals and drug addicts.

In 1963, Rex served briefly as Dean of the Theological Hall. In this position he established his own chair for the phenomenology of religion, an innovation that had a lasting impact on the development of theology in New Zealand. For health reasons, he had to retire into private life that same year. He died in 1967. His wife took her own life in June 1968, one year after his death. An annual scholarship is financed from his estate.

In addition to his teaching activities, Rex published numerous articles for theological journals and edited volumes on theological topics such as individual freedom, existentialism and Christianity in the Roman Empire. His most important publication Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? , which deals with the question of the alleged resurrection of the founder of the Christian religion, Jesus Christ from the dead, appeared posthumously a few months after his death.

Fonts

• The Individual in Soren Kierkegaard , slea
• The ethical problem in eschatological existence in Paulus , Tübingen 1954. (Dissertation)
• Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? , Auckland 1967.
• A Book of Helmut Rex. A Selection of His Writings with Memoirs of His Life and Work , edited by AC Moore and ME Andrew 1980. (compilation of writings)

literature

• Obituary in Otago Daily Times, March 18, 1967.
• Obituary in Theological Review , 1967, pp. 3-7.
• David Clark: Our Interests and Christ: The Christian Existentialism of Helmut Rex: A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Otago, Dunedin , New Zealand 2003.

Web links

• Ian Breward: Rex, Helmut Herbert Hermann , in: Dictionary of New Zealand Biography . Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry on Rehbein on the special wanted site GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London).