Quenstedt, Johannes Andreas

QUENSTEDT, cven´stet, JOHANNES ANDREAS: Lutheran dogmatician; b. at Quedlinburg (31 m. s.w. of Magdeburg) Aug. 13, 1617; d. at Wittenberg May 22, 1688. He was educated at the University of Helmstädt, 1637–43; and of Wittenberg, 1644, where he also lectured on geography; was adjunct professor in the philosophical faculty, 1646–49; ordinary professor of logic and metaphysics and associate professor of theology, 1649–60; and ordinary professor of theology, 1660–88. Quenstedt represents the old orthodox reaction after the period of reconstruction had set in; the fruit of his thirty years of work in the university lectureship was published in the Theologia didactico-polemica sive systema theologicum (Wittenberg, 1685; Leipsic, 1715), a work according to the strictest standard of Lutheran orthodoxy based upon the Theologia, positiva acroamatica of J. F. König, and characterized by external dogmatization instead of a development of the subject from within, and abounding in artful scholastic refinements. He was noted among his contemporaries for his mild, irenic spirit and retiring, pious disposition, which is also shown by his Ethica pastorum et instructio cathedralis (1678), in which he advises to temper severity with gentleness in resisting heretics, and to distinguish between the tempters and the tempted; warns against pedantry in the pulpit; and recommends the reading of Johann Arndt's Vom vahren Christenthum. Other works are the Dialogus de patriis illustrium doctrina et scriptis virorum (Wittenberg, 1654), and a collection of dissertations, Exercitationes de theologia in genere ejusque principio sancta scriptura (1677).

(Johannes Kunze.)

Bibliography: A. Sennert, in H. Pipping, Memoria theologorum, pp. 229 sqq., Leipsic, 1705; J. F. Niceron, Nachrichten von berühmten Gelehrten, xx. 130 sqq., Halle, 1760; J. C. Erdmann, Biographie sämtlicher Propste zu Wittenberg, pp. 25–26, Wittenberg, 1802; idem, Lebensbeschreibungen von den wittenbergischen Theologen, pp. 87–88, ib. 1804; A. Tholuck, Der Geist der lutherischen Theologen Wittenbergs, pp. 214 sqq., Gotha, 1852; W. Gass, Geschichte der protestantischen Dogmatik, i. 357 sqq., Berlin, 1854: G. Frank, Geschichte der protestantischen Theologie, ii. 30, 4 vols., Leipsic, 1862–1905.