Albert Schweitzer

Albert Schweitzer, OM (14 January 1875 – 4 September 1965) was a French-German theologian, organist, writer, humanitarian, philosopher, and physician. He was born in the province of Alsace-Lorraine recently annexed by Germany in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian war. Although that region had been integrated into the German Empire four years earlier, and remained a German province until 1918, he considered himself French and wrote mostly in German. His mother-tongue was Alsatian. Schweitzer, a Lutheran, challenged both the secular view of Jesus as depicted by historical-critical methodology current at this time, as well as the traditional Christian view. His contributions to the interpretation of Pauline Christianity concern the role of Paul's mysticism of “being in Christ” as primary and the doctrine of Justification by Faith as secondary. He received the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize for his philosophy of “Reverence for Life”, expressed in many ways, but most famously in founding and sustaining the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Lambaréné, now in Gabon, west central Africa (then French Equatorial Africa). As a music scholar and organist, he studied the music of German composer Johann Sebastian Bach and influenced the Organ Reform Movement (Orgelbewegung). 2Education Schweitzer was born in Kaysersberg, the son of Louis Schweitzer and Adèle Schillinger. He spent his childhood in the Alsatian village of Gunsbach, where his father, the local Lutheran-Evangelical pastor of the EPCAAL, taught him how to play musi