August Neander

At this point Neander decided that the original investigation of Christian history would form the great work of his life.

At this time, Neander published his first monograph, Über den Kaiser Julianus und sein Zeitalter.

A more extended monograph followed in 1822, Der Heilige Johannes Chrysostomus und die Kirche besonders des Orients in dessen Zeitalter, with one on Tertullian in 1824 (Antignostikus).

[9] Neander began his work on Christian history in 1824 and published the first volume of Allgemeine Geschichte der christlichen Religion und Kirche in 1825.

[3] Shortly after Neander's birth, his mother Esther divorced her husband and moved the family to Hamburg where they experienced a great deal of poverty.

[5][10] However, Neander cherished this period in his life and described it in endearing terms as “men in all ages who…have been indebted to their pious mothers” for planting the seeds of faith in their hearts.

Neander was often described as ‘wide-hearted’, ‘truthful’, ‘sincere’, ‘free from all the stuff of vanity’, ‘affectionate’, ‘innocent and pure of heart’.

His guiding principle in dealing both with history and with the contemporary condition of the church was "that Christianity has room for the various tendencies of human nature, and aims at permeating and glorifying them all; that according to the divine plan these various tendencies are to occur successively and simultaneously and to counterbalance each other, so that the freedom and variety of the development of the spiritual life ought not to be forced into a single dogmatic form" (Otto Pfleiderer).