David Curtis Steinmetz (June 12, 1936 – November 26, 2015) was an American historian of late medieval and early modern Christianity.
[1] Born in Columbus, Ohio, Steinmetz received his BA in English from Wheaton College in Illinois (1958) and his BD from Drew University (1961).
Before coming to Duke University, where he spent most of his academic career, he taught for five years (1966-1971) at Lancaster Theological Seminary.
At the Duke Divinity School, he served as the Amos Ragan Kearns Distinguished Professor of the History of Christianity and was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006.
In 1959 Steinmetz married Virginia Ruth Verploegh, an English teacher from Chicago whom he met at Wheaton.
She taught for several years at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina, before she was appointed as Duke’s first director of graduate student career services.
In addition to his reputation as a productive scholar, Steinmetz was known as a lively and entertaining lecturer, who could win over students disinclined to take history seriously, No one was therefore surprised when he won a teaching prize in 1986 and was named the Duke University Scholar/Teacher of the year.
His prose style, written and spoken, was admired by critics for its clarity, its elegance, and its dry humor.
Steinmetz was an intellectual historian and a specialist in the history of Christian thought in late medieval and early modern Europe.
His earliest works explored the reception of the teaching of St. Augustine in the later Middle Ages, determining if possible the intellectual influence such late medieval Augustinianism might have exercised on Martin Luther.
But Steinmetz was dissatisfied with what he regarded as an exclusive interest in hermeneutics and concluded that such an approach, while useful, was woefully inadequate.
At the same time (2010) Emory University offered him a visiting post as the McDonald Distinguished Professor of History, a gift that enabled him to lay the intellectual foundations for his next book, The Catholic Calvin.
Misericordia Dei: The Theology of Johannes von Staupitz in its Late Medieval Setting.