Elert was born on 19 August 1885 in the town of Heldrungen in the Prussian Province of Saxony (present-day Thuringia), but he grew up in northern Germany.
[3] After attending the Realgymnasium in Harburg and the Gymnasium in Husum, he studied theology, philosophy, history, German literature, psychology and law in Breslau, Erlangen, and Leipzig.
They had three children: two sons, both of whom died on the Eastern front in World War II, and one daughter, who later married a Lutheran pastor.
[15] The Elert house in Erlangen (Hindenburgstrasse 44) is now a study center for theology students ("Werner-Elert-House") that is owned by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bavaria.
In the final period of his life (1950–54), he worked on issues in the history of Christian dogma, particularly relating to Eastern Orthodox christology and eucharistic fellowship.
His first major work, Der Kampf um das Christentum [the struggle over Christianity], published in 1921, offers a critique of the synthesis that developed in the nineteenth century between liberal Protestant theology (especially through the influence of Immanuel Kant, Georg Hegel, and Friedrich Schleiermacher) and modern German "culture" (Kultur).
[18] In Elert's view, modern theology must return to an independent position that maintains its critical distance from all influences that are foreign to the biblical witness to Jesus Christ.
"[22] Following earlier theologians in the Erlangen tradition (e.g., F. H. R. Frank, Ludwig Ihmels), Elert stressed the importance of understanding the connection between the historic biblical witness to Christ and the immediacy and "certainty" of the individual Christian's faith in God through the gospel.
For example, in his Morphologie des Luthertums [the structure of Lutheranism], he presupposed a confessional "dynamism" of Lutheranism, "which, as a basic structural fact, is given to the historical changes themselves.”[24] In his final, unfinished work on the christology of Theodore of Pharan, Elert highlighted the relationship between the dogma of the ancient church and the biblical image of Christ in order to show, contrary to the thesis of Adolph von Harnack, that Christian dogma is not the foreign intrusion of Greek metaphysics into the original gospel, but rather it is a necessary "given," grounded in the gospel and liturgical witness to Christ.
[27] Part One of the book ("The Struggle with God") describes the human experience of freedom and fate [Schicksal], in which the latter concept refers to "the product of all the factors which shape our lives, other than the will to be free".
This work, which began with his assumption of the chair in systematic theology at Erlangen in 1932, culminated in the publication of his 700-page Der christliche Glaube [Christian Dogmatics] in 1940.
[36] His colleague, Paul Althaus, deemed this book "the first great contradiction... against the theology of Karl Barth from the Lutheran side.
"[37] The purpose of dogmatics, according to Elert, is to find within the normative content of biblical proclamation that point at which it "confronts contemporary human beings most immediately with the reality of its subject matter," and to ward off misunderstandings.
[46] In the final years of his life, Elert turned his attention to issues in the history of dogma, particularly in the areas of christology and eucharistic fellowship.
[50] That support took place in the wake of the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II and in view of the social, political, and economic crises of the Weimar era.
[56] "Although he actively worked against the infiltration of Nazism and the Deutsche Christen" in the Erlangen theology faculty, "he remained silent in the face of other anti-Semitic actions on the part of the Nazis.
[58] For example, as dean, he had kept the theology faculty free of Nazi-Party members and "German Christians" (Deutsche Christen), and, "at great personal risk" vis-a-vis the Gestapo, he had helped to shield at least forty students who should have been expelled from the university because of their Jewish descent or political views.
[59] Following two investigations by the American military in 1945 and 1946, Elert and his colleagues in the theology faculty were officially cleared to resume their teaching and scholarly work.