Combining high critical acumen with a keen sense of the drama of human history, in his prime Pauck was considered the Dean of historical theology in the United States.
[1] After moving to Berlin with his family as a young boy, Pauck received a classical education in Greek, Latin, French, arithmetic, history, geography, and science at the Paulsen Realgymnasium in Berlin-Steglitz.
He also heard lectures by Karl Barth in Göttingen prior to returning to Berlin to pursue his dissertation on Martin Bucer's reformation treatise, De Regno Christi.
Alongside his Americanization Pauck never lost sight of the twentieth-century plight and horror that had seized his homeland with the rise of fascism and the Hitler state.
In a speech given in 1939 at Chicago Theological Seminary, he stated: In the midst of ongoing crises of the 1930s-1940s, Pauck remained anchored in the traditions of his 19th-century forebears, especially the thought of Goethe, whom he frequently cited from memory.
That friendship deepened when Pauck moved from Chicago to teach alongside Niebuhr and Tillich at Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1953.
During this time Pauck's first wife, Olga Dietz Gümbel, died January 15, 1963, and on November 21, 1964 he married the Union Seminary alumna and former Oxford University Press religion editor, Marion Hausner.
After reaching the age of retirement from Union Seminary, Wilhelm Pauck assumed the position of Distinguished Professor of Church History at the Vanderbilt University Divinity School (1967–72).
Following the Vanderbilt professorship he served as Visiting Professor in the Departments of History and Religious Studies at Stanford University from 1972 until his official retirement in 1976.
[16] Speaking in 1968 at the presentation of a Festschrift, his Divinity School colleague in Chicago, Lutheran theologian Joseph Sittler, described teaching as Pauck's "fabulous métier."
Sittler stated further that Pauck was especially noted for his ability t o mediate the past as a lively classroom lecturer, seminar teacher, podium speaker, and panelist.
In his teaching and lectures, a telling anecdote would illumine the foibles and highpoints of the Christian past, while illustrating the human predicament generally and giving students courage to wrestle with similar issues in their own time and place.
Like them, he preferred undogmatic expressions of neo-orthodox Christianity to more traditionalist teachings that failed to view the legacy of the church through the lens of history.
An active proponent of the ecumenical movement in the 1940s, including conversations with Roman Catholic theologians, Pauck consulted on the World Council of Churches meetings in Amsterdam (1948) and Evanston, Illinois (1954).
A partial list of twentieth-century Reformation scholars and historians of theology influenced by him would include the names of James Luther Adams, William A. Clebsch, John Dillenberger, B.A.
[19] Pauck had confidence in the significance of the past for the present, and came to regret elements of American culture that downplay the need for a sense of what modern believers owe to their predecessors.
He took something like the same idea from his sole intellectual hero, Ernst Troeltsch, who taught that religion and theology are thoroughly historical, even when they purport to transmit eternal verities.