Andreas Osiander

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Andreas Osiander (1498–1552) was a German Lutheran theologian and reformer. Born in Gunzenhausen, Franconia, he studied at the University of Ingolstadt and was ordained a Catholic priest in 1520. That same year he worked as a Hebrew tutor at an Augustinian convent in Nuremberg and soon joined the Lutheran cause publicly.

In Nuremberg, Osiander helped push the Reformation, influenced the city’s adoption of it in 1525, and played a key role in converting Albert of Prussia to Lutheranism. He took part in major religious discussions of the time, including the Marburg Colloquy (1529), the Diet of Augsburg (1530), and the Schmalkalden articles (1531). After the Augsburg Interim in 1548, he left Nuremberg and moved first to Breslau (Wrocław) and then to Königsberg (Kaliningrad), where he taught at the new Königsberg University until his death in 1552.

Osiander published a corrected edition of the Latin Vulgate in 1522 and helped with the 1533 Brandenburg-Nuernbergische Kirchenordnung. He wrote Harmoniae Evangelicae, a popular gospel harmony (1537) that linked Greek and Latin texts with his notes on how he ordered the accounts. In 1543 he added a preface to Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, suggesting the model was useful even if not strictly true. In 1550 he published two disputations, De Lege et Evangelio and De Justificatione, where he argued that justification by faith comes from Christ’s indwelling in believers—a view that sparked strong disagreement with Luther and Calvin and was later rejected by most Lutherans. Osiander’s mystic theology emphasized union with Christ and the idea that righteousness comes from God dwelling within a person.

He was the father of theologian Lucas Osiander the Elder, and his descendants continued in theology. His niece Margarete married Thomas Cranmer, the future Archbishop of Canterbury.