Quick Miskotte facts

K.H. Miskotte:

  • was born in 1894 and died in 1976, meaning that he was twenty years old when World War One began; and Jimmy Carter became president of the United States in the same year he passed away
  • took his first pastoral call in a small-town church in 1921 (at twenty-seven); like Barth, the townspeople called him “the red pastor” because of his socialism
  • married Cornelia (née Cladder) in 1923; he called her “Cor.” In the same year, he began to correspond with Barth
  • while pastoring full-time, he earned a doctorate in theology from the University of Groningen in 1932 (at thirty-eight)
  • he took a trip to the Dutch East Indies in 1937
  • the German army invaded the Netherlands in 1940; Miskotte’s family sheltered Jewish refugees in their manse, and Miskotte participated in a resistance cell. Nazi censors caught and banned his wartime book Edda and Torah, and killed his good friend Jan Koopmans
  • he published the first edition of Biblical ABCs in 1941
  • his denomination appointed him to a professorship in theology and ethics at the University of Leiden in 1945
  • in October 1946, his wife and his daughter Alma died from food poisoning
  • he remarried to a widow, Jannie (née van Pienbroek), in 1953
  • he published his magnum opus, When the Gods are Silent, in 1956
  • he retired in 1959, at the age of sixty-five
  • he published a revised edition of Biblical ABCs in 1966
  • Karl Barth passed away in 1968, ending their nearly half-century of friendship