A professor of systematic theology at the University of Augsburg, Bernd Oberdorfer has specialized in Trinitarian theology and pneumatology and worked on topics in the history of Christian doctrine, ecumenical theology and inter-denominational dialogue, Orthodox theology, and theological theories of culture. He studied Protestant theology at the University of Tübingen and took his Ph.D. in theology at the University of Munich in 1993. He had begun teaching at Augsburg the previous year and was named to his current chair in 2001. Dr. Oberdorfer also has taught theology at the University of Heidelberg and been a visiting professor on the theological faculty of the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. He was ordained in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in 2000. The author of some thirty articles in academic journals, his books include two studies in German, one on the development of the thought of the towering German Protestant theologian, Freidrich Schleiermacher, Geselligkeit und Realisierung von Sittlichkeit: Die Theorieentwicklung Friedrich Schleiermachers bis 1799 (1995), and the other an analysis of the doctrine of the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son-the so-called Filioque ("and from the Son") controversy-dividing the Eastern and Western churches, Filioque: Geschichte und Theologie eines ökumenischen Problems, which was published in 2001 by Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht.