In 1925, as a student of 19 years old, Ernst Käsemann attended a lecture course (by Erik Peterson) on the Epistle to the Romans. Looking back from the vantage-point of 1973, he could write that this early experience determined his course of study ‘and in some sense, as befits a theologian, my life’. ‘The basic problem was posed. In the following semesters I then listened to the expositions of H. von Soden and R. Bultmann. I then turned successively to the work of K. Barth, A. Schlatter, Luther and Calvin, studied them critically, and was led by them into interpretation ancient and modern. No literary document has been more important for me.’
