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Dr. Harold F. Roellig

In the nineteen fifties, while a student at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis in an attempt to give more focus to his studies, Harold Roellig began to research the problems presented by especially the natural and physical sciences that he felt hindered the evangelistic efforts of Christ's Church. As at that time the semesters at the seminary and neighboring Washington University coincided, he simultaneously attended courses at both schools. Upon graduation from the seminary, he also had seventy-seven hours of regular and summer school course work in various scientific fields at Washington University. This prepared him for doctoral work in vertebrate paleontology and geology at Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. In the vast paleontological collections of the museum, he gained first-hand experience and expertise in these fields.

After receiving the Ph.D., he began work on a synthesis of God's revelations both from His inspired Bible and in His created works. This resulted in The God Who Cares: A Christian Interpretation of Time, Life, and Man. The book presented a holistic view of God's activity with His creation over past ages.

Roellig's second area of longstanding concern is why Christianity appears to have so little influence in the way so many of today's Christians live their daily lives. He began this study in the sixties during the time he was a college chaplain in the New York City area.

Unlike during the early years of Christianity, the ethical behavior of Christians today is acknowledged to have become almost indistinguishable from that of non-Christians. It raises the question of why should non-Christians bother with Christianity if it makes so little difference in the lives of its adherents? In the last chapters of The God Who Cares, the book gave a brief survey of what happened over the past 2000 years to the way of life that Jesus taught and how it became obscured in Christianity. A few readers wrote to ask that the topic of these chapters be expanded into a book of their own.

With this encouragement, Dr. Roellig resigned his tenured professorship in order to devote himself to a broad study of the 2000-year history of how Jesus' new way of life fared in the churches. As the footnotes in The More Excellent Way amply document, he reviewed the significant literature written during this period on how Christians were to live their lives. After many years, this inquiry has finally resulted in The More Excellent Way: 2000 Years of Jesus' New Way of Life.

At the present time, Dr. Roellig is working on a complete revision and scientific up-dating of his earlier work, The God Who Cares: A Christian Interpretation of Time, Life, and Man.

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