DIECKHOFF, AUGUST WILHELM. - Protestant theologian, born on 5 February 1823 in Göttingen, died on 12 September 1894 in Rostock. In 1854 he became an extraordinary professor of systematic and historical theology at Göttingen, and in 1860 he became a full professor of the same subject at the University of Rostock.
He wrote several scholarly works, particularly concerned with the origins of Lutheranism. His first important work on the Waldensians in the Middle Ages (Die Waldenser im Mittelalter. Zwei historische Untersuchungen, 1851) refuted the common opinion then prevailing that these heretics were precursors of the Protestant Reformation; according to D., they were instead, in speculative terms, representatives of medieval Christianity, merely accepting Pelagian doctrines. In other works, D. delved into the concept of the originality of the Lutheran Reformation. In 1870 he published a work against the infallibility of the papacy.