Emil Brunner was born in Winterthur, near Zurich, Switzerland.
He studied at the universities of Zurich and Berlin, receiving his doctorate in theology from Zurich in 1913, with a dissertation on The Symbolic Element in Religious Knowledge. Brunner served as pastor from 1916 to 1924 in the mountain village of Obstalden in the Swiss Canton of Glarus. In 1919–1920 he spent a year in the United States studying at Union Theological Seminary in New York.
In 1921, Brunner published his Habilitationsschrift (a post-doctoral dissertation traditionally required in many countries in order to attain the position of a fully tenured professor) on Experience, Knowledge and Faith and in 1922 was appointed a Privatdozent at the University of Zurich. Soon after, another book followed: Mysticism and the Word (1924), a critique of the liberal theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher. In 1924 Brunner was appointed Professor of Systematic and Practical Theology at the University of Zurich, a post which he held until his retirement in 1953. In 1927 he published The Philosophy of Religion from the Standpoint of Protestant Theology and second The Mediator.
After accepting various invitations to deliver lectures across Europe and the United States, in 1930 Brunner published God and Man and in 1932 The Divine Imperative. Brunner continued his theological output with Man in Revolt and Truth as Encounter in 1937. In the same year he was a substantial contributor to the World Conference on Church, Community, and State in Oxford, a position which was reflected in his continued involvement in the ecumenical movement. In 1937–1938 he returned to the United States for a year as a visiting professor at Princeton Theological Seminary.
Brunner's ecclesiastical positions varied at differing points in his career. Before the outbreak of the war Brunner returned to Europe with the young Scottish theologian Thomas F. Torrance who had studied under Karl Barth in Basel and who had been teaching at Auburn Theological Seminary, New York (and who would subsequently go on to distinguish himself as a professor at the University of Edinburgh). Following the war, Brunner delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of St Andrews, Scotland in 1946–1947 on Christianity and Civilisation. In 1953 he retired from his post at the University of Zurich and took up a position of Visiting Professor at the recently founded International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan (1953–1955), but not before the publication of the first two volumes of his three volume magnum opus Dogmatics (volume one: The Christian Doctrine of God (1946), volume two: The Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption (1950), and volume three: The Christian Doctrine of the Church, Faith, and Consummation (1960)). While returning to Europe from Japan, Brunner suffered a cerebral haemorrhage and was physically impaired, weakening his ability to work. Though there were times when his condition would improve, he suffered further strokes, finally succumbing to death in 1966.
Brunner holds a place of prominence in Protestant theology in the 20th century and was one of the four or five leading systematicians.