Christian Hermann Weisse

Christian Hermann Weisse (also Weiße; August 10, 1801 – September 19, 1866), was a German Protestant religious philosopher.

Philosophy

He was born at Leipzig, and studied at the university there, at first adhering to the Hegelian school of philosophy. In the course of time, his ideas changed, and became close to those of Schelling in his later years. He developed (along with I. H. Fichte) a new speculative theism, and became an opponent of Hegel's pantheistic idealism. In his addresses on the future of the Protestant Church (Reden über die Zukunft der evangelischen Kirche, 1849), he finds the essence of Christianity in Jesus' conceptions of the heavenly Father, the Son of Man and the kingdom of Heaven. In his work on philosophical dogmatics (Philosophische Dogmatik oder Philosophie des Christentums, 3 vols. 1855-1862) he seeks, by idealizing all the Christian dogmas, to reduce them to natural postulates of reason or conscience.

Weisse was the first theologian to propose the two-source hypothesis (1838), which is still held by a majority of biblical scholars today. In the two-source hypothesis, the Gospel of Mark was the first gospel to be written and was one of two sources to the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke, the other source being the Q document, a lost collection of Jesus's sayings. He died in his native city of Leipzig, aged 65.

Works

His other works include:

• System der Ästhetik (2 vols., 1830)
• Die Idee der Gottheit (1833)
• Die philosophische Geheimlehre von der Unsterblichkeit des menschlichen Individuums (1834)
• Büchlein von der Auferstehung (1836)
• Die evangelische Geschichte, kritisch und philosophisch bearbeitet (2 vols., 1838)
• Die Evangelienfrage in ihrem gegenwärtigen Stadium (1856)
• Psychologie und Unsterblichkeitslehre (edited by R. Seydel, 1869)

References

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Weisse, Christian Hermann". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.  This work in turn cites:
  • Otto Pfleiderer, Development of Theology (1890)
  • Rudolf Seydel, Christian Hermann Weisse (1866)
  • R. Seydel, Religion und Wissenschaft (1887)

External links

• Klaus-Gunther Wesseling (1998). "Weisse, Christian Hermann". In Bautz, Traugott. Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL) (in German) 13. Herzberg: Bautz. cols. 684–690. ISBN 3-88309-072-7.