Christian Hermann Weisse

Christian Hermann Weisse (1801-1866), German Protestant religious philosopher, was born at Leipzig on the 10th of August 1801. He studied at Leipzig, and at first belonged to the Hegelian school of philosophy. In course of time, however, his ideas approximating to those of Schelling in his later years, he elaborated with I. H. v. 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 fiber die Zukunft der evangelischen Kirche, 1849), he finds the essence of Christianity in Jesus's 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. He died on the 19th of September 1866.

His other works include: Die Idee der Gottheit (1833), Die philosophische Geheimlehre von der Unsterblichkeit des menschlichen Individuums (1834), Biichlein von der Auferstehung (1836), Die evangelische Geschichte, kritisch and philosophisch bearbeitet (2 vols., 1838), and Psychologie and Unsterblichkeitslehre (edited by R. Seydel, 1869). See O. Pfleiderer, Development of Theology (1890); and cf. R. Seydel, Christ. Herm. Weisse (1866), and Religion and Wissenschaft (1887).