Name Christian Weisse | Role Philosopher | |
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Died September 19, 1866, Leipzig, Germany | ||
Christian Hermann Weisse (Weiße in modern German; 10 August 1801 – 19 September 1866) was a German Protestant religious philosopher. He was the son of theologian Christian Ernst Weisse (1766–1832).
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Philosophy
Weisse 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.