1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Müller, Julius

MÜLLER, JULIUS (1801–1878), German Protestant theologian, was born at Brieg on the 10th of April 1801. He studied at Breslau, Göttingen and Berlin, first law, then theology; and in 1839 became professor ordinarius of theology at Halle (1839). In 1848 he helped to found the Deutsch-evang. Kirchentag, and two years later founded and edited (1850–1861), with Neander and K. I. Nitzsch, the Deutsche Zeitschrift für christliche Wissenschaft und christliches Leben. He died at Halle on the 27th of September 1878. A disciple of Neander and friend of Richard Rothe, Müller bitterly opposed the philosophy of Hegel and the criticism of F. C. Baur. His book, Über den Gegensatz des Protestantismus und des Catholicismus (1833), called forth a reply from Baur, and he was one of those who attacked D. Strauss’s Life of Jesus. In 1846 he had been deputed to attend the General Evangelical Synod at Berlin. Here he supported the Consensus-Union, and afterwards defended himself in the pamphlets Die erste Generalsynode der evang. Landeskirche Preussens (1847) and Die evangelische Union, ihr Wesen und göttliches Recht (1854). His chief work, however, was Die christliche Lehre der Sünde (2 vols., 1839; 5th ed., 1867; Eng. trans. from 5th ed.), in which he carried scholasticism so far as “to revive the ancient Gnostic theory of the fall of man before all time, a theory which found no favour amongst his theological friends” (Otto Pfleiderer).

Müller’s other works include Dogmat. Abhandlungen (1870), and Das christliche Leben (3rd ed., 1847). See M. Kähler, Julius Müller (1878); L. Schultze, Julius Müller (1879) and Julius Müller als Ethiker (1895).