Background
He was born at Brieg (now Brzeg, Poland) and studied at Breslau, Göttingen and Berlin – first law, which he later abandoned for theology.
theologian university professor
He was born at Brieg (now Brzeg, Poland) and studied at Breslau, Göttingen and Berlin – first law, which he later abandoned for theology.
University of Göttingen.
From 1825 to 1831, he was in charge of several small parishes. In 1831, he was second university preacher at Göttingen University, and lectured on practical theology and pedagogics. In 1834, he became extraordinary professor of theology there.
From 1835 to 1839 he was professor in Marburg.
In 1839 he became professor ordinarius of theology at the University of Halle, where he remained for the rest of his life. He died at Halle. In 1846 he had been deputed to attend the General Evangelical Synod at Berlin.
In 1848 he helped to found the Deutsch-evangelische Kirchentag, and two years later founded and edited (1850–1861), with August Neander and Karl Nitzsch, the Deutsche Zeitschrift für christliche Wissenschaft und christliches Leben. Müller"s other works include Dogmatische Abhandlungen (1870), and Das christliche Leben (3rd ed, 1847).
Here he supported the Consensus-Union and afterwards defended himself in the pamphlets Die erste Generalsynode der evangelische Landeskirche Preussens (1847) and Die evangelische Union, ihr Wesen und göttliches Recht (1854). His chief work, however, was Die christliche Lehre der Sünde (The Christian teaching of sin, 2 vols, 1839. 5th ed, 1867; Engineer transport 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).
