Wilhelm Herrmann

Wilhelm Herrmann (born December 6, 1846, Melkow, near Magdeburg, Prussia [now in Germany]—died January 3, 1922, Marburg, Germany) was a liberal German Protestant theologian who taught that faith should be grounded in the direct experience of the reality of the life of Christ rather than in doctrine. A disciple of Albrecht Ritschl, whose emphasis on ethics and rejection of metaphysics he continued, Herrmann was also an important influence on his own students Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann.

Herrmann studied at the University of Halle from 1866, becoming a lecturer in 1875. In 1879 he was appointed professor at the University of Marburg, and he remained there for the rest of his career. As a teacher and author, he argued that faith is a living personal relationship with God, derived through direct communication with God in Jesus Christ. He believed that people are able to see the truly good disclosed and actualized in Jesus. Like Ritschl before him, Herrmann drew heavily from Immanuel Kant in making the assertion that God is an object not of theoretical but of practical knowledge and that therefore theology can be neither supported nor attacked by science or philosophy. Among his chief works are Der Verkehr des Christen mit Gott (1886; The Communion of the Christian with God) and Ethik (1901).