August Friedrich Christian Vilmar

August Friedrich Christian Vilmar, German Neo-Lutheran theologian; born at Solz (near Rotenburg, 78 m. NE of Frankfurt) November 21, 1800; died at Marburg July 30, 1868.

In the reports drawn up by Vilmar in the name of his committees for the Hessian Diet in 1831-32 he appealed effectually for the elevation of the national university, for the foundation of new professorships, and for the better equipment of institutions of learning.

Deeming that the gymnasium was designed to train up Christian leaders of the nation, and that religious instruction should assume a distinctively churchly character, Vilmar set forth his views in a series of contributions to Hengstenberg's Evangelische Kirchenzeitung in 1841 (ed.

To prove that the creed of the so-called Reformed church of Lower Hesse was this unaltered Augsburg Confession cost Vilmar immense toil.

Against such an endeavor Vilmar wrote his Verhältnis der evangelischen Kirche in Kurhessen zu ihren neuesten Gegnern (Marburg, 1839).

Essentially a conservative and devoted to his sovereign, he not only supported his elector manfully, but also made the Hessischer Volksfreund, which he founded in 1848 and edited alone until the middle of 1851, a center for all the loyalists of the land.

His power as a preacher may still be seen in his Predigten and geistliche Reden (1876), while his visitation of churches in the discharge of his duties gave rise to many official communications of importance.

This course of lectures was edited by his pupil C. Müller under the title Collegium Biblicum (6 vols., Gütersloh, 1879–83); and most of his other lectures were also edited posthumously: K. W. Piderit preparing the Die Augsburgische Konfession (Marburg, 1870), Lehre vom geistlichen Amt (1870), Christliche Kirchenzucht (1872), Pastoraltheologie (Gütersloh, 1872), and Dogmatik (2 vols., 1874), and C. C. Israel those on Theologische Moral (2 vols., 1871).