Karl Immanuel Nitzsch

Karl Immanuel Nitzsch (21 September 1787, Borna – 21 August 1868, Berlin) was a German Lutheran church leader.

His father, Karl Ludwig Nitzsch, at that time pastor and superintendent in Borna, later (1790) became professor at Wittenberg and director (1817) of the seminary for preachers.

According to Otto Pfleiderer, (Development of Theology, p. 123): "He took as his starting-point the fundamental thought of Schleiermacher, that religion is not doctrine but life, direct consciousness, feeling.

At the same time he sought to bring religious feeling into closer connection with knowledge and volition than Schleiermacher had done; he laid special stress – and justly – on the recognition of a necessary and radical union of religion with morality, treating both dogmatics and ethics together accordingly in his System der christlichen Lehre".

His Protestantische Beantwortung, a reply to the Symbolik of Johann Adam Möhler (1796-1838),[3] which originally appeared in the Studien und Kritiken, of which he was one of the founders, may also be mentioned.