Michael Weiße

Michael Weiße or Weisse ( – 19 March 1534) was a German theologian, Protestant reformer and hymn writer. First a Franciscan, he joined the Bohemian Brethren. He published the most extensive early Protestant hymnal in 1531, supplying most hymn texts and some tunes himself. One of his hymns was used in Johann Sebastian Bach's St John Passion.

Career

Weiße was born in Neiße From 1504, he studied at the University of Cracow and became a Franciscan friar in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland) in 1510. He and colleagues Johannes Zeising and Johann Mönch converted to the teaching of Martin Luther, and were expelled from Breslau around 1517. In 1518 they were admitted to the Bohemian Brethren.

Weiße was elected as Prediger (preacher) and Vorsteher (leader) of the German community of brethren in Landskron in 1522. The same year he was sent as part of a delegation to Wittenberg, to compare the Brethren's creed with that of Martin Luther. From 1525, Weiße, Zeising and Mönch favoured and promoted the teaching of Ulrich Zwingli, which caused conflict with the bishop of Prague. While Weiße and Mönch submitted to the bishop, Zeising joined the Anabaptists and was burned in Brünn in 1528 on a decree of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I. Mauricio Kagel quoted the hymn, paraphrased to "Bach, der uns selig macht" in his oratorio Sankt-Bach-Passion telling Bach's life, composed for the tricentenary of Bach's birth in 1985.

Eight hymns by Weiße are part of the current German Protestant hymnal (EG), including his Easter hymn "Gelobt sei Gott im höchsten Thron". His hymnal was reprinted by Konrad Ameln in 1957 as a facsimile, titled Gesangbuch der Böhmischen Brüder 1531 (Hymnal of the Bohemien Brethren 1531). A digitized edition from Nuremeburg, 1544, is accessible on e-rara.

Literature Petr Hlaváček: Die Franziskaner-Observanten zwischen böhmischer und europäischer Reformation. In: Winfried Eberhard und Franz Machilek (ed.): Kirchliche Reformimpulse des 14./14. Jahrhunderts in Ostmitteleuropa. Böhlau-Verlag 2006, , pp.321f. Michael Weiße. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). S. Fornagon. Michael Weiße. Jahrbuch für Schlesische Kirche und Kirchengeschichte. NF 33, 1954. Walther Killy: Killy Literaturlexikon: Autoren und Werke deutscher Sprache. 15 volumes. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh, München 1988–1991. CD-ROM: Berlin 1998. Andreas Marti: Weiße, Michael. In: Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart. volume 8. 4th edition. 2005, p.1379.