Johannes Müller (19 April 1864 – 4 January 1949) was an unconventional German Protestant theologian.

Life Provenance and early years Johannes Müller was born in Riesa, a small town located a short distance down-river from Dresden. He was born into a revivalist family. His parents had met in a pietist community.

His father, Johann Gottfried Lobegott Müller (1833–1905), was a school master and also a cantor and an organist. His paternal grandfather was another school master. His mother, born Christiane Friedericke Dölitzsch (1833–93), came from a farming family in nearby Mautitz. Between the ages of four and nine Johannes Müller was struck down with Poliomyelitis, becoming completely paralysed and confined to his bed when he was seven. However, after the doctors had given up any hope of improvement in his condition he did, slowly, recover. He later described his years of debilitating childhood illness as particularly happy and powerfully formative in terms of an ability to absorb information and impressions. When he was twelve he went to live with his grandparents in Dresden where he attended secondary school.

Student years Müller moved on to study philosophy and Lutheran theology at Leipzig University in 1884. His tutors included Franz Delitzsch. He also studied as a student at Erlangen University where he became a member of a Wingolf student fraternity.August Winkler: Vademekum Wingolfitikum, Wingolfsverlag, Wolfratshausen 1925, p. 214. In 1890 he received his doctorate in philosophy. His attempt to gain a doctorate in theology the following year failed on account of profound theological differences with his assessors at the Leipzig University Faculty of Theology, however. In 1889 he became Mission Secretary of the Evangelical-Lutheran National Association for Missions to Israel ("Evangelisch-lutherischen Zentralvereins für Mission unter Israel"), as the organisation was known at that time. He presented a proposal that its proselytising highighting individual Jewish sages should be replaced with a peoples' mission which would provide for the recognition of Israel as a single overarching entity in unity with Jesus as Messiah. He drew inspiration from the ideas of Joseph Rabinowitz. The management committee were not persuaded, however, and at the end of 1892 Johannes Müller's resignation was accepted.

After the unconventional conclusion to his university career, Müller showed himself to be largely unencumbered by the traditional boundaries of theological belief, giving stimulating public talks on questions of faith and life in ways that managed to fill lecture halls in Germany and nearby countries. Conventional church teaching held that nature was the well-spring of sin and immorality. Having identified and defined his target in this way, Müller went on to reject it as cold-hearted and anti-life ("gefühlskalt und lebensfeindlich"). He condemned "aloof" thought,Harald Haury: Von Riesa nach Schloss Elmau, , p. 11,15, 111, 187, 302 incorporating, some believed, the language of "gutter antisemitism" in his presentations.

Printing years Müller's adolescence and student years furnished him with a powerful but in many ways representative "fin de siècle" intellect. In the end he would publish more than 40 books. Soon he was filling 1,000 seat evangelical halls with his perorations, and in 1897 he teamed up with Heinrich Lhotzky to publish his own journal, the periodical "Blätter zur Pflege des persönlichen Lebens" ("Pages on taking care of the individual life"). It was renamed "Grünen Blätter" ("Green leaves/pages") in 1914 (and then withdrawn in 1941 due to paper shortages). Müller's many written pieces are today sometimes seen in the wider context of the so-called Judenmission (loosely "Mission to the Jews") as foreshadowing the political antisemitism that led to the Holocaust.Paul Gerhard Aring: Christen und Juden heute – und die „Judenmission“? Geschichte und Theologie protestantischer Judenmission in Deutschland, dargestellt und untersucht am Beispiel des Protestantismus im mittleren Deutschland. Haag + Herchen, Frankfurt am Main 1987, p. 4f.Paul Gerhard Aring: Christen und Juden heute – und die „Judenmission“? Geschichte und Theologie protestantischer Judenmission in Deutschland, dargestellt und untersucht am Beispiel des Protestantismus im mittleren Deutschland. Haag + Herchen, Frankfurt am Main 1987, pp. 231–235. With his continuing high-profile public activity as a "religious intellectual", he campaigned for a new free Christianity, and it was this that provided a personal justification for his own freelance existence. His ideas were translated into several languages and found a resonance with many educated fellow citizens, with the "unchurched educated" ("entkirchlichten Gebildeten"),Friedrich Wilhelm Graf Protestantische Wellness in Süddeutsche Zeitung, Ostern 2014, p 12 and with adherents of the Cultural Protestantism movement who were engaged in reinventing Christianity for a modern industrial age.

He was in close personal contact with Heinrich Diesman (1863–1927), a "populist" theoretician. He engaged with the newly fashionable branch of science known as Eugenics, and the application in literature and philosophy of the "degeneration phenomena". Müller bemoaned a "direct national danger" predicated on the decline in marriage among educated circles. Women would thereby remain deprived of the fulfillment of their "central role as women" ("ihres ... eigentlichen Frauenberufs"). Massive immigration from Poland, Russia and Bohemia was degrading "our nation".Johannes Müller: Beruf und Stellung der Frau, Grüne Blätter 1900, p. 302. What remained unexplained for Müller and his readers was the way that a "heightened sensitivity to the upheavals of modernity, a turbocharged vitality, and possibly even genius religiosity, alongside a number of liberal convictions, could go hand in hand with a brazenly populist ideology. After 1918, Müller shared the conviction, widespread among political conservatives, that the Weimar policies and constitutional structure lacked legitimacy. His critics imply that it was only the régime change of 1933 that addressed those concerns, although others point out that prior to that point Johannes Müller had "ignored completely" Adolf Hitler and his movement.

From Mainberg to Elmau

In 1903 Müller and Heinrich Lhotzky set up a "care home for personal life" ("Pflegestätte persönlichen Lebens") in Castle Mainberg at Schweinfurt in the hill-country east of Frankfurt. The centre became a meeting point for their readers and friends. Support came from a wide and disparate range of backers, reflecting Müller's public profile at the time. They included the cookie magnate, Hermann Bahlsen, the Gutehoffnungshütte heiress, Elsa von Michael, the Count of Solms-Laubach, Walter Luetgebrune, later known as a lawyer for right-wing extremists. Others were the Social Democrat politician Anton Fendrich, the future resistance fighter Elisabeth von Thadden, the musician Wilhelm Kempff, the politician Arnold Bergsträsser, the publisher Oscar Beck along with the literary polymaths Wilhelm Langewiesche and Korfiz Holm. The castle had been placed at Müller's disposal by the industrialist Alexander Erbslöh, a friend who had been persuaded to buy it for the purpose. In 1912 it was recorded that the average stay at the establishment lasted for 13.7 days. Müller introduced special one-week seminar sessions at reduced price for students: the next year the same deal was made available to theologians and teachers. Some stayed for as long as two months. However, Alexander Erbslöh now declined to provide further funding, while at the same time Müller received an undertaking of substantial financial support from Elsa von Michael, generally known to posterity by her subsequent title as Elsa Countess of Waldersee. She was a daughter of the fabulously wealthy Haniel family. The result was that in 1912 Johannes Müller acquired the run-down Elmau estate, hidden away at the end of a long lane in the mountains between Partenkirchen and Mittenwald, and located barely twenty kilometers to the east of Germany's highest mountain peak.

By a fortunate coincidence Johannes Müller had a brother-in-law called Carl Sattler who worked in Munich as an architect. The two men worked together to design and develop an elaborate sanatorium-like retreat in the fashionable Reform Architecture style at the Elmau site. Completed in 1916, financed by Elsa, Countess of Waldersee, this became Schloss Elmau. Max von Baden, a well-connected aristocrat-politician who on at least one occasion described Johannes Müller as his spiritual guide, and who later (briefly) became Chancellor of the German Empire, presided over the opening ceremony. At Elmau, Müller created a "Sanctuary of Personal Life" ("Freistätte persönlichen Lebens") where he hoped to be able to help lead "people of today" ("„Menschen von heute") along a path the nature of which corresponded to the meaning of Jesus' ethics. Teaching and daily life at Elmau involved a "believers' community", German folk dance, healthy food, chamber music concerts and the transcending of class and class boundaries."Die Gäste saßen bei den langen Mahlzeiten an großen Tischen, der berühmte Professor neben dem sozialdemokratischen Handwerker, …" ("the guests sat through long meals at long tables, the famous professor next to the socialist crafstman ..."), Friedrich Wilhelm Graf in Protestantische Wellness, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 19–21 April (Ostern) 2014, p 12. The extensive provision of music, in particular, had a powerfully curative effect on guests who came in search not necessarily of theological enlightenment, but hoping to find, from the music and the strikingly beautiful natural surroundings, a measure of relief from the intolerable stresses presented by daily life.

Unimaginably destructive war had broken out in July in 1914. Müller talked up the war as "Crisis of Healing" ("Heilkrise") which would confront humanity with the bankruptcy of its civilisation and awaken it from vacuousness ("aus ihrer Wesenlosigheit"). That the Germans stood alone against the whole world, with a superior shared spirituality and in a just cause, demonstrated in his own eyes that Müller was God's preferred device, to lead in the new age, and to resolve the matter of the pacifists through national victory. Müller himself became something of a semi-permanent fixture at Schloss Elmau (which, especially in wartime, was physically cut off from roads and population centres) in a way he never had at Schloss Mainberg. Young women were employed without payment to work as domestic assistants: some found themselves husbands from among the guests.

One of Johannes Müller's closest friends was the heir to the Grand Duchy of Baden (and at this time a close friend of Cosima Wagner) Max von Baden, who hoped that Müller might cure his anxiety attacks and help him overcome his perceived emotional isolation. Another intimate was the monarchist-theologian Adolf von Harnack. Schloss Elmau guests also included Maurus Gerner-Beuerle, later a longstanding "Domprediger" at Bremen, Eivind Berggrav who subsequently became the Bishop of Oslo and the writer Erich Ebermayer. It was at the recommendation of Adolf von Harnack that in 1917 the Theology Faculty at Berlin University conferred an honorary doctorate on Johannes Müller.

War ended in military defeat in 1918 to be followed in rapid succession by the abdication of Wilhelm II, a rash of revolutionary uprisings across the country, the establishment of a new republican government structure, currency collapse and years of economic hardship. Travel was no longer so difficult and Johannes Müller embarked on a succession of lecture tours, including in his itineraries Norway, Sweden, Hungary, the Netherlands and Denmark. He resigned from the Pan-German League in 1919.

Nazi years