Religion Past and Present
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Subject: Religious Studies
Edited by: Hans Dieter Betz, Don S. Browning†, Bernd Janowski and Eberhard Jüngel
Religion Past and Present (RPP) Online is the online version of the updated English translation of the 4th edition of the definitive encyclopedia of religion worldwide: the peerless Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart (RGG). This great resource, now at last available in English and Online, Religion Past and Present Online continues the tradition of deep knowledge and authority relied upon by generations of scholars in religious, theological, and biblical studies. Including the latest developments in research, Religion Past and Present Online encompasses a vast range of subjects connected with religion.
Subscriptions: see brill.com
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Religion Past and Present (RPP) Online is the online version of the updated English translation of the 4th edition of the definitive encyclopedia of religion worldwide: the peerless Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart (RGG). This great resource, now at last available in English and Online, Religion Past and Present Online continues the tradition of deep knowledge and authority relied upon by generations of scholars in religious, theological, and biblical studies. Including the latest developments in research, Religion Past and Present Online encompasses a vast range of subjects connected with religion.
Subscriptions: see brill.com
Wobbermin, Georg
(216 words)
[German Version] To deal with the challenges to systematic theology raised by the history of religions, Wobbermin, a disciple of Ritschl, conceived a theory of theology based on the psychology (VII) of religion, which he viewed as a contemporary extension of the fundamental insights of the Lutheran Reformation (“Faith and God belong together”: Luther,
Large Catechism) and the theology of F.D.E. Schleiermacher, as well as a theological adaptation of W. James’s philosophy of religion. Its methodological principle was the “religio-psychological circle”…
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Religion Past and Present
Woe
(199 words)
[German Version] Woe, Hebrew mainly יוֹה/
hôy and יוֹא/
ʾôy, Septua-gint οὐαί/
ouaí (Lat.
vae), an emotive, onomatopoeic outcry expressing anguish, grief, distress, pain, etc., common in the Old and New Testaments, but rare elsewhere. It is debated whether the two main Hebrew words have different meanings. According to Zobel, ʾ
ôy is used with a “motivating clause” expressing death and destruction to a person or group;
hôy lacks the ¶ clause, being an interjection associated originally with funerary laments (Burial: III; Mourning customs: II; e.g. Jer 22:18). The ori…
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Religion Past and Present
Wolf, Erik
(345 words)
[German Version] Legal philosophy is indebted to Wolf for pioneering studies in the history of jurisprudence in the context of intellectual history, especially its roots in ancient Greece, on systematic historical analysis of the problem of natural law (IV), and on jurisprudence in literature. His major interest, however, was increasingly the theological basis of law in general and ecclesiastical law in particular. Along with H. Dombois and J. Heckel, he was one of the central figures in the theology of law (Jurisprudence: IV) and (Protestant) ecclesiastical ¶ law in the early pos…
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Religion Past and Present
Wolf, Ernst Friedrich
(227 words)
[German Version] (Aug 2, 1902, Prague – Sep 11, 1971, Garmisch-Partenkirchen) received his Lic.theol. and habilitation from Rostock in 1925. In 1930/1931 he held a substitute position at Tübingen; in 1931 he was appointed professor of church history and Christian archaeology in Bonn. In 1935, as a prominent theologian of the Confessing Church, he was transferred to Halle for disciplinary reasons. After military service and imprisonment, he was appointed to a chair in Göttingen in 1945, from 1957 t…
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Religion Past and Present
Wolff, Christian
(1,301 words)
[German Version] (Jan 24, 1679, Breslau – Apr 9, 1754, Halle), son of a tanner. He first attended the Lutheran Elisabeth Gymnasium in Breslau, where he not only received thorough training in traditional scholastic philosophy, but also took an active part in the controversies between Protestantism and Catholicism. From 1699, at his father’s wish, he studied theology at the University of Jena, but devoted himself mainly to philosophy, mathematics and physics. In 1702 he passed the Master’s examinati…
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Religion Past and Present
Wolff, Hans Walter
(188 words)
[German Version] His research, honored with three
Festschriften and three honorary doctorates, focused primarily on OT prophets and prophecy (II). Along with W. Zimmerli’s commentary on Ezekiel, his seminal commentaries on the prophets Hosea to Micah (and Haggai) represent the most important 20th-century interpretations of the prophets. His preliminary studies were published in two volumes of collected essays. He always wrote parallel expositions of the prophetic books for parish use. He also wrote on …
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Religion Past and Present
Wolf, Friedrich August
(328 words)
[German Version] (Feb 15, 1759, Hainrode – Aug 8, 1824, Marseille). Wolf matriculated at Göttingen in 1777 and became a teacher in Ilfeld in 1779; in 1781 be was appointed rector of the municipal Gymnasium in Osterode. In 1783 he was appointed professor of philosophy and pedagogics at the University of Halle, succeeding Ernst Christian Trapps. in Halle he founded the Seminarium Philologicum in 1787. When the French occupied Halle and closed the university in 1806, Wolf went to Berlin, where he bec…
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Religion Past and Present
Wolff, Walther
(210 words)
[German Version] (Dec 9, 1870, Neuwerk – Aug 26, 1931, Aachen), with an honorary doctorate, one of the most high-profile church politicians of the Weimar Republic. The son of a orphanage director, Wolff studied from 1889 to 1893 at Greifswald, Marburg, and ¶ Halle. In 1895 he was appointed pastor in Otzenrath, on the Lower Rhine; he moved to Aachen in 1901, and energetically pursued an ecclesiastical career: his offices included the presidency of the Rhenish provincial synod (1919–1931) and the vice-presidency of the Prussian general syn…
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Religion Past and Present
Wolfgang of Regensburg (Saint)
(189 words)
[German Version] (c. 924, northern Swabia – Oct 31, 994, Pupping, Upper Austria) was born to a free but non-noble family in Swabia (Pfullingen?). Educated on Reichenau and in Würzburg, as a teacher in the cathedral school in Trier after 956 he became familiar with the Benedictine monastic reform of Gorze; in 964 he himself entered the reformed abbey of Einsiedeln. In 972 he was made bishop of Regensburg by Otto the Great. In Regensburg he was a fervent champion of strictly regulated monastic and c…
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Religion Past and Present
Wolf, Hugo
(183 words)
[German Version] (Feb 13, 1860, Windischgrätz [Solvenj Gradec] – Feb 22, 1903, Vienna), second only to F. Schubert as a composer of art songs. The chaotic saga of Wolf ’s early years and training chimes with the image of eccentric artistic energy that alienated many of his benefactors. His mood swings foreshadowed the insanity that incapacitated him in 1897. Wolf made his artistic breakthrough in 1888/1889, when he received ¶ public acclaim for settings of texts by E. Mörike, J. v. Eichendorff, and J.W. v. Goethe. He set both secular and sacred texts, “serving his…
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Religion Past and Present
Wolfram von Eschenbach
(578 words)
[German Version] was one of the most important German court poets of the early 13th century. No historical information about his life has survived; nothing about his dates, social class, or education can be verified. All we know is his name, which he probably took from the town of Eschenbach (since 1917 Wolframs-Eschenbach), in an area with which his works display substantial familiarity. There is evidence of a noble family “v. Eschenbach” there since 1268, which ¶ traced itself back to the poet and had a monumenetal tomb erected for him in the Liebfrauenmünster in the 1…
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Religion Past and Present
Wolfrum, Philipp Julius
(210 words)
[German Version] (Dec 17, 1854, Schwarzenbach am Wald – May 8, 1919, Samaden, Switzerland). After attending the teachers’ college in Altdorf (J.C.A. Zahn), Wolfrum began teaching at the teachers’ college in Bamberg. He was put on leave to study music in Munich, where one of his teachers was G.J. Rheinberger. Beginning in 1884, he taught music at Heidelberg in the faculty of theology and was appointed musical director in 1885. In 1891 he received his Dr.phil. from Leipzig. In 1894 Heidelberg appoin…
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Religion Past and Present
Wolkan, Rudolf
(159 words)
[German Version] (Jul 21, 1860, Přelouč, Bohemia [today in the Czech Republic] – Jul 16, 1927, Vienna), librarian and literary historian. He studied German literature at Prague and became a professor and vice-director of the university library in Vienna. For the most part, Humanism and the Reformation, primarily in Bohemia, constituted the focus of his works on the history of literature and religion, which document his clear interest in the religious bodies of that period and their hymnody. There is still no published assessment of his life and work. Barbara Lange Bibliography Works in…
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Religion Past and Present
Wolleb, Johannes
(104 words)
[German Version] (Jun 24, 1586, Basel – Nov 24, 1629, Basel), Reformed theologian. He studied theology with A. Polanus v. Polansdorf and served as a deacon after 1607; in 1618 he succeeded J.J. Grynaeus as chief pastor (antistes) of the Basel Minster. He was also appointed professor of Old Testament. His
Christianae theologiae compendium, a succinct summary of the theology of Reformed orthodoxy (II, 2.b), shows him less as an original thinker than as a skilled presenter of the thought of others. Martin Sallmann Bibliography Works include:
Christianae theologiae compendium, ed. E. Bi…
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Religion Past and Present
Wöllner/Wöllner Edict
(430 words)
[German Version] The Wöllner Edict was the most significant edict on church affairs of the late 18th century in Prussia. Johann Christoph Woellner (not Wöllner; May 19, 1732, Döberitz – Sep 10, 1800, Groß-Rietz, near Beeskow) studied theology at Halle; in 1755 he became pastor in Groß-Behnitz, where he soon began to work the Itzenplitz estate, the management of wich he assumed in 1762. In 1766 he married the Itzenplitz daughter Amalie, a marriage disapproved of by Frederick the Great. Wöllner, a s…
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Religion Past and Present
Wolsey, Thomas
(383 words)
[German Version] (1472 [?], Ipswich – Nov 29, 1530, Leicester). After studying at New College, Oxford, ordination to the priesthood (1501), and a term as court chaplain to the archbishop of Canterbury, Wolsey, the son of an innkeeper and butcher, became chaplain to Henry VII in 1507. Under Henry’s successor, Henry VIII, his career in church and state began: appointed adviser to the king in 1511, in 1514 he was made bishop of Lincoln and later in the year archbishop of York. In 1515 he was made lor…
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Religion Past and Present
Woltersdorf, Ernst Gottlieb
(99 words)
[German Version] (May 30, 1725, Friedrichsfelde – Dec 17, 1761, Bunzlau [Bolesławiec]) studied in Halle from 1742 to 1744; his teachers included J. Lange and S.J. Baumgarten. After a conversion experience in 1744, he maintained contact with the Moravians in Herrnhut (Bohemian and Moravian Brethren: II). In 1748 he became pastor in Bunzlau, where he founded an orphanage in 1754 inspired by A.H. Francke. He also wrote 218 hymns and 35 devotional works. Cornelia Kück Bibliography Works include:
Evangelische Psalmen, 2 vols., 1750–1752 On Woltersdorf: J. Giffey,
Ernst Gottlieb Wolters…
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Religion Past and Present
Wolzogen, Ludovicus
(121 words)
[German Version] (1633, Amersfoort – Nov 13, 1690, Amsterdam), Reformed theologian. After studying at Utrecht, Groningen, and Geneva, he became pastor of the Walloon congregation in Groningen in 1658 and Middelburg in 1662; in 1664 he was also appointed pastor and professor of church history in Utrecht and in 1670 in Amsterdam. He opposed Spinozism (B. Spinoza), but as a supporter of Cartesianism he was himself exposed to constant charges of deficient orthodoxy by the adherents of G. Voetius. Christoph Strohm Bibliography Works include:
De scripturarum interprete contra exercit…
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Religion Past and Present
Womanism
(295 words)
[German Version] is a movement of black women or women of color committed to freedom from gender, racial, economic, planetary, and sexual oppression. The term was coined in 1983 by the black American writer and activist Alice Walker (born 1944), who describes a womanist as a “black feminist or feminist of color.” Womanist Bible scholar Renita Weems sees Walker’s lyrical description as “a cultural image, not a hard and fast definition.” Some womanists identify with feminists, particularly with Thir…
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Religion Past and Present
Women
(11,554 words)
[German Version]
I. Religious Studies Traditionally research on religion has rarely dealt with women. Exceptions include Moriz Winternitz (
Die Frau in den indischen Religionen, 1915–1916) and F. Heiler (
Die Frau in den Religionen der Menschheit, 1977). In the 1970s, gender studies introduced a broad paradigm shift, which also affected religious studies. The principle that has guided this change from the traditional approach is that
homo religiosus is not coincident with
vir religiosus but equally has to include
femina religiosa. The various questions can be assigned to th…
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Religion Past and Present