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[German Version] I. Philosophy – II. Science – III. Dogmatics – IV. Ethics I. Philosophy Causality (from Lat. causa, “cause”), also causal nexus, causal relationship, is a term for the characteristic relationship between cause and effect. The things related are generally assumed to be pairs of events (event causality), though in some cases they may be an active thing and an event (agent causality); whether agent causality can be reduced to event causality is disputed. In either ca…

[German Version] I. Fundamental Theology Process theology is a school within North American theology (North America, Theology in: III) whose essential stimuli came from the process metaphysics (Process philosophy) of A.N. Whitehead. The early center of this movement was the University of Chicago, where from the mid-1920s Whitehead’s thought came to influence theology through the work of H.N. Wieman (and later his students Bernard M. Loomer and Bernard E. Meland) and Charles Hartshorne. The appeal to…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies – II. Philosophy of Religion and Historical Theology – III. Philosophy – IV. Dogmatics – V. Practical Theology – VI. Ethics I. Religious Studies Perceptions of animate and inanimate nature, dreams, ecstasy, trance, and death, as well as sickness and physical sensation, and finally self-reflection and self-transcendence have led to highly diverse models for interpreting …

[German Version] I. Religious Studies In general usage, tradition (from Lat. transdare/ tradere, “hand on, transmit”) connotes retention and safeguarding, understood as a conservative handing down of mores, customs, norms, rules, and knowledge. The emphasis is on continuity with the past. Jan Assmann interprets tradition as an exemplary case of “cultural memory,” an enduring cultural construction of identity. In religions appeal to tradition is a prominent element justifying interpretations, practices, clai…

[German Version] The term selfishness denotes the disastrous focus of finite persons on their own selves (Self), perverting their creaturely self-love through inversion of the proper relation between relationship to God, the world, and self. 1. When one’s relationship to God is subordinated to relationship to oneself or is replaced entirely, selfishness manifests itself as hubris, the desire to be like God (Gen 3:5), spiritual pride, and self-righteousness. Theologically, therefore, there has been a tendency to identify selfishness with sin per se (Augustine, Puritanism ¶ [Purit…

[German Version] I. Dogmatics – II. Ethics I. Dogmatics The focus of the problems addressed by the Protestant doctrine of ordo salutis is the relationship between the action of God’s grace ( gratia dei applicatrix) and the human experience of salvation. Based on the Reformers’ doctrine of justification but also going beyond it, it describes the working of the Holy Spirit or God’s grace in the life of the justified believer in all its unity and diversity. The beginnings of the doctrine are already visible in the Augsburg Confession of 1530 ( CA 6 and 12) and – in greater detail – in the…

[German Version] I. Bible – II. Dogmatics – III. Ethics I. Bible 1. Old Testament and Gospels. The word “body” rarely appears in the Hebrew OT, because human beings are usually referred to as flesh and soul (cf. Flesh and spirit: I). The LXX often uses σῶμα/ sṓma (“body”) to translate בָּשָׂר/ bāśār (“flesh”). Although the term “body” does not occur in creation passages, it is still true that human beings were created by God as physical creatures …

[German Version] I. The Term and Its Impact Though there was scattered use of the term in German historiography (Ernst Bernheim) and 19th-century German and French philosophy (Conrad Herrmann, M. Blondel), the concept and term go back to C.S. Peirce (see also II below), who introduced the concept in How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1878), the term in 1902 in J. Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, and both orally between 1871 and 1873 ¶ in the Metaphysical Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He used the term for a logical maxim that the meaning of concepts must…

[German Version] I. Dogmatics – II. Ethics I. Dogmatics “Imputation” (Lat. imputare, Gk λογίζεσθαι/ logízesthai) specifies that the justification of the sinful person is through the effective judgment of God: God ascribes the righteousness of Christ to the sinner through faith. Human self-justification encounters the quite different righteousness of God which takes human sin upon itself and does away with it in Jesus Christ. This confrontation aims at a new relationship with God on the part of the individua…

[German Version] Penitence, like the related terms contrition, repentance, regret, and remorse (cf. Ger. Reue), denotes a common human feeling in which a person feels painfully affected by the effects of his or her actions or attitudes, and is moved to wish these things had not happened and to attempt to revise them in future behavior or make good their effects. The concept of penitence presupposes the processual nature of personal being (Process), which in the case of finite persons has a temporal structure …

[German Version] I. Religious Studies 1. Phenomenology Western, Christian connotations of the concept of the soul, imposed on the religio-historical evidence by outside studies, must be generally excluded if the soul is understood as the principle of manifestations of life that are perceptible (or culturally considered to be perceptible), although they are rarely categorized under a common umbrella term. It is therefore reasonable to speak of a multiplicity of souls – for example four among the Ob-Ugrians (Hasenfratz, Einführung, 38–41), five among the Proto-Germanic peoples ( ib…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies – II. Christianity – III. Buddhism I. Religious Studies The term compassion bears Christian connotations: compassion (cf. Lat. compassio; Gk συμπάϑεια/ sympátheia) refers to the capacity or ability to share concretely in the suffering of others, to sympathize and to draw consequences for one's own behavior. In this regard, the religions answer the question of the appropriate object for compassion – for example all people, only people of a certain group, …

[German Version] The gambling habit is a powerful inclination that places a person between desire and aversion in a tense state of agitation under intense pressure to engage in gaming (Play). The carefree ease of gaming is thus reduced to a meaningless waste of time or elevated to a compulsive addiction to a recklessness that jeopardizes life and property. Gaming becomes perverted into a symbol of personal bondage in which the player flees into an alternative world instead of attending to his or h…

[German Version] I. The Concept Social psychology studies the modes of social experience and behavior and the interaction processes both of individuals and between individuals and social systems (Community and the individual) of varying complexity (microsystems like partnerships, families [Family], groups; mesosystems like organizations and institutions; macrosystems like social, political and cultural entities), as well as the relationship of social systems to each other. The basic issues, which are…

[German Version] (Ger. Takt, Fr. tact, Lat. tactus, “sense of touch, feeling, influence”) denotes the practical judgment that enables the accurate application of rules in concrete cases by drawing on the totality of the determinants present in the mind as universal rules of common sense or experience, without being elevated to the level of conscious scientific clarity (I. Kant). In a moral sense, tact is sensitivity to what is right and proper given the distinctive character of a particular situation a…

[German Version] I. Philosophy Rationality is derived from Latin ratio (“calculation, consideration, reason”) and medieval Latin rationalitas (“reason, capacity for thought”). The term denotes various intellectual capacities that distinguish human beings as “rational animals” from the other more highly developed animals. In German, from the 18th century, these capacities were generally designated as Verstand (Intellect: I) and Vernunft (Reason: I). Under the influence of the English term rationality, and the usage of various scientific disciplines, especially s…

[German Version] (Apr 9, 1868, Neuchâtel, Switzerland – Dec 8, 1946, Yellow Springs, OH). Born in Switzerland and brought up in a Reformed environment, Leuba lived in the United States from 1887 onward and studied at Clark University under S. Hall. His empirical study of conversion, which he submitted as a doctoral dissertation in 1895, is considered a pioneering work of the psychology of religion. From 1898 to 1933, Leuba was professor of psychology at Bryn Mawr College. Together with W. James, he became the foremost promoter of the American psychology of religion. ¶ His religion-critic…

[German Version] I. Phenomenology and Social Sciences – II. Ethics – III. Mores and Church Life – IV. Ecclesiastical Mores I. Phenomenology and Social Sciences The term “mores” (cf. Ger. Sitte) refers to regular forms of common living that are relatively binding and provided by tradition. Behavior oriented to mores relates to cultural patterns that have been valid for “a long time,” and were often practiced by previous generations. M. Weber thus speaks of “embeddedness” ( Eingelebtheit). In German, the term Sitte (“mores”) competes with Brauch (Custom). There is no sharp dis…

[German Version] I. Philosophy The term process denotes a directed course of events in nature, history, or the life of an individual that can run its causally determined course teleologically, as a self-organizing dynamic and, in the case of living creatures, on the basis of intentions and meanings. In antiquity and the Middle Ages, it was assumed that everything existing is determined by its nature and possesses an immanent tendency to actualize its potentialities. The understanding of process chang…

[German Version] The noun wish denotes a person’s desire to obtain an anticipated or pursued good (Goods) for him- or herself or others. It presupposes the temporality of existence, as is present in our experiencing as the immediate present of the remembered past and the awaited future of personal presence. In wishes as phenomena of consciousness, intentional act and content can be distinguished but never separated. Hence the common distinction between the subjective sense of the word (wish as an ac…