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[German Version] I. Church History World War I stands for a hitherto unknown escalation in the intensity and violence of warfare in the name of the nation and the national state. As the first fully-fledged technological and industrial mass conflict – or in the words of M. Weber: as the Maschinenkrieg (“war of machines”) of the “modern military state” –, World War I revealed the extent to which the expectations of national integration had changed and gave rise to a new form of wartime reality: as a “total war,” it confronted all the warring stat…

[German Version] I. Study of Religion – II. History – III. Sociology – IV. Practical Theology – V. Missiology I. Study of Religion The term modernization usually refers to mutually reinforcing structural changes in various social sectors: nation building and democratization in the political sector; industrialization and tertiarization (i.e. the development of services) in the economic sector; urbanization, educational expansion, and mobilization in the social sector; diversification and individualization in the c…

[German Version] ( Jul 25, 1903, Breslau [Wrocław] – Apr 3, 1953, Frankfurt am Main), one of the first women ordained in the Old Prussian Union (1928). As municipal vicar of Breslau (appointed ¶ Nov 1933), she championed the cause of the city’s Jewish citizens, helping them emigrate and thus probably saving the lives of more than 100 Jews (National Socialism: I, 4). After her circular letter against the “Jewish badge” dated Sep 12, 1941, became generally known, she was relieved of her duties; expelled from Breslau, she went to …

[German Version] (Aug 10, 1873, Cleveland, OH – Jun 12, 1966, Madison, NH). Hocking initially studied mechanical engineering at Iowa State, then philosophy at Harvard. In The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912), he attempted to synthesize the Idealism of J. Royce with the Pragmatism of W. James to develop a philosophy of religion on an empirical basis. As Alford Professor at Harvard from 1920 to 1943, he built on this beginning ( Living Religious and a World Faith, 1940; The Coming World Civilization, 1956; etc.), but also addressed the political problems of the Middle Ea…

[German Version] (Sep 15, 1715, Accra, Gold Coast [today Ghana] – Oct 23, 1769, Accra), son of a Togolese mother and a Danish father, studied theology in Copenhagen from 1727 to 1735 and then accompanied N. v. Zinzendorf to Herrnhut. He returned to Elmina in West Africa in 1737 as the first Moravian missionary (Bohemian and Moravian Brethren: II, 4). During a long stay in Germany (1740–1756), in 1746 he married Rebecca Freundlich (1718–1780), a former slave from the Caribbean. From 1756 to 1761 he…

[German Version] I. Definition The use of spiritualism as a precise technical term was shaped by the Soziallehren of E. Troeltsch, who used it to distinguish between two groups Luther had lumped together as Schwärmer (“Enthusiasts”): spiritualists and Anabaptists. The common characteristic shared by the groups called spiritualists is their belief in the direct effect of the Holy Spirit (Spirit/Holy Spirit) within each individual, in contrast to the outward working of the Spirit through the words of Scripture. As a rule, this belief i…