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[German Version] I. History – II. Church Law – III. Dogmatics – IV. Ethics – V. Missiology I. History 1. Antiquity and Middle Ages Because the faithful are supposed to “lead a life worthy of God” (1 Thess 2:12), the question of the ordering of the earthly Christian life and of the admonition of sinners has remained an object of active reflection since the founding of the first churches. Whereas admonition and invitation to repentance are initially the responsibility of the congregations (Matt 18:5–18), banishment and the carrying out of excommunicatio minor and maior (Excommunicati…

[German Version] The theological concept of YHWH’s zeal (האָנְקִ/ qinʾāh) stands at the center of the struggle to assure that only the biblical God be worshiped (Monotheism and polytheism); it is intimately associated with his holiness (Josh 24:19; Sacred and profane: V). It gives expression – first and foremost in the cult – to God’s intolerant demand for exclusivity, championed against the religion of Baal by the prophetic and Levitical “YHWH alone movement” of the 9th century (2 Kgs 9f.) and reflected…

[German Version] I. Terminology – II. Historical Development – III. Results I. Terminology Covenant theology or federal theology (Ger. Föderaltheologie), an old Reformed doctrinal system whose origins are to be sought in Zürich, Heidelberg and Herborn, is the broad attempt to comprehend and portray as a unity the history of God with humanity attested in the OT and NT by means of the biblical covenant concept (Covenant). Correspondingly, the whole substance of dogma, from the creation…

[German Version] According to Augustine of Hippo ( De haeresibus 83; MPL 42, 46), the notion of a sleep or death of the soul was already current among the “Arabs” in the time of Origen. This means that souls in the “intermediate sate” share the fate of their mortal bodies, rising to life again with them only on the Last Day. This idea, with various rationales, was later advocated by Pope John XXII, the Renaissance savant P. Pomponazzi, a few Anabaptist groups, A. v. Karlstadt, and Luther. The arguments f…

[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. Dogmatics In general, the term synergy denotes theological conceptions that consider spiritual or ethical cooperation of the human will with divine grace a causal factor in human salvation (Pelagius/Pelagians/Semi-Pelagians). The Reformers followed Augustine of Hippo in rejecting synergism, seeing justification based solely on God’s free grace ( sola gratia) as the only foundation of salvation. Despite the 1999 Joint Declarationon the Doctrine of Justification by the Vatican and the Lutheran World Federation, it remains debatable whether an…

[German Version] I. Philosophy of Religion The notion and theme of “natural theology” are of philosophical origin and thus antedate Christian theology. They go back to the Middle Stoa (Stoics, Panaetius), whose division of theology into three genera – mythical, ¶ natural, and political or civil – can be traced through Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas to the dawn of the Enlightenment. Natural theology plays a critical role in this triad: because it claims to represent the divine in accord with its own nature, it seeks to bring out …

[German Version] In the mirror of Lutheran denominational polemics, the term designates a Reformed doctrinal decision concerning Christology which can already be identified in Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, and Peter Lombard, and which J. Calvin formulated in terms of the divine Logos, despite his full in-dwelling in the humanity of Christ, as also remaining outside ( extra) Christ and “as in the beginning, filling the whole world” ( Inst. II:13:4). The scope of this disputed doctrinal formulation became apparent in…

[German Version] I. Bible 1. Old Testament and early Jewish apocalypticism. Predestination refers traditionally to God’s foreordained final determination regarding the eschatological salvation or damnation of each individual. In this sense, it represents a subset of a universal notion of divine predetermination (Determinism and indeterminism: II) taken to its logical individual and soteriological extreme, as is found in both Judaism and Christianity. The Old Testament does not speak of predestination in this sense, but certain lines of tradition leading in that directi…

[German Version] I. Old Testament – II. New Testament – III. Dogmatics – IV. Judaism I. Old Testament Election, especially in compounds such as doctrine of election, election idea, election tradition, is a term from biblical theology based on the theological use of the Heb. verb בחר/ bḥr, especially in Deuteronomy, which has become established since K. Galling's monograph (1928). It has become the comprehensive term for the foundation of Israel's existence and involves “the philosop…

[German Version] I. Dogmatics – II. Fundamental Theology I. Dogmatics The terms infralapsarianism and supralapsarianism designate the alternate positions in the 17th-century dispute between the various schools of Reformed theology regarding the understanding of predestination. The controversial issue was: who is the eternally chosen or damned human being? The yet to be created and fallible person (thus supralapsarianism: T. Be…

[German Version] (“continuous creation”) aims to express the idea that the created world is dependent at each moment in its temporal existence on the active presence of God for its maintenance and subsistence. ¶ The term interprets the conservatio and at the same time shifts it in the closest conceivable proximity of the concept of initial creation (VI): “For God, creation and maintenance are one and the same thing” (Luther). If creation is not to remain a speculative idea, of no consequenc…

[German Version] I. History of Religions – II. Old Testament – III. Judaism – IV. Christianity – V. Dogmatics – VI. Islam I. History of Religions The terms messiah and messianism derive from the Hebrew word māšîaḥ, “anointed one.” Under the impact of foreign rule in Israel and Judah beginning in the 6th century bce, the word took on a new meaning: the Messiah was expected to bring deliverance from foreigners and oppressors, and in part to inaugurate the eschatological age of salvation (see II–IV below). The word's meaning was expanded in the …

[German Version] I. Bible – II. Dogmatics I. Bible 1. Hebrew Bible Older interpretations (most recently: Copan) of Gen 1:1, 2, that God created the tohuwabohu, etc. from nothing (Creation; Chaos: II) in order subsequently to shape it in the six days of creation have been abandoned. However one assesses the syntax of Gen 1:1–3, the consensus maintains: the framework of Gen 1:1+2:4a speaks of the creation of the ordered world of life, but Gen 1:2 mentions (de-mythologizing Me…

[German Version] I. Old Testament – II. New Testament – III.  Christianity – IV.  Judaism – V. Islam I. Old Testament In the OT, fear of God occurs in various reactions to the encounter with God. Fear of God encompasses both the immediate reaction of a person gripped by horror before the holy God (the numinous) and the behavior of the pious person toward God in the form of obedience and praise. Consequently, fear of God can also designate veneration of God and piety (religion). The scope of the fear of God corresponds to the breadth of the concept of God (God: II). The God of Israel is not only a nume…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies Peace (negatively: absence of fighting and war; positively: security, wellbeing, and harmony) is considered desirable in all traditional religions, although they also have their specific legitimations of war. In archaic religions, peace is primarily related to the community and understood as a present reality. However, from the beginning of the Christian era, religious developments produced stronger differentiations. Peace is no longer seen as a social phenomenon…

[German Version] The doctrine of the testimonium was formulated by Calvin ( Inst.I 7) and included in various Reformed articles of faith (I, 3; Confessio Gallicana 4). It means that the unimpugnable validity and authority of Scripture (Holy Scriptures) does not depend on the judgment of the church (in the form of an agreement or consensus) but on the testimony of the Spirit (Spirit/Holy Spirit). J.H. Alsted honored it as the foundation of all theology. It does not mean that the “self-evidence” of Scripture is joined by …