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[German Version] I. History and Church History 1. Historical and political context.…

[German Version] 1. Friedrich Adolf (Jul 13, 1767, Tecklenburg – Apr 4, 1845, Bremen), Reformed theologian. After working as a schoolteacher in Westphalia, Krummacher became professor of rhetoric in Duisburg in 1800, pastor in Kettwig an der Ruhr in 1807, general superintendent of Anhalt-Bernburg in 1812, and pastor in Bremen in 1824. Close to the revival movement (Revival/Revival movements), and a supporter of the union of churches (Unions, Church: I), Krummacher was active above all as a religious author ( Parabeln, 81848). Peter Maser Bibliography A.W. Möller, Friedrich Adolf K…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies The term personality cult probably became popular in February of 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev’s famous “secret speech” at the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union admitted numerous excesses during the Stalin period and ascribed them to the “cult of personality” (Russ. kul’ t lichnosti) surrounding J. Stalin . Since that time, personality cult ha…

[German Version] (Apr 21, 1864, Erfurt – Jun 14, 1920, Munich) I. Life and Work From his childhood, Karl Emil Maximilian Weber was deeply influenced by the cultural ideals of the educated German Protestant bourgeoisie. His father Max Weber Sr. (1836–1897), a lawyer, represented the National Liberal Party as a deputy in the Landtag and Reichstag. His mother Helene Weber née Fallenstein, who was descended from a family of Huguenots, was a deeply religious and morally sensitive woman with a strong commitment to charitable social work. His sister Henriette was married to the cultural Protestant historian A. Hausrath, his sister Ida to the National Liberal historian Hermann Baumgarten, the father of the practical theologian O. Baumgarten from Kiel. In his large cosmopolitan family with ties throughout Europe, Weber witnessed highly different styles of Protestant pi…

[German Version] I. General – II. Church History – III. Systematics – IV. Practical Theology – V. Missiology I. General The expression liberal theology became prevalent in the “Saddle Period” (Reinhart Koselleck) of Neo-Protestantism between 1780 and 1820; it denotes a type of “modern theology” that combines strong dem…

[German Version] I. Sociology and Social History First attested in the writings of R. Pannwitz ( Die Krisis der europäischen Kultur, 1917), the concept of postmodernism spans a wide spectrum of heterogeneous meanings, the extremes of which are marked, on the one hand, by the notion of a new age that is meant …

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[German Version] I. Concept The term revolution (from Lat. revolvere, “turn over”) denotes a sudden qualitative change of existing circumstances and processes, a change that does not just affect individual elements – like the replacement of government personnel in a coup – but brings change of the overall system. The term was used originally in astronomy for the orbit of a heavenly body. Since the early modern era, has been used to refer to changes that overturn the political system, but this definition …

[German Version] I. Church History – II. Philosophy – III. Practical Theology I. Church History 1. The German term Neuzeit, which first appeared in church historiography around 1870, and which corresponds to the English term “modern times,” encompasses a broad spectrum of heterogeneous meanings. Terms such as tempus novum, historia nova, or neue Zeit (“new times”) – in contrast to the Middle Ages (I) – were coined in the 17th century to…

[German Version] I. The Concept Nationalism may be described as an integrative ideology that claims that loyalty to the inclusive body of the ¶ nation has absolute priority over all other commitments. Such competing loyalties include loyalty to a particular estate or social class, a dynasty, a local state, a region, a tribe, a denomination, or a religion. While the concept of a nation played a role in political debates in medieval Europe, its reference was not to the totality of the people but to the ruling class (the nationes of the nobility and the clergy). Modern nationalism emer…

[German Version] I. Concept, Historical and Legal Foundations The concept of the party has always been polyvalent in the political semantics of European modernity, while the historical configurations of parties have been subject to extreme variations. As intermediary, organizationally cemented groups representing shared views and positioned between the general population and the government, and legitimized by the respective national electoral law, parties have helped promote the parliamentarization and …

[German Version] I. Religious Studies People and nationhood are functional political terms that serve to define a collective entity and to incorporate it into a specific context (see III below). Only since the 18th century has it been possible to speak of a German nation as the active subject of its own history. The rupture of the church at the Reformation and the subsequent wars of religion in the 16th and 17th century long prevented the development of an inclusive political or religious identity. It …

[German Version] I. Religio-Cultural Journals – II. Journals of Religious Studies – III. Christianity – IV. Judaism – V. Islam I. Religio-Cultural Journals During the second half of the 19th century, the publication of German-language journals experienced a tremendous upsurge. While the year 1890 saw the publication of 3,203 individual titles, the number had grown to 5,231 by the year 1900 and to 6,689 by 1914. Journals became the preferred medium in academia and culture. In the field of theology, the proportion …

[German Version] I. Old Testament – II. New Testament – III. Early Judaism – IV. Church History – V. Philosophy – VI. Philosophy of Religion – VII. Dogmatics – VIII. Ethics – IX. Sociology, Politics, and Law I. Old Testament 1. The concept of political freedom, which originated in the Greek polis (City cult), first appeared in Hellenistic Jewish historiography. The Stoics' concept of freedom, which contrasts inner freedom and outward constraint, has no counterpart in the OT. The OT is rooted in an internal mythological cultur…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies In the 1960s, religious studies began to discuss the continuing decline of religious commitment in Europe intensively. In particular the writings of Bryan Wilson ( Religion in a Secular Society, 1966) and Peter L. Berger ( The Sacred Canopy, 1967), drawing on the ideas of M. Weber, É. Durkheim, and others led to formulation of a so-called theory of secularization, where secularization denotes a natural aspect of the process of modernization, in which the traditional religious legitimation of the world has increasingly lost…