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New Type of Religiosity 1. The Reformation radiating from Germany hosted a confluence of social, political, and religious developments. In terms of religion, the various motifs were focused through scriptural principles, and a teaching on justification. The criticism of the Church by that Church itself led to a collapse of the medieval concept of a unitary Christianity, the Corpus Christianum. Into its place stepped the co-existing confessional churches. In the Protestant regional churches, there arose a new type of Christian religiosity, one characteri…

The Person 1. Martin Luther was born on November 10, 1483, at Eisleben, in Saxony, Germany. In 1505, to fulfill a private vow that he had made in acute fear of death and the Last Judgment, he entered the monastery of Augustinian hermits in Erfurt. His experience of failing to attain a salvific relationship to God even as a monk led him to a gradual change of attitude and the ‘reformatory turn’ that he later stylized in his self-interpretation as a sudden experience of breakthrough and awakening. On October 31, 1517, Luther became a public figure by posting his ninety-five theses against indulgences. His criticism soon broadened to include an attack on prevailing dogmas, and in 1520 the Pope excommunicated him; in 1521 the Emperor issued the Edict of Worms. Luther's local lord, Frederick the Wise, sheltered him in the Wartburg Castle, where he translated the New Testament into German. In the 1520s, there followed important declarations and clarifications vis-à-vis the ‘left wing’ of the Reformation (with the 1522 Wittenberg riots through Karlstadt; Thomas Müntzer; Peasants' War), humanism, and the Swiss Reformation. Bound to Wittenberg by an imperial edict that continued in …

[German Version] (c.1300, Strasbourg – Jun 16, 1361, Strasbourg). Along with Meister Eckhart and H. Suso, Tauler was the most important representative of German Dominican mysticism (III, 3.b) on the Upper Rhine. Trained at the Dominican convent in Strasbourg, which he had joined around the age of 14, he did not hold a degree in theology but had received a good education; philosophically active, he participated in the neoplatonic revival in the Dominican order (Berthold of Moosburg). In terms of th…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies and History of Philosophy The dogmatic definition of the Holy Spirit as a person within the one divine substance (Trinity/Doctrine of the Trinity) presupposes not only a particular philosophical context but also a religio-historical horizon. A formative influence on the conceptualization of the Holy Spirit was exercised by the various anthropomorphic interpretations of elemental anthropological or normative qualities in the contex…

[German Version] I. New Testament – II. Church History – III. Theology I. New Testament …

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[German Version] (died Mar 30, 1530, Stuttgart). The Augsburg weaver Bader, who was released from a brief imprisonment in 1527 following his tactical revocation of his a…

[German Version] I. Definition Sociology is an empirical social science; its field of study encompasses the relatively enduring forms and structures of social action (Action, Science of ) and the resultant social units, from entities like the family and kinship group and social groups to large-scale organizations and states. The word itself is an artificial combination of Latin socius (“companion, fellow”) and Greek logos (“word, truth,” in an extended sense “knowledge”). It appears for the first time in vol. IV of the Cours de philosophie positive of A. Comte (1838). As a scie…

[German Version] (Dec 28, 1654, Metz – Mar 7, 1729, Berlin). During his service as a page at the Saxon-Eisenach court in Marksuhl (c. 1666 to 1670), Naudé became familiar with German culture and the internal differences within Protestantism. After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, he came to Brandenburg in 1687 by way of Saarbrücken and Hanau. There he embarked on a career in mathematics (1687 teaching in the Gymnasium in Joachimsthal, appointed court mathematician in 1696, made a made member…

[German Version] (d. Jun 29, 1293, Tournai) supported the Beguines as archdeacon in Brügge (from 1276/1277) and Tournai (from 1279) and had decisive influence as magister regens of theology in Paris from 1275 to 1292. Although he was involved in the condemnation of rigorous Aristotelianism (his role was never completely c…

[German Version] (1328, Kalkar – Dec 20, 1408, Cologne). Henry of Kalkar received…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies – II. New Testament – III. Church History – IV. North America – V. Systematic Theology – VI. Islam – VII. China I. Religious Studies Millenarianism (chiliasm) refers to the notion of a 1,000-year (Lat. millenarius, Gk χ…

[German Version] The university founded in 1386 by Rupert I, Elector Palatine, was initially staffed by scholars forced out of Paris and Prague because of ecclesial and national opposition. The founding rector Marsilius of Inghen guided Heidelberg on the path of a moderate via moderna; from 1452, the via antiqua shared equal rights. The scholastic manner of instruction (Scholasticism) was supplemented after 1456 with the humanist (Humanism: III), but not profoundly altered. Brought to the Lutheran Reformation in 1558 by Ottheinrich (1556–1559)…

[German Version] (1550, Liège – after 1630, Straßburg [Strasbourg]). Though born into a Catholic family, Sudermann came into contact with Calvinism, Lutheranism, and Anabaptism early on. Having worked as a private tutor, after 1585 he served as an educator of the nobility at the Bruderhof in Straßburg. He had already come in contact with the ideas of K. v. Schwenckfeld, some of whose w…

[German Version] (Georgsohn; 1501, Flanders – Aug 25, 1556, Basel). The glass painter Joris's public criticism of a Host procession in Delft in 1528 led to his mutilation and banishment. After receiving adult baptism in 1534/1535, Jor…

[German Version] (1285/1289, Jandun – 1328, Todi). John, who received his M.A. in Paris in 1310, regarded Averroes as a normative authority, more definitively so than the consistent Aristotelians of the 13th century did. He accepted Averroes's doctrine of the soul and cosmology as philosophically correct but did not intellectually harmonize them with Christian doctrine, which he never explicitly di…

[German Version] I. Course – II. French Revolution and Religion – III. Effects on Germany In the French Revolution, discontent exploded over the inability of French absolutism under Louis XVI to achieve reform. It signaled the dissolution of the old European estates (Estate-based society) and absolutism, to be replaced by bourgeois society (Bourgeoisie) and the constitutional state based on the rule of law. I. Course The struggle of the aristocracy in the …

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[German Version] (Dec 11, 1694, Frankfurt am Main – Jul 24, 1776, Lingen). After studying jurisprudence in Marburg and Halle (C. Thomasius) and undertaking educational journeys, especially to the courts of European rulers, Loën lived in Frankfurt am Main from an inherited fortune from 1724. Drawing on the form of the courtly Baroque novel, he developed an ¶ enlightened conception of state politics in Der redliche Mann am Hofe (The candid man at court; 1740). In the essay Die einzig wahre Religion (The only true religion; 1750f.), he elaborated an irenic program on the basis …

[German Version] (Jan 9/10, 1502, Münster? – after 1570). Gifted as a visionary from his youth, Niclaes moved from Amsterdam to Emden after his calling as a prophet in 1540. He expanded late medieval mystical concepts into a prophetic-chiliastic spiritualism. Against a background of …