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[German Version] 1. Julius (May 10, 1857, Lengerich, Westphalia – Jun 7, 1930, Münster), together with F. Spitta, a leader of the “Older Liturgical Movement.” After studying theology at Bonn, Halle, and Göttingen, he succeeded Spitta as assistant preacher in Bonn. He received his license to teach in 1884 and was appointed pastor in Seelscheid. In 1891 he was appointed professor in the seminary at Friedberg and in 1893 professor of practical theology at Straßburg (Strasbourg). In 1914 he became the f…

[German Version] was a movement for the reform of ecclesiastical policy and regional church law in 18th-century Germany, in which episcopalian (Episcopalism: II) and national church ideas combined to form an explosive mixture. It owes its name to a book written by the suffragan bishop of Trier J.N.v. Hontheim (1701–1790), De statu Ecclesiae et legitima potestate Romani Pontificis…, which appeared in 1763 under the pseudonym Justinus Febronius. Following a selective reduction of its contents, the book became the agenda of Febronianism. Hontheim's objec…

[German Version] 1. Joachim (May, 1544, Pyritz, Pomerania [now Pyrzyce, Poland] – Jan 14, 1623, Greifswald). Initially (1572) professor of mathematics in Greifswald, in 1578 he was appointed professor of law, a member of the ducal council, and president of the consistory. With his younger brother Matthias (2. below), he was a leading advocate of the episcopal system (Episcopalism: I), appealing to imperial law to legitimate the evolving Pro­testant system of placing church governance in the hands of…

[German Version] (Bodinus; 1529 or 1530, Angers – 1596, Laon) was a Carmelite for a brief period; he studied law in Toulouse from 1550 and became an advocate at the Parliament of Paris in 1561. In 1571, he entered the service of the Duke of Alençon and made contact with the “Politiques,” a group of moderate Catholics and Protestants who regarded the state as h…

[German Version] The summepiscopate of the princes is a 19th-century term for the governance of the Protestant churches, but its roots go back to the 16th century. After the breakdown of episcopal jurisdiction, with the approval of the Reformers the Protestant estates of the Empire set about restructuring the governance of the church; only “out of Christian charity” (Luther), it was to be put in the hands of the sovereign as praecipuum membrum ecclesiae (Melanchthon), but not by virtue of his temporal authority. Therefore Luther was not the progenitor of the princes’…

[German Version] ( Jan 16, 1802, Munich – Aug 10, 1861, Brückenau), Protestant jurisprudent and politician. Stahl (orig. Jolson) was of Jewish parentage; in 1819 he converted to Lutheranism and took the name Stahl when he was baptized. In 1832 he was appointed associate professor at Erlangen and in the same year full professor at Würzburg; in 1834 he was ¶ appointed full professor at Erlangen. As representative of the university in the Bavarian Landtag, he was reprimanded on account of a conflict with the government; in 1840 he therefore accepted an appointment in Be…

[German Version] (Feb 25, 1916, Chemnitz – Mar 29, 1967, Munich) was a Protestant lawyer who studied from 1936 to 1939, received his doctorate in 1940, and, following almost a decade of military service and imprisonment in Russia, became a lawyer serving the church. He gained his Habilitation in 1956 (Munich), became professor of state and church law in Marburg in 1958/59, and professor of church and state law in Munich in 1959. Grundmann's life work was devoted especially to Protestant canon law …

[German Version] The “standard year” of the Peace of Westphalia established in 1624 as normative for religious observance. It drastically restricted the right of princes to determine the confessional allegiance ( Ius reformandi ) of their lands guaranteed in the Peace of Augsburg by ensuring that the religion practiced legally – publicly or privately – at any time during the year 1624 could continue in that form in the future ( Instrumentum pacis osnabrugense art. V, §§32ff.). Church property was to remain in the hands of whoever held it on the “standard day” ( dies normalis; art. V, §2),…

[German Version] I. Practical Theology The term school prayers refers primarily to prayers at the beginning or end of the school day or during breaks, along with prayers during religious education classes. In German public schools today – unlike the period of the denominational primary schools (into the 1960s) and also unlike in England, for example – such prayers are a marginal phenomenon. Scattered attempts to reintroduced school prayers like that of the Bavarian government in 1987 (Kaufmann, 32–38) e…

[German Version] I As one type of relationship between church and state, a state church is a church incorporated into the state in such a way that it appears to be a state institution. As a result, the state not only has the right to intervene in the internal governance of the church (staffing, deciding doctrinal conflicts, disposition of church property, etc.; Church polity) but also may use the church for state purposes. 1 The history of state churches began when Theodosius I made the Christian church the only recognized church of the Roman Empire ( Reichskirche). In East Rome, a sacral …

[German Version] At the request of the liberal Bavarian minister of culture Johannes v. Lutz (1826–1890), §130a, the Kanzelparagraph, was included in the German criminal code by a law of Dec 10, 1871, part of the legislation enacted during the Kulturkampf. It threatened the clergy, with other official religious leaders, with up to two years imprisonment if they discussed state matters in public or in their preaching and threatened the public order. A law of Feb 28, 1872, extended the statutory offense to include dissemination of similar ideas in writing. During the Kirchenkampf (Nation…

[German Version] (Apr 23, 1827, Winterberg, Westphalia – Dec 19, 1914, Obermais, near Meran), Catholic canonist and legal historian. He was appointed associate professor in Prague in 1854, full professor in 1855; from 1873 to 1906, he taught as a professor in Bonn. Although originally closely tied to the Catholic Church, in 1870 he became one of the most prominent critics of the dogma of papal infallibility and – with J. v. Döllinger – a leading organizer of the Old Catholic movement (Old Catholic…

[German Version] denotes the equal status in law of religious communities in the state; it therefore presupposes the dissolution of confessional homogeneity within the state. Parity had been practiced earlier, but in Germany it first gained legal form through the (still limited) equality granted to the Catholic and Protestant parties, particularly in the Peace of Augsburg. It gained an explicit basis in constitutional law in the Peace of Westphalia as aequalitas exacta mutuaque (“complete and mutual equality”). At the same time, the previously excluded Reformed beli…

[German Version] I. In international law, neutrality is the legal status of a state that is not participating in a war involving other states. This status carries various rights (e.g. territorial integrity, armed resistance to violations of neutrality) and duties (esp. no military, financial, or other support of any belligerent, sufficient military potential to defend against attacks in peacetime, willingness to allow ships on the high seas to be searched by belligerents, and equal treatment of the…

[German Version] The term Constantinian Era is a headword known more in the context of “the end of the Constantinian Era” (Constantine the Great) than as a period delimited by precise historical criteria and is supposed to characterize the symbiosis of church and secular authority that began with the “Constantinian change” (312) and lasted into the modern era, indeed into recent history. It is meant to refer to an alliance in which each side uses the services of the other to reach its ¶ goals: the church uses the state for recourse to secular force and privileges; the st…

[German Version] (May 27, 1818, Zellerfeld – Dec 25, 1893, Hanover), Protestant teacher of constitutional and church law. After studying law in Göttingen, Berlin and Jena, Mejer obtained his doctorate in 1841 in Göttingen; he became a lecturer there in 1842, and a full professor at Königsberg in 1847, Greifswald in 1850, Rostock in 1851, and finally Göttingen from 1874 to 1885, after which he was president of the Hanover Evangelical Lutheran regional consistory until his death. As a pupil of A.L. …

[German Version] (Dec 20, 1837, Konitz, Western Prussia – Sep 7, 1910, Leipzig), (Protestant) jurist who became associate professor at the University of Halle in 1865, followed by Freiburg in 1868; from 1869, he was full professor at Leipzig. Deeply committed to the Hegelian idea of the state (G.W.F. Hegel), Friedberg belonged to the most prominent “state canonists” who sided with the state in the Kulturkampf . Although Friedberg sought to legitimate his position from a scientific-historical standpoint, his evaluation of the medieval conflic…

[German Version] I. History Religious education (RE) in schools, in modern usage of the term (for RE in a broader sense see Christian doctrine classes, Confirmation classes), is the result of the general differentiation process that led to the promotion of religious learning beyond the contexts of family and worship. The schools of the European cultural sphere arose largely in the area of the church (School and church, Church schools, Monastery schools); for a long time, schooling was essentially based on religious texts. Since each country established its own particular forms…

[German Version] (Mar 27, 1857, Urach – Nov 28, 1927, Erlangen), Protestant jurist. After studying theology and philosophy, Rieker first worked for the church. He then studied law in Leipzig, where he gained a doctorate and Habilitation in 1891. In 1893 he was appointed assistant professor, and from 1903 full professor of public law and history of law, in Erlangen. In his main work on the legal position of the Protestant Church in Germany, Rieker essentially seeks to prove that the synodal and presbyterial principles have no basis…

[German Version] I. Protestantism – II. Catholicism I. Protestantism In the 16th and 17th century (before territorialism and collegialism), episcopalism and the theory of the episcopal system developed by its proponents represented the earliest justification of the ecclesiastical authority wielded by Protestant princes in their realms. 1. While the Reformers regarded these local rulers as mere fellow Christians, albeit as praecipuum membrum ecclesiae, and wished to invest them with this authority only as long as seemed necessa…