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[German Version] ( ius exclusivae) denotes the right of a civil ruler or state in Catholic church law to exclude as undesirable a certain candidate from being elected or appointed to church office. Papal exclusion, which the sovereigns of major Catholic powers (German and – later – Austrian emperors, kings of France and Spain) claimed for themselves with no formal recognition by th…

[German Version] The term state religion denotes a religious element unifying the collectivity of subjects, considered indispensable for the existence of the state (“un roi, une loi, une foi”). It was taken for granted as the foundation of nearly every early form of the state. To the extent that religion is considered an element of public order, religious pluralism is perceived as a threat to the unity of the state, since it bears the seed of civil war, or at least qualified loyalty on the part of th…

[German Version] I. German Law Along with artistic freedom, Basic Law art. 5 § 3 guarantees freedom of “scholarship, research, and teaching.” The association of freedom of teaching with scholarship and research shows that the guarantee of the Basic Law applies only to scholarly teaching, i.e. teaching that presents the findings of one’s own research (and examines critically the findings of others). Freedom of teaching thus relates (albeit not exclusively) to teaching in public and private universitie…

[German Version] I. Catholic – II. Orthodox – III. Protestantism – IV. Judaism I. Catholic Excommunication must be defined as a privative term from communicatio and κοινωνíα/ koinōnía (cf. 1 Cor 10:16: sharing and participating in the body and blood of Jesus ¶ Christ; cf. 2 Cor 13:13: communion in the Holy Spirit). The word excommunication does not occur in the New Testament. The competence of the church to excommunicate is traced back to Matt 16:18f.…

[German Version] refers to modalities of the medieval and modern Catholic claim to ecclesial (and esp. papal) authority in temporal (worldly) matters ( in temporalibus). Invoking older doctrinal tra-¶ ditions, the medieval papacy in particular claimed papal supremacy over all secular powers (most strongly articulated in the Unam sanctam bull of Boniface VIII [1302], doctrine of the two swords), and thus not only the supreme legislative authority in spiritualibus et temporalibus but also a right to intervene directly in the legal order of states through the repeali…

[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] I. History Ever since classical antiquity, the theory of resistance and the right of resistance have been linked inseparably to the understanding of sovereignty and its limits in both civil society and the church. 1. In the Germanic tribal kingdom of Western, Central, and Northern Europe, three overlapping legal concepts legitimated a right of resistance: (1) the conviction that the ruler is not above the law but subject to the law (grounded in the tradition of the administration of justice by the community of all …

[German Version] (May 5, 1916, Wiesbaden – Aug 14, 1988, Erlangen), Protestant jurist. He served as an officer from the first days of the war. After 1945 he studied and completed his professional qualification, and then practiced as a lawyer for several years in state and church administration. In 1958 he gained his Habilitation. From 1960 until his retirement in 1984 he was full professor of public law and church law in Erlangen. Obermayer was one of the pioneers of administrative law founded on the rule of law, informed by basic rights and in co…

[German Version] 1. Johannes (Nov 24, 1889, Kammerstein, Middle Franconia – Dec 15, 1965, Tübingen), Protestant teacher of constitutional and church law. After service in the church in Munich and later in Berlin, he became a private lecturer in 1923, and supernumerary professor in Berlin in 1926; in 1928, he was a full professor of public law and church law in Bonn, and in Munich from 1934 (with an interruption), until his retirement in 1957. After his initial labors in the history of church law as …