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[German Version] I. Church History 1. Germany and Europe. Protestantism is a synoptic term for all the Christian churches and groups with roots in the 16th-century Reformation. The term embraces the Lutheran and Reformed confessional churches (Lutheranism, Reformed churches) that emerged directly from the Reformation as well as the Anabaptist movements, the Anglican Church (with some qualifications), and the churches and Free churches associated indirectly with the Reformation that came into being later …

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[German Version] I. Religious Studies 1. Human destiny. The human experience of existence holds both positive and negative events. Personal and structural processes involving violence and suffering are constants. The “horizon of justice and righteousness” allows us to surmise that the events that take place in the course of the world are not random but are turbulences on the surface of a fundamental order. Disorientation (anomie) does not destroy the need for security. These turbulences remain a question to which religious ¶ traditions and atheistic projections of Dasein offer answers. 2. Religious responses. The cultures that explai…

[German Version] I. Philosophy of religion Self-sufficiency is the characteristic “a se,” to be self-caused or self-existing and is therefore regarded against the background of the aseity of God. To speak of God’s self-sufficiency is to say that his being (Divine essence) and his characteristics (Divine attributes) do not have an external reason or cause. In modern philosophical debate the view that God is self-caused, i.e. he is the necessary requirement of his own existence, is understood to foll…

[German Version] I. Church History Pelagius was an ascetic and theological writer from Britain. Before 410 he taught in Rome, and in 411/412, following the capture of Rome by the Goths, went to Palestine after a short stay in North Africa. His teaching, according to which the possibility of sinlessness was an essential part of human nature, provoked the criticism of Augustine and Jerome. This teaching had its setting in the pastoral care of members of the Roman elite. Pelagius stated that when one repeatedly told clients that the value of their rational nature consisted in freedom of choice (Free will), they were set free to make ethical progress. Pelagius opposed any theory of substantial evil (Manichaeism), original sin transmitted from Adam to all humanity, or a hereditary defect. He believed that the grace of God, in its various forms, consisted in constituting and reclaiming the freedom choice that defined human nature. After a first colloquium in Jerusalem in late July 415, Pelagius was acquitted in December 415 at the Palestinian Synod of Diospolis. From 412, and more intensively after his acquittal in 415, Augustine used publicity to very good effect to have Pelagius’s teaching condemned as heresy. In the summer of 416 the synods of Carthage and Milevis condemned Pelagian teaching (c…

[German Version] The classic deployment of the concept of “satisfaction” in Christian soteriology (Redemption: III; VI) comes in Anselm of Canterbury’s Cur Deus Homo, where Anselm attempts to demonstrate the necessity of the incarnation and passion of God the Son. He asserts that willful injury done to another demands two acts of reparation if it is not to be ¶ punished: recompense to the value of the injury and an additional payment to “satisfy” the outrage of the injury being done. Boso, Anselm’s imaginary interlocutor, offers no argument against this …

[German Version] I. History of Religion – II. New Testament – III. Church History – IV. Dogmatics – V. Practical Theology – VI. History of Liturgy – VII. Law – VIII. Missions – IX. Art I. History of Religion From the standpoint of the history of religion, baptism is not a general type of rite (Rite and ritual) but a lustration ritual that is carried out not only in Christianity but also in historically related religions such as Judaism…