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[German Version] I. Phenomenology – II. History – III. Dogmatics – IV. Practical Theology – V. Ethics – VI. Orthodox Church – VII. Judaism – VIII. Art History – IX. Asia, Africa, Latin America I. Phenomenology The term liturgy has been used for Christian worship since the end of the 16th century; by the end of the 18th century, it had gained general acceptance. In secular usage, Gk λειτουργία/ leitourgía means work done in public service (from λαός/ laós, “people” [Laity] and ἔργον/ érgon, “work”); the LXX used it for the temple cult. It appears only 15 times in the N…

[German Version] I. General In general a prayer book is a book for laity intended for private use outside the public liturgy of the church; that is the sense in which it will be used here. Of course private prayer has always been practiced: it is nurtured by the prayer of public worship, which it influences in turn, as in the Early Church where prayers like the Paternoster and Psalms were learned by heart during instruction for baptism. But a distinct mode of prayer that is private and based on a b…

[German Version] I. Liturgy – II. Art History I. Liturgy The baptismal font shows how baptism was administered: decorations indicate the theological meaning of baptism, and changes in the form of the font point to changes in the liturgical significance of the rite. Early Christian baptism was probably administered in flowing waters, either by pouring these over the head of …

[German Version] I. Catholic Church It seems that there was a synagogue tradition in antiquity of lay persons undertaking the reading in public worship of lessons other than those taken from the Gospels. From the early Middle Ages, readers were given clerical status (Clergy and laity), and assigned to one of the so-called minor orders at the preparatory stage before ordination of priests. Since the reordering of liturgical services by Paul VI’s apostolic decree Ministeria quaedam (Aug 15, 1972), readers are assigned to the laity (as they were orig.), the office of read…

[German Version] The Latin term collatio is used in a variety of senses such as “bringing together,” “gathering,” “bestowing” (thus in Corpus Iuris Canonici, canon 147, for ¶ the conferment of an office), “comparing” (e.g. of a copy with the original). Rhetorics and philosophy employ the term for an amplifying figure of thought that compares two things on account of their similarity until it arrives at a complete comparison on the basis on a metaphorical tertium. In the context of church Latin, John Cassian's Collationes patrum (425–429) played a formative role: it contains 24 e…

[German Version] The first Losung was given orally on May 3, 1728, by N. v. Zinzendorf of the Moravian Church (Bohemian and Moravian Brethren: II) in the context of evening worship as a watchword for the next day. Every day from then on, the Brethren took the daily watchword given by Zinzendorf to the 32 houses of the Herrnhut community in Saxony, so that it could shape the community's common spiritual life. Zinzendorf chose a verse from the Bible or a line from a hymn. From this initial phase, a written fragment from the year 1729 has survived. The Losungen entered a second phase when they w…

[German Version] During the worship (II, 4) services of apostolic times, it was customary to read from the Old Testament and to give oral accounts of the ministry of Jesus Christ, which were then replaced by readings from the Epistles (cf. Col 4:16). Acts of the martyrs were later also included. With the formation of the New Testament canon, these texts were also read out loud. It is assumed that the Scriptures were read in consecutive order, with the exception of the ermerging high feasts (Feasts…

[German Version] I. Philosophy Traditional epistemology considers reason primarily to be a discursive faculty (Gk διάνοια/ diánoia; λόγος/¶ lógos; Lat. ratio), in part to distinguish it from intellect as an intuitive faculty (Capacity). This distinction also implies a ranking: the discursive faculty either proceeds syllogistically as “demonstration” (ἀπόδειξις/ apódeixis) based on ultimate principles that cannot themselves be deduced by reasoning (Arist. Eth. Nic. 1139b) or else leads to them, roughly in the sense of movement from the presuppositions made…

[German Version] (from Fr. prône, Lat. praeconium), designates a preaching service that developed in the early Middle Ages, at a time when the mass (II) received its main emphasis through increasing piety focused on the sacrifice of the mass and thereby neglected the Word (Eucharist: II, 2). Charlemagne commended regular preaching (II; Liber regulae pastoralis II, 4), but this was made difficult by the low standard of education of the priests. Nevertheless, there were magnificent preachers who preached in the vernacular and attracted the masses. Th…