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[German Version] The German Basic Law contains (art. 140, 139 Weimar Constitution), along with an institutional guarantee of Sunday and holidays recognized by the state, a charge for legislators sufficiently to assure their purpose as “days of rest from work and spiritual uplifting.” No guarantee of specific, individual, state-recognized holidays or of a certain number of them, however, can be derived from this provision, so that the legislator can deny individual holidays their previous recogniti…

[German Version] The political dimension of the church’s mission (Public Disclosure Mandate of the German Protestant Church) continually raises the question whether political activity on the part of those employed by the church is permis-¶ sible in some particular political or social order. In the free democratic state under the German Basic Law, such activity is poised between the guarantees of civil rights and the special constraints imposed by the clergy’s mandate to preach the gospel and their ministerial office. According to the ecclesiastical employment law of the reg…

[German Version] I. Law – II. Ethics – III. Practical Theology I. Law The right to conscientious objection in Germany, which long existed only as a special privilege granted to the members of the historic peace churches (e.g. the Mennonites in Prussia; see II below), today enjoys special constitutional protection through art. 4 III of German Basic Law (“No one may be forced into armed military service against his conscience”) as the most common example of freedom of cons…

[German Version] I. Concept 1. The origin of the Latin word persona (“mask, role, status”) is unknown; it may be Etruscan. The philologist Gavius Bassus (1st cent. bce) traced the “origin” of the word to the function of the ancient theater mask, namely that of a megaphone which concentrated the voice and caused it to “sound through” ( per-sonare; cf. Gellius, Noctes Atticae V 7) in a more sonorous way. The corresponding Greek word is πρόσωπον/ prósōpon, “face, mask, front.” The word “persona” is employed in grammar, rhetoric, jurisprudence, and philosophy. What the mode…