Search

[German Version] I. Religious Studies 1. Since time immemorial, the use of the term spirit has been influenced by Christian usage, especially by the concept of the Holy Spirit, including connotations of Latin spiritus and Greek πνεύμα/ pneúma. Spirit has a wide range of meaning; it can denote both a spiritual and a mental attitude, dynamic, or quality ascribed to an individual and a projection of such phenomena into the external world. An anthropomorphic concretion of such projections can then refer to “beings” that in earlier times might have been called “trolls” or the like. 2. In religi…

[German Version] As the opposite of election or salvation by God, and in divergence from common linguistic usage in dogmatics, rejection must be distinguished from damnation in so far as it is not necessarily associated with eschatological consequences in terms of definitive exclusion from salvation (Kingdom of God: IV). The apostle Paul’s struggle over the fate of the chosen people of Israel, in the face of their widespread non-acceptance of the new covenant of God with all humankind in Jesus Chr…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies – II. Philosophy – III. Philosophy of Religion – IV. Dogmatics I. Religious Studies In the study of religion, the term “monism” denotes concepts that relate the whole of reality to a single principle, and understand diversity and plurality as an all- unity. Monism, from the Gk μόνος/ monos (“alone, single”) is thus also in religious studies to be understood first in opposition to all dualistic concepts (Dualism); this was also the case when this concept was originally defined in the German Enlightenment (C…

[German Version] I. As Epoch 1. Literature. The term “romantic” (from Old Fr. romanz, roman; cf. Ger. romantisch) appeared as early as the 17th century with the meaning “unbridled,” “fantastic,” “wild”; while Romanticism in Europe denotes a period in culture and art. As a movement in literary studies it runs from 1790 to 1825, with offshoots to c. 1850. ¶ Literary Romanticism in Germany is divided into early, high, and late Romanticism. Around 1798, the so-called Jena or early Romantic group (until c. 1806) formed around the journal Athenäum, represented by Friedrich v. Hardenberg …

…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies – II. History of Religions – III. Philosophy of Religion – IV. Art History I. Religious Studies All cultures have concepts of a hereafter or beyond (“the next world”), although they are extremely diverse. They involve a realm of existence different from the visible earthly world but nevertheless thought of as real. Concepts of the hereafter are part of cosmology and therefore are related to the real world: the hereafter may be localized above or below the earth, in inaccessib…

…

[German Version] …

[German Version] I. Philosophy of Religion Given the substantiall…

[German Version] Existential theology is less a unified theological position or method than a particular theological attitude in the sense of a polemical and appellative corrective. It acquires its specific profile through the critical rejection of a domesticated and self-satisfied Christianity, but also of a theology that has a bias toward the ideal of objective science. For S. Kierkegaard ( Sygdommen til Døden, 1849; ET: The Sickness unto Death, 1983; Christelige Taler, 1848; ET: Christian Discourses…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies – II. Philosophy – III. Fundamental Theology I. Religious Studies The term “boundary” is used spatially, temporally, and metaphorically. Spatially, a boundary separates localities and territories, signaled by boundary markers (cf. OE mearc, “boundary, landmark”). In certain cases, boundaries must not be crossed; in sacred sites onl…

[German Version] Especially in the context of an apocalyptic theology of history (History, Theology of), premoni-¶ tions of the end of the world and the return of Jesus Christ (Parousia) as judge and savior based on portents and omens are described and interpreted by initiates by virtue of special revelations and visions. Against the backgro…

[German Version] (Gk ἀποκατάστασις πάντων) or the redemption/restoration of all is the eschatological notion that all human beings (things, creatures) without exception will be received into eschatological salvation (the kingdom of God). One the one hand, apocatastasis conflicts with the more common eschatological notion of a “double outcome,” which envisions an…

…

[German Version] I. Philosophy of Religion – II. Dogmatics I. Philosophy of Religion …

[German Version] (Aug 23, 1773, Barby – Aug 10, 1843, Jena), a philosopher in the circle of so-called German Idealism, a physicist and mathematician, the founder of Friesianism (Ernst Friedrich Apelt) or neo-Friesianism (Leonard Nelson; R. Otto). From a Herrnhuter family, Fries attended the school in Niesky together with F.D.E. Schleiermacher, with whom his thought in the philosophy of religion has affinity, and studied with Ernst Platner, among others, in Leipzig and with J.G. Fichte in Jena, whe…

…

[German Version] Against the background of the existentialism (theology) of R. Bultmann ( Neues Testament und Mythologie, 1941; ET: The New Testament and Mythology, 1941), existential …

…

[German Version] I. Philosophy – II. Philosophy of Religion I. Philosophy Etymologically, the word “absolute” means something separate from and independent of everything that is only relative. In this sense, the absolute can be understood ontologically as substance, logically as principle. If the absolute is taken as a singulare tantum, then it refers to something apart from which there is nothing that exists independently. This raises the question of how to conceive the relationship to the absolute of what is only relative. This is the fundamental question of Western metaphysics. The first theoretically considered answer appears in Plato. In thi…