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[German Version] (Feb 27, 1823, Tréguier, Brittany– Oct 2, 1892, Paris). Ernest Renan, French historian of religion and scholar of ancient New Eastern studies, began by studying Roman Catholic theology, philosophy, and philology at the ecclesiastical Grand Séminaire of St. Sulpice in Paris. Full of enthusiasm, he absorbed the works of German Idealist philosophy and of F.C. Baur’s Tübingen School, especially D.F. Strauß’s Leben Jesu. His youthful desire for freedom and knowledge caused him to leave the seminary in 1845, shortly before his ordination as subdea…

[German Version] I. Dogmatics – II. Ethics I. Dogmatics Since the 18th century, terms such as fatherland, love for the fatherland and patriotism have played a central role in the proclamation of all Christian churches and in the discourse of academic theologians, and have also influenced debates on Jewish self-understanding at least since M. Mendelssohn. In view of the striking methodical reticence of scholarship in church history and the history of theology, there is a deficit of historical terminolog…

[German Version] (Aug 13, Königsberg [Kaliningrad] – Jul 11, 1884, Königsberg). After studying philosophy and Protestant theology, Rupp went on to the seminary in Wittenberg. From 1832 to 1845 he taught at the Altstädisches Gymnasium in Königsberg, and from 1832 to 1851 he was a lecturer in the Königsberg faculty of theology. In 1842 he was appointed Divisionspfarrer and was ordained on Apr 22. Five days later he was also chosen as pastor of the Reformed congregation. Rupp, a religious rationalist and political liberal, criticized the renewed confessi…

[German Version] (Mar 20, 1765, Kassel – Nov 22, 1836, Heidelberg). From a poor background, Daub began his studies of philology, philosophy, history, and theology in Marburg in 1786. He passed the theological exam in Marburg in 1789, became Stipendiatenmajor (tutor for scholarship students), and Privatdozent in 1790. In 1794, he became professor of philosophy in the Hohe Landesschule Hanau. On Nov 13, 1795, he was appointed second professor – of dogmatics a…

[German Version] (Dec 15, 1858, Berlin – Feb 3, 1926, Merano), Protestant clergyman, after 1896 head of the humanitarian Armenian relief organization. Lepsius was the son of the famous Egyptologist Carl Richard Lepsius. His mother Elisabeth, a neo-Pietist supporter of J.H. Wichern's Inland Mission, played a decisive role in his religious development. He studied philosophy (doctorate in 1880) and theology with A. Cremer, as advised by F. Fabri. He served as curate and teacher with the German Protes…

[German Version] (von) (Mar 25, 1827, Altenburg – Feb 7, 1894, Erlangen). From a rationalist pastor's family, Frank studied philosophy and Protestant theology (the latter primarily with G.C.A.v. Harleß) in Leipzig in 1845–51. After earning a double doctorate in 1850/51 and after an experience of religious revival, he taught secondary school (Gymnasium) and began researching the theology of the Formula of Concord ( Die Theologie der Concordienformel, 4 vols., 1858–65), offering a critique of “modern theology” in Lutheran terms. After his appointment in Erlangen…

[German Version] I. Philosophy The term first appears in controversies about Italian Fascism, but in theoretical discussions it is also applied to Bolshevism (Communism) (see II below). When the National Socialists (National Socialism) seized power it became a central theme of political theory. The term became popular because the traditional categories of tyranny and despotism were inadequate to define the rising political deformations of the 20th century. Whereas political science attempted to defi…

[German Version] are more or less regularly organized international conferences attended by theologians, leaders, officials, and believers from different religions. The prototype of all religion conferences is the World’s Parliament of Religions hosted in 1893 in conjunction with the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. At this conference, university theologians and church leaders from all Christian denominations, as well as Reform Jewish (Reform Judaism) rabbis, theosophists (Theosophy), Hind…

[German Version] I. History The term Vormärz is usually employed in reference to the period of German history spanning the years 1830 to 1848. Unlike the competing designations Biedermeier and Restoration, it evokes the atmosphere of change in German society that finally erupted in revolutionary uprisings against the political authorities in March 1848 – events that hastened the pace of social reforms, although the possibilities of political participation remained extremely limited. The constitutional crisis of the 1840s, i.e. the Vormärz in the strict sense, manifested it…

[German Version] I. The neologism “civilization,” probably coined around 1700 by French legal scholars with the Latin semantic field of civis (citizen), civilitas, and civiliter in mind, originally referred to the transformation of a criminal procedure into a civil procedure. Initially in French, English, and Spanish, but later also in other European languages including German, “civilization” soon acquired broad meaning in the history of philosophy. Civilization now stood both for the lifest…

[German Version] (Feb 3, 1816, London – Aug 15, 1853, Brighton), Anglican theologian and social reformer. Robertson is considered one of the great, epoch-making preachers of the 19th century. After being ordained priest in Oxford, the stark confrontation with the catastrophic consequences of rapid capitalist industrialization in the poverty-stricken areas of Winchester and Cheltenham made such an impression on his sensibility that he suffered several nervous breakdowns. He was a Germanophile trans…

[German Version] (Nov 21, 1860, Geislingen, Württemberg – Feb 24, 1945, Stuttgart), pastor in Stuttgart, president of the Evangelische Arbeitervereine of Württemberg, from 1913 Landtag deputy and from 1919 a delegate to the Landeskirchenversammlung (meeting of regional churches) drafting a constitution for the regional church. In the 1920s, Lamparter became active in the Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus. In 1928 a collection of his essays was published under the title Evangelische Kirche und Judentum. He demanded legal and social equality for Jews, emphasized the…

[German Version] (Jul 11, 1888, Plettenburg – Apr 7, 1985, Plettenburg), Roman Catholic jurisprudent and political theorist. Firmly rooted in the traditional Catholic milieu, Schmitt must be considered one of the most brilliant German intellectuals of the 20th century. Despite his partisan advocacy of the “German revolution” of the National Socialists – in part emotional and positional, in part opportunistic, Schmitt, a radical anti-Semite, exercised a strong influence even after his dismissal in …

[German Version] I. Religious Studies People and nationhood are functional political terms that serve to define a collective entity and to incorporate it into a specific context (see III below). Only since the 18th century has it been possible to speak of a German nation as the active subject of its own history. The rupture of the church at the Reformation and the subsequent wars of religion in the 16th and 17th century long prevented the development of an inclusive political or religious identity. It …

[German Version] (Sep 1, 1761, Leonberg – Aug 10, 1851, Heidelberg). After the early death of Paulus’s mother, his father was the major influence on his religious education. In 1771 the father was dismissed from his position as deacon by the Stuttgart Consistory on account of his mystical separatism. While still a seminary student in Tübingen, from 1781 Paulus developed basic elements of a critical rational exegesis, rejecting the supranaturalism (Rationalism) of his teacher G.C. Storr. He was hig…

[German Version] (Nov 29, 1891, Lichte, Thuringia – Feb 13, 1982, Princeton, USA). Piper’s mother, descended from French Huguenots, provided contacts with France that helped to shape his life. A forerunner of the youth movement, he expressed that generation’s typical criticism of capitalism and individualism. He was severely traumatized by voluntary service at the front, and in 1920, having gained his doctorate in Göttingen, he became a socialist advocate of pacifism and ecumenism …

[German Version] (Oct 18, 1834, Unna – Oct 4, 1903, Greifswald), Protestant theologian. A graduate of the Gütersloh Protestant Gymnasium, from simple origins and shaped by the revival movement (Revival/Revival movements), he studied in Halle from 1853 with F.A.G. Tholuck and Julius Müller and in Tübingen from 1856 with J.T. Beck. Here he established a close friendship with M. Kähler. After a brief stay at the Wittenberg Seminary for Preachers, Cremer received the Lic.Theol. on the basis of his Die eschatologische Rede Jesu Christi Matthäi 24.25 (“The Eschatological Discou…

[German Version] (Aug 1, 1773, Langensalza – Dec 30, 1831, Leipzig). Tittmann’s father, Karl Christian Tittmann, later became chief consistorial councilor in Dresden. Tittmann studied philosophy and Protestant theology at Wittenberg and Leipzig, where in 1796 he was appointed associate professor, initially in the faculty of philosophy, then (1800) i…

[German Version] (Jan 13, 1837, Karlsruhe – Aug 2, 1909, Heidelberg), a Protestant church historian. The son of a prominent pastor from Baden, Hausrath studied Protestant theology and history from 1856 onward in liberal Jena, where K.A. v. Hase became his teacher and close friend. Following study visits to Göttingen, Berlin, and Heidelberg, Hausrath earned his Lic.theol. in Berlin with a study entitled Der Ketzermeister Konrad von Marburg (1861). After completing his curacy, he gained his Habilitation in Heidelberg in 1862 and was employed as an assessor in the…

[German Version] (Jan 5, 1846, Aurich – Sep 15, 1926, Jena), a fashionable philosopher of cultural Protestantism, studied classical philology and philosophy at Göttingen with R.H. Lotze and Gustav Teichmüller (1832–1888) from 1863 to 1867. While writing his dissertation on Aristotle's language, he corresponded with F.A. Trendelenburg. From 1871 to 1874 he …

[German Version] The Latin word natio (from nasci, “be born”) denotes the place of origin of a person or thing. Natio was the goddess of birth. The Latin word also meant a tribe or people. Since the Middle Ages, nation (or natio) has had a wide range of heterogeneous meanings. The medieval nationes of universities, councils, merchants, clerics, and nobility were not precursors of modern ideas of a nation, although clerics and landed nobility in the late Middle Ages developed notions of a German national consciousness or sense of a German Reich. Formulas using the word natio…

[German Version] I. Old Testament – II. New Testament – III. Early Judaism – IV. Church History – V. Philosophy – VI. Philosophy of Religion – VII. Dogmatics – VIII. Ethics – IX. Sociology, Politics, and Law I. Old Testament 1. The concept of political freedom, which originated in the Greek polis (City cult), first appeared in Hellenistic Jewish historiography. The Stoics' concept of freedom, which contrasts inner freedom and outward constraint, has no counterpart in the OT. The OT is rooted in an internal mythological cultur…

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[German Version] The term cultural studies (Ger. Kulturwissenschaft) appeared as early as the late 18th century. It gained programmatic content, however, only around 1900 in the controversies concerning the independence of the humanities in relation to the natural sciences and concerning the normative integration of modern capitalist mass societies shaped by multiple crises. Since the “linguistic turn” and the “culturalist turn” in the 1980s, it has served the trans-d…

[German Version] I. General – II. Judaism I. General Exile (Lat. exilium or exul) refers to the state-organized and politically, religiously, or ethnically motivated expulsion of people from their homeland or their forced resettlement in a land that they often would not have freely chosen as a place of refuge. The politically powerful have forced people into exile in all periods of history. The t…

[German Version] 1. Franz Martin Leopold (Aug 1, 1860, Gütergotz near Potsdam – Mar 17, 1937, Leipzig-Schleußig). After serving as a pastor in Westerland, Eisenach, and Preetz, Rendtorff directed the Preetz Predigerseminar from 1896 onward. He became a Privatdozent in practical …

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[German Version] was originally an imperial legal term for the forced or desired emigration of Christian citizens to another jurisdiction primarily for religious reasons. In 1555, the Peace of Augsburg guaranteed Catholic subjects of Protestant rulers the right to depart with no tax obligation or departure fee ( emigrationis census). The degree to which a ruler could force citizens of other Christian confessions to emigrate remained contested. Detailed regulations for the ius emigrandi for adherents of the religious parties privileged under …

[German Version] (Oct 31, 1903, Nürnberg – Apr 24, 1995, Göttingen). From 1922 to 1926, Trillhaas studied philosophy and Protestant theology in Munich, Erlangen, and Göttingen. His Lutheranism was strongly influenced by P. Althaus, W. Elert, E. Hirsch, and the phenomenologist Alexander Pfänder. In 1931 he wrote a dissertation in philosophy on F. Nietzsche. In 1932 he received his Lic. theol. and in 1933 his habilitation with a thesis entitled Schleiermachers Predigt und das homiletische Problem; re…

[German Version] (to 1854: P.A. Bötticher; Nov 2, 1827, Berlin – Dec 22, 1891, Göttingen), Near ¶ Eastern scholar and cultural philosopher. Lagarde may be considered a classic representative of modern intellectual religiosity (Religiousness among intellectuals); thanks to his great sensitivity to the antagonism between social modernization and purposive-rational conduct of life, he sought through religio-historical research to instigate a national religious renewal of German culture. An unhappy childhood resulted in a labile psychological constitution and a pr…

[German Version] (Aug 31, 1817, Hildesheim – Sep 17, 1889, Kreiensen). In 1837 Reuter began studying Protestant theology in Göttingen; in 1838 he moved to Berlin, where he combined theology with history and philosophy. Close friendly exchange of ideas with Rudolf v. Ihering (later a renowned jurist) and atte…

[German Version] The origin of the term is disputed. Some point to L. Uhland's Auswanderung in die Ver-¶ gangenheit [Emigration into the past] (1848), some to the author Frank Thiess (1890–1977), who claimed the…

[German Version] (May 1, 1780, Hildesheim – May 31, 1846, Berlin), theologian and church historian. After studying Protestant theology and philosophy in Göttingen with G.J. Planck, C.F. v. Ammon, K.F. Stäudlin, and J.G. Eichhorn, Marheineke received his Dr.Phil. in 1803 from Erlangen. In 1804 he was appointed lecturer on the Protestant faculty at Erlangen and in 1805 associate professor of church history and university preacher. From 1807 to 1811 he was professor of New Testament, practical theolo…

[German Version] (Jun 29, 1862, Bremen – Mar 13, 1940, Gießen), Protestant church historian. He studied in history, philosophy, and theology in Heidelberg, Jena, Gießen, and Göttingen. He was awarded a Dr.theol. in Jena (1884) and a Lic.theol. in Gießen (1886), where he became associate professor for church history in 1889 and full professor in 1891. Deeply rooted in the education-oriented cultural Protestantism of the prewar period, the “social aristocrat” Krüger edited the Handbuch der Kirchengeschichte für Studierende (1909–1912, 21923–1932), and the Theologischer Jahresbe…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies In the 1960s, religious studies began to discuss the continuing decline of religious commitment in Europe intensively. In particular the writings of Bryan Wilson ( Religion in a Secular Society, 1966) and Peter L. Berger ( The Sacred Canopy, 1967), drawing on the ideas of M. Weber, É. …

[German Version] (Oct 28, 1942, Leipzig – Dec 31, 2001, Leipzig). Nowak gained his Abitur in 1961; he refused military service, and after working in the Leipzig city theater, and then with the Leipzig theater company, began to study theology in 1964. With a church history dissertation on “Euthanasia and Sterilization in the Third Reich,” a German studies dissertation under Claus Träger on Schleiermacher (1984), and a further dissertation on “The Protestant Church and the WeimarRepublic,” he gained a high reputation in West Germany as the leading former German Democratic Republic (GDR) church historian of his generation. A pupil of the Leipzig contemporary church historian Kurt Meier, he also developed a view of recent church history in line with Trutz Rendtorff’s theory of modern Christianity, following extended visits to Paris. Nowak wove the history of ideas, political history, and social history, into a cultural history of Christianity since the Enlightenment. His most important fields of research were the Enlightenment, F.D.E. Schleiermacher, cultural Protestantism (particularly A. v. Harnack), the inter-war period, and, from 1989/1990, the history of the Protestant churches in divided Germany, primarily in the GDR. An aesthetically sensitive liberal intellectual, he was nonetheless able to publish several novels as a member of the GDR Writers’ Association, and to comment on church politics in publications associated with the Christian Democrats (East). As a member of the Leipzig faculty (from 1983, lecturer; 1987, associate professor; 1992, full professor), during the months of reunification he…

[German Version] Despite intensive historical research, the origins of the term cultural Protestantism have been identified only in broad outline. Originally it was not a self-designation but a polemical term used by others, reflecting the florescence of cultural semantics (Culture: II) in the late 19th and early 20th century. In all European societies, the widespread sense of a crisis of modernity, the cultural pessimism rife among the bourgeoisie, and the relat…

[German Version] I. Concept …

[German Version] I. Religio-Cultural Journals – II. Journals of Religious Studies – III. Christianity – IV. Judaism – V. Islam I. Religio-Cultural Journals During the second half of the 19th century, the publication of German-language journ…

[German Version] (Friends of Light). Lichtfreunde was the name given to the “Protestantische Freunde,” an association of rationalistic early liberal Protestant clergy and laity in Saxony and Prussia organized in 1841. The term, borrowed from Freemasonry, was originally used for adherents of the Enlightenment in general; by the time journals bearing this name were established in Saxony (1831) and Frankfurt am Main (1836), it was serving as a programmatic label for consistent support of the Enlightenme…

[German Version] While studying the ecumenical movements of the 20th century, the sociologist Peter L. Berger developed “A Market Model for the Analysis of Ecumenicity” (1963). His t…

[German Version] The expression “social radicalism” is used in everyday language, in the technical terminology of various academic disciplines, and in political discourse. In German political terminology it is first attested in the ideological debates of the Vormärz (I) and the closely related religious party conflicts. At that time, 18th-century British and French discourse had a decisive influence. In Britain, from c. 1740 all political programs were described as radical that wished to make far-…

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[German Version] The expression völkische Theologie(“national theology”) emerged in Germany around 1880 at the latest; its genesis and intellectual contexts have scarcely been explored. Nor are there studies of possible equivalents in other European languages. In terms of the sociology of knowledge, national theology can be interpreted as a specifically modern ideology of emancipation or as a liberation theology. relating to a people or nation (People and nationhood) acting collectively. Notwithstand…

[German Version] I. History and Church History 1. Historical and political context. National Socialism as a political movement was born in Munich in 1919 with the founding of the National Socia…

[German Version] I. Church History – II. Philosophy – III. Practical Theology I. Church History 1. The German term Neuzeit, which first appeared in church historiography around 1870, and which corresponds to the English term “modern times,” encompasses a broad spectrum of heterogeneous meanings. Terms such as tempus novum, historia nova, or neue Zeit (“new times”) – in contrast to the Middle Ages (I) – were coined in the 17th century to express experiences, both fascinating and frightening, of accelerated change in many areas of life along with rapid scientific and technological innovation. Chronologically the term is notoriously vague; representatives of the Enlightenment and Idealism identified the dawn of modern times with the Renaissance and Reformation, but the profound processes of religious and cultural transformation and sociopolitical modernization in the Enlightenment made later historians and cultural diagnosticians see the dawn of the modern era in the political and socioeconomic “double revolution” (Wehler) between 1780 and 1830. The much-discussed openness of the concept has led historians and students of culture since 1880 to suggest further differentiation, for example by distinguishing an early modern period (16th–18th cents.) from modern history (19th and early 20th cents., through World War I) and contemporary history, beginning between 1917 and 1919. Others make a programmatic distinction between modern times and modernity: modern times began in the late 15th and 16th centuries, but it remained for modern civilization or modernity in the saddle period between 1770 and 1830 to unleash the enormous cultural revolution that dismantled the feudal and estate-based institutions inherited from the past, through capitalist industrialization, political democratization, broad linguistic change, the separation of the state from society, and the incipient functional differentiation of relatively autonomous cultural spheres. For the history of Protestantism since…

[German Version] 1. Friedrich Adolf (Jul 13, 1767, Tecklenburg – Apr 4, 1845, Bremen), Reformed theologian. After working as a …

[German Version] The origins of the expression political religion, analogous to political theology, are obscure. Probably it was a neologism born in the “saddle period” of the late 18th an…

[German Version] (Jun 23, 1807, Maulbronn – Oct 18, 1849, Heilbronn). Beginning in 1821, Märklin, the scion of an old family of Württemberg theologians, went through the Württemberg institutions of theological education in the company of such figures as D.F. Strauß, F.T. Vischer, and Wilhelm Zimmermann (known in Ger. as the Geniepromotion, or “genius doctorates”). At the Protestant seminary in Blaubeuren and later at the Protestant house of studies in Tübingen, F.C. Baur inspired in Märklin an enthusiasm for the theology of F.D.E. Schleiermacher, which soon gave way to deep fascination with G.W.…

[German Version] (Ger. Sattelzeit) has become a central concept in the exploration of conceptual history by German historians. It was coined spontaneously by Reinhard Koselleck in the planning stage of a lexicon sponsored by the Arbeitskreis für moderne Sozialgeschichte, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland(8 vols. in 9, 1972–1997). It is possible that echoes of the concept of so-called axial or pivotal ages, developed by H. Freyer and C. Schmitt (among others), played a r…