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[German Version] For Irenaeus the Holy Spirit (Spirit/Holy Spirit) is fully divine as mediator of the Fathers creating and redemptive action (God the Father), but the tendency after him was to conceive the Spirit as subordinate, even sometimes the highest of the creatures. Against this, Athanasius and the Cappadocians (Cappadocian theology), while conceding that Scripture does not ambiguously teach the Spirit's full divinity, argued that as the sanctifier the Spirit was to be worshiped together wi…

[German Version] The biblical basis of the doctrine of the Son's particular divine personhood (Christology) is to be found in New Testament confessions (II), placing Jesus Christ alongside the Father and the Spirit (God the Father, God the Holy Spirit) and attributing to him creating and saving action. It is also to be found in the grounding of this in Old Testament portrayals of God's self-differentiating action in the…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies – II. Philosophy of Religion – III. History of Dogma and Dogmatics I. Religious Studies Until very recently, the use of the term incarnation in religious studies was borrowed from ideas current in Christianity. From the perspective of systematics, incarnation or “enfleshment” goes hand in hand with a body and soul polarity, implying a particular conceptualization ¶ of the relationship between God and the world as well as with the concept of the individual and person, and with religious legitimation of authority (rev…

1. OT and Judaism 1.1. Atonement is a central concept in biblical theology. Along with the traditional misunderstanding of appeasing an angry deity, the penal definition of making good an offense and the viewing of the cultus as a human work have impeded a more relevant approach. In the OT, atonement breaks the nexus of sin and its evil consequences by “channeling ¶ the baneful influence of the evil into an animal that died vicariously for the man (or for the cultic object). Expiation was thus not a penalty, but a saving event” (G. von Rad, 271). The basis …

[German Version] I. Religious Studies – II. Old Testament. – III. New Testament – IV. Philosophy of Religion – V. Dogmatics I. Religious Studies Monotheistic ideas of God, which take as their starting point the existence and activity of a single God, have long dominated the understanding of religion in historically Christian Europe. The term monotheism itself is a modern coinage, first appearing in 1660 in the work of the English philosopher Henry More. As a contrast ¶ to the term polytheism, which goes back originally to Philo of Alexandria and was rediscovered for the European tradition by J. Bodin in 1580, monotheism was introduced into the 17th- and 18th-century discussion of the origins of belief in God. From then until the mid-20th century, the emergence of monotheism was explained either in the context of evolutionary models (Evolution) as the culmination of a chain of development comprising at least two stages (e.g. animism, totemism, fetishism, polytheism, monotheism) or a…

[German Version] I. Terminology All the major concepts in soteriology have biblical roots. Of central importance today is the notion of reconciliation (II), which …

[German Version] I. Primitive Christianity – II. History of Doctrine – III. Dogmatics – IV. Forms of Extra-ecclesial Christology I. Primitive Christianity …

[German Version] I. History of Religion – II. Old Testament – III. Judaism – IV. New Testament – V. History of Theology – VI. Creation and Preservation – VII. Religious Education – VIII. Islam – IX. Science – X. Art History I. History of Religion 1. Fundamentals Life, nature, the environment, the passage of time – these are everyday experiences for any society. But reality also includes the danger that this world may be imperiled or perilous. Chaos and death are part of the cosmos (World). Reality is ambivalent. From the perspective of evolutionary theory, the essential symptoms of development from prehuman to human life include ritualization of this sense of peril, …