Lutheran and Catholic Reunionists in the Age of Bismarck

1988 ◽  
Vol 57 (S1) ◽  
pp. 89-107
Author(s):  
Manfred Fleischer
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Final Analysis ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
National State ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
German People ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages

Religious division has determined Germany's destiny. In the Middle Ages, it was the struggle between Emperor and Pope which doomed the Holy Roman Empire. During the Reformation, and the Thirty Years' War, it was Protestantism as well as the anti-Imperial diplomacy of the Pope and the French cardinals, which prevented the emergence of a national state and a centralized government. “From the split of the church dates all our misfortune,” complained in 1846 the Lutheran historian Johann Friedrich Böhmer, editor of a major medieval source collection. “It is a pity that the nation in the heart of Europe was drawn away from its political profession by quarrels with the church, that the development of strong political institutions was interrupted, that they eroded under the acids of religious passion and negation, so that the German people finally got into a stage of the disease where they are either seized by violent fever, or rot in apathy and despair. All our inner ferment which soon will erupt in a revolutionary outburst, all our political impotence and lethargy were, in the final analysis, caused by the split of the church, which tore us apart, and which no one can bridge. Only a new St. Boniface who would restore ecclesiastical unity could help us.”

Lutheran and Catholic Reunionists in the Age of Bismarck

1969 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manfred Fleischer
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
National State ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages

Religious division has determined Germany's destiny. In the Middle Ages, it was the struggle between Emperor and Pope which doomed the Holy Roman Empire. During the Reformation, and the Thirty Years' War, it was Protestantism as well as the anti-Imperial diplomacy of the Pope and the French cardinals, which prevented the emergence of a national state and a centralized government. “From the split of the church dates all our misfortune,” complained in 1846 the Lutheran historian Johann Friedrich Böhmer, editor of a major medieval source collection.

The Reformation and the Establishment of Lutheranism in the Holy Roman Empire

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joachim Whaley
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
General Population ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
The Political ◽  
Charles V ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Political Structures ◽  
The Church

Martin Luther was a subject of the Elector of Saxony in the Holy Roman Empire. His emergence as a reformer was made possible by the sponsorship he received in Wittenberg. He owed his survival to the protection afforded him by the Elector when Emperor Charles V outlawed him and ordered that the papal ban of excommunication be enforced in the empire. The audience to which Luther appealed was the general population of German Christians, both lay and ecclesiastical, who wanted a reform of the church and the reduction of the pope’s influence over it. That his appeal resonated so widely and so profoundly had much to do with a combination of crises that had developed in the empire from the 15th century. That his reform proposals resulted in the formation of a new church owed everything to the political structures of the empire. These facilitated the suppression of radical challenges to Luther’s position. They also thwarted every effort Charles V made over several decades to ensure that the empire remained Catholic. Lutheranism became entwined with the idea of German liberty; as a result, its survival was secured in the constitution of the empire, first in 1555 and then in 1648.

The German Enigma

1941 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 428-450
Author(s):  
Goetz A. Briefs
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
German History ◽  
Rhine Valley ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
Thin Veneer

No country within the Western orbit offers to foreign thinkers such an ambiguous and enigmatic aspect as does Germany. There is no end of books and articles wrestling with this problem.German history presents sufficient justification for the existence of an enigmatic dualism within the nation. To begin with: Germany is that country in Europe through which a line of profound cultural demarcation runs. The Limes Germanicus (cf. my articles in this Review, July and October, 1939) signified the borderline of Roman conquest and Roman cultural penetration. Within this line Mediterranean civilization took undisputed hold both during the Roman Empire and throughout the middle ages, in the latter period mediated by the Church. The lands farther to the East and North became christianized hundreds of years later than the lands around the Danube and Rhine valley. Often the christianization of the East was pushed forward by force of arms. Riehl, Nietzsche, Ricarda Huch and others have remarked that, to all appearances, the christianization of the German North and East was only superficial, a thin veneer over a basically heathen reality; of late H. Rauschning expressed his concern over the quick disappearance of the Christian faith and ethics among the Northern German peasants after Nazism came to power, and the prophets of the “German Faith” today spread the suggestion that the Northern German peasant never was a Christian.

Purity and Pollution in Protestant Ritual Ethics

2017 ◽  
Vol 86 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-62
Author(s):  
Klaus C. Yoder
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Council Of Trent ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Intellectual Activity ◽  
Moral Thought ◽  
Charles V ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
The Church

Purification of the Church is frequently invoked to narrate Protestant justifications for the break from Rome during the Reformation. It also functions to link the Reformation to a process of modern disenchantment. However, little attention has been paid to the rhetoric of pollution and precisely how the reformers articulated the dangers of polluted ritual. The historical location of the sources examined here is the middle decades of the 16th century when Protestants were dealing with political setbacks to the Reformation cause in the Holy Roman Empire, particularly the imposition of the Augsburg Interim by Charles V. This law was designed to find some middle ground between Catholics and Protestants until the schism would be settled at the Council of Trent. However, the debates about whether certain ceremonies, supposedly non-binding with respect to doctrinal commitments, could be used for politically expedient purposes, pushed Protestant thinkers to reassess the power and dangers of liturgical practices and paraphernalia. This article interprets the discourse of pollution in Protestant controversies about compromise in ritual matters by treating the responses of two theologians writing against the Interim from different parts of Germany: Joachim Westphal and Wolfgang Musculus. By laying out the causes of ritual pollution and its negative effects upon body and soul according to individuals who worked for reform in both their intellectual activity as well as their pastoral service, this article demonstrates the importance of ritual matters for Protestant moral thought.

The Enigma of Gregory the Great's Dialogues: A Response to Francis Clark

1988 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Meyvaert
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Gregory The Great ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages

The Middle Ages remained serenely unaware that a dark problem might attach itself some day to the Dialogues of Gregory the Great. They knew their Gregory, studied his Moralia and other scriptural commentaries with uplifted hearts, read his Dialogues with equal veneration and devotion and never perceived even the glimmer of a contradiction between the two categories of works. Then came the Reformation with its stress on Scripture and its dislike of the ‘superstitious Romanist piety’ fostered by works like the Dialogues. A problem thus arose for the Reformers. They had little love for the papacy but retained a veneration for the Church Fathers, among whom they counted Gregory the Great, that great interpreter of Scripture, who had been instrumental in bringing Christianity to England. Was it possible to retain Gregory but divest him of an embarrassing work? It is important to note that the first attempts to deny Gregory's authorship of the Dialogues are rooted in the polemics of the Reformation period.

Von Wittenberg und Nürnberg nach Kronstadt: Die Siebenbürgischen Kirchenordnungen von 1543/47 vor dem Hintergrund ihrer Wurzeln

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-45
Author(s):  
Armin Kohnle
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Early Phase ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Entire Area ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Swiss Confederation ◽  
The Church

Abstract In the early phase of the Reformation in Transylvania, two church-regulating texts became particularly important: Johannes Honter’s little Reformation booklet for Kronstadt und Burzenland from 1543 and the church regulations published in print in 1547, which the Universitas Saxonum made binding for the entire area of Saxon law three years later. The essay focuses on these two important texts and analyzes their roots in the Reformation tradition of the Holy Roman Empire and the Swiss Confederation. Wittenberg and Nuremberg stand for two of the possible sources from which the Transylvanian church ordinances could have drawn. In view of more than a century of intensive historiographical debate on these questions, an attempt is made to present the different positions and to check them for plausibility. The influence of Swiss theology, which is important from a church historical perspective, is also analyzed here.

Literature on Church History, 1914–1920. IV. The Church in Modern Times (Part One: The Period of the Enlightenment)

1924 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-295
Author(s):  
Gustav Krüger
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Church History ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages

It is a characteristic of German scholarship to see problems and to work with them in the solution of intellectual and spiritual questions. Certainly it is a praiseworthy trait in the field of history that it follows the inner relation of events and cannot rest until all the subtlest threads are discovered. Such a problem is presented in the rise of the modern world of thought and the inquiry as to the factors which have contributed to it. In von Below's book on the causes of the Reformation, referred to at the beginning of my third article (HThR, Jan. 1924, pp. 5f.), the question is discussed, among others, whether the transition from the Middle Ages to modern times is really to be found in Luther and his work.

Imperialism

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krishan Kumar
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Present Possibility ◽  
Influential Theory ◽  
The Middle Ages

Imperialism relates to the theory and practice of the European empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There were European empires before that, many of which had a continuous history from those earlier times well into the twentieth century. These include some of the best known: the Ottoman; Portuguese; Spanish; Austrian; Russian; Dutch; British; and French empires, all of which had their origins in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Running alongside these was the even longer-lasting though sometimes ineffectual Holy Roman Empire, whose important role in keeping the imperial idea alive in the Middle Ages and beyond has unfairly been slighted owing to the popularity of Voltaire's quip that it was “neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.” For some students of empire, empire represents an ever-present possibility, because imperialism is a drive that is inherent in the very nature of human society and politics. The most influential theory of modern imperialism was penned not by a Marxist or even a socialist but by a self-professed English liberal, J. A. Hobson.

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