Apostolic dispute
The Apostolikumsstreit was from the mid-19th to the early 20th century a dispute for binding to the early church creeds within the Reformed Churches in Switzerland and the German Protestant churches. While in Switzerland, as a result of the apostolic dispute , freedom of religion applies, all German Protestant regional churches have the Apostolic Creed (Apostolic) and the Nicano-Constantinopolitan Creed in common. In the Reformed churches, the apostolic is seldom spoken outside of the baptismal rite , for example on Reformation Sunday .
Apostolic dispute in Switzerland
In the Reformed churches of German-speaking Switzerland , the dispute over the obligation to be an Apostolic began in 1845 in the Swiss Society of Preachers and in the St. Gallen Synod . There the request was still rejected that the apostolic should be deleted from the baptismal rite. In the Reformed Church of the Canton of Zurich , the discussion was initiated in 1854 by Alois Emanuel Biedermann . In 1868 an agreement was reached in Zurich to leave a choice between two different liturgical forms for baptism and the Lord's Supper . In the reformed church of the canton of Thurgau , the obligatory apostolic service was abolished in 1876. In its place came the Thurgau Confession , which however was not binding. In the 1870s in particular at the synods of the Reformed churches in Basel and Bern there was a dispute about the binding nature of the Apostolicum, with numerous theological pamphlets being written. By the end of the 1870s, the liberal-Protestant position had prevailed in most of the regional churches and the requirement for a specific confessional text - be it the apostolic or a cantonal confessional text - was abolished for worship, baptisms or ordinations.
The resulting freedom of belief is still being discussed in the 21st century. In 2006, the Federation of Swiss Protestant Churches launched a collection of creeds and sent them for consultation in order to stimulate a Swiss-wide discussion about the creeds.
Apostolic dispute in Germany
In 1871/1872 the Protestant theologians Adolf Sydow and Gustav Lisco sparked the dispute over the apostolic by calling the virgin birth and the descent into hell of Christ as legends. Lisco was dismissed from the pastoral service due to a voluntary report for not using the Apostolicum.
In 1891 the Protestant pastor Christoph Schrempf from Wuerttemberg refused to recite the Apostolicum during the baptism for reasons of conscience, arguing that he could not affirm essential statements. This resulted in his immediate release with no pension rights. Berlin theology students then sought advice from the local professor of systematic theology Adolf von Harnack as to whether they could submit a petition to the Old Prussian Evangelical Upper Church Council (EOK) demanding that the apostolate be abolished. Harnack advised them against such a step, but then conveyed to them his own criticisms of the apostolic (especially on the virgin birth) in a lecture and published them in 1892. In it he did not call for the abolition of the old church symbol (alternative name for the apostolic) , but suggested the creation of a peer-to-peer, nondescript form. This publication sparked a storm of protest in the church public and, as a result, a (not just literary) dispute that expressed the contradictions between the theologically liberal Ritschl School and its opponents, the church-positive direction . For example, the Evangelical Lutheran Conference included the virgin birth as one of the foundations of Christianity .
The dispute subsequently led to the ecclesiastical enactment of a “ Heresy Law ” (1910), which was applied to the Protestant pastor Carl Jatho in 1911 , as well as to state decrees by the Berlin Ministry of Culture regarding the professorial occupation of the Berlin Protestant theological faculty (establishment of a further systematic-theological professorship, which was filled by Adolf Schlatter ).
literature
- K.-H. Neufeld: Adolf Harnack's conflict with the church. Way-stations to the "essence of Christianity". IThS. 4, Innsbruck / Vienna / Munich 1979, pp. 114-132.
- Gerhard Ruhbach : Apostolic dispute . In: Evangelisches Lexikon für Theologie und Gemeinde 1, Wuppertal 2 1998, S. 104f.
- Rudolf Gebhard: Controversial Freedom of Confession. The Apostolic Controversy in the Reformed Regional Churches of German-speaking Switzerland in the 19th century , Zurich 2003
Individual evidence
- ^ Rudolf Gebhard: Apostolic controversy. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
- ↑ Peter Schmid: Confession: "Say more clearly what we believe together" . Report from the study day in the Ittingen Charterhouse on October 29, 2010. Ed .: Landeskirchen-Forum. ( landeskirchenforum.ch [accessed on August 14, 2015]). Confession: "Say more clearly what we believe together" ( Memento from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Christina Tuor-Kurth: How do the Reformed make their faith recognizable? In: SEK (Ed.): Bulletin . No. 1 , 2012, p. 31–33 ( kirchenbund.ch [accessed on August 14, 2015]).
- ^ Adolf v. Harnack: In matters of the Apostolicum. In: Christliche Welt (ChW) 32, 1892, pp. 768-770; see. in the same year in detail: A. v. Harnack: The Apostolic Creed . A historical report with an introduction and an afterword . 1892. Reprinted in: Kurt Nowak (Ed.): Adolf von Harnack as a contemporary . Speeches and writings from the years of the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. de Gruyter, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-11-013799-2 , p. 500-544 .
- ↑ See Hermann Cremer : To the struggle for the apostolic . A pamphlet against D. Harnack , Berlin 1892, and Harnack's reply: Answer to D. Cremer's pamphlet "On the battle for the apostolic" . In: Adolf von Harnack as a contemporary. Speeches and writings from the times of the German Empire and the Weimar Republic . Edited and introduced by Kurt Nowak. Berlin 1996, pp. 545-578