German Evangelical Church Conference

The German Evangelical Church Conference (also Eisenach Conference or Eisenach Church Conference ) was an institution that existed from 1852 to 1921, in which the leadership of the Evangelical regional churches in the German Confederation and in the German Empire (even after 1866, still including Austria ) coordinated joint projects.

prehistory

After the fall of the Holy Roman Empire , the Corpus Evangelicorum , which made it possible for the evangelical estates to deliberate jointly, no longer existed either. In the middle of the 19th century, in view of the increasing independence of the churches from the state, there was a growing interest in revitalizing such a joint advisory body. In January and February 1846, at the invitation of Prussia and Württemberg, a conference attended by 26 highest church authorities took place in Berlin, in the run-up to which Carl Ullmann first launched the idea of closer ties between the regional churches. The conference itself agreed to continue the consultations, but was very hesitant to implement them.

The revolutionary year of 1848 initially brought a strong upswing in national church plans. The first German Protestant Church Congress in September 1848 was a free conference of Protestant notables, which aimed to create a Protestant federation of churches. These meetings were also continued (until 1872), but soon abandoned the aim of uniting the individual regional churches. This gave the idea of cooperation between church leaders new topicality. On the fringes of the Kirchentag in Elberfeld in 1851, eight church governments agreed to found a church conference that held periodically, which was constituted on June 3, 1852 in Eisenach. 24 church governments were already involved here, later those of all federal states of the German Confederation and Austria.

effectiveness

The conferences, which have met every two years in Eisenach since 1855, were unable to pass binding resolutions; however, their recommendations were generally implemented by most church governments. Questions were discussed in which a joint appearance by the Protestant churches in Germany appeared to be desirable. The first project in 1853 was the collection of 150 core songs that were to become the basis of a common hymn book . But since all regional churches wanted to stick to their hymn books, this was only realized in 1915 with the German Evangelical Hymn book , a hymn book for German-speaking congregations abroad. The support of the German foreign diaspora was always on the agenda of the conference, but was mostly taken up by the Prussian regional church . In contrast, the Eisenach regulation of 1861, in which neo-Gothic or neo-Romanesque forms were prescribed for church construction, had a great influence . In 1884 a joint text version of Martin Luther's Small Catechism was adopted, and in 1892, after long preparatory work, a revised text of the Luther Bible . From 1888 to 1896 work was carried out to reorganize the pericope order . The German Evangelical Institute for Classical Studies of the Holy Land, founded in 1900, was also jointly supported .

The official organ of the conference was the General Church Gazette for Protestant Germany , in which the papers, minutes and memoranda were published.

Efforts by Prussia to deepen the union failed after the German War of 1866, initially because of the defense against confessional Lutheranism. It was not until the beginning of the 20th century that Kaiser Wilhelm II was able to create an executive body, an annual German Evangelical Church Committee with expanded powers, in 1903 . The church conferences continued to meet until 1921, but the center of power was now the church committee. He also led the negotiations that led to the establishment of the German Evangelical Church Federation, which replaced the German Evangelical Church Conference in 1922.

literature

German Protestant (also Eisenacher) church conference. In: Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon . Volume 4, Leipzig 1906, pp. 689-690 ( online ).

Theodor Karg: From the Eisenach Conference to the German Evangelical Church Federation. Diss. Iur. Freiburg i. Br. 1961.

Joachim Rogge : Church Days and Eisenach Conferences. In: Joachim Rogge, Gerhard Ruhbach (ed.): The history of the Evangelical Church of the Union. Volume 2 .: The independence of the church under the royal summepiscopate (1850–1918). Leipzig 1994, pp. 42-55.

Friedrich Wilhelm Graf : Eisenacher Conference . In: Religion Past and Present (RGG). 4th edition. Volume 2, Mohr-Siebeck, Tübingen 1999, Sp. 1179-1180.

Britta Wellnitz: German Protestant congregations abroad. The history of their origins and the development of their legal relationships with the Evangelical Church in Germany. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2003, pp. 91-93.

Individual proof

^ JF Gerhard Goeters : The German Evangelical Church Conference in Berlin in the spring of 1846 . In: JF Gerhard Goeters, Rudolf Mau (ed.): The history of the Evangelical Church of the Union. Vol. 1: The beginnings of the union under the sovereign church regime (1817-1850) . Leipzig 1992, pp. 338-341.

[1] JF Gerhard Goeters : The German Evangelical Church Conference in Berlin in the spring of 1846 . In: JF Gerhard Goeters, Rudolf Mau (ed.): The history of the Evangelical Church of the Union. Vol. 1: The beginnings of the union under the sovereign church regime (1817-1850) . Leipzig 1992, pp. 338-341.