Fairy von Lilienfeld

Fairy von Lilienfeld , b. von Rosenberg (born October 4, 1917 in Riga , Latvia ; † November 12, 2009 in Höchstadt an der Aisch ) was a Protestant theologian .

Life

Fairy von Lilienfeld was the daughter of Baron Harald Ferdinand von Rosenberg (1876-1946), who was born on the Gilsen manor in Courland and came from a Baltic German aristocratic family. Her mother Helene "Hella" Baroness von Rosenberg (née Holbeck) (1880–1972) was born in Tbilisi as the daughter of the doctor Heinrich Markus Holbeck and his wife Marie Wagner and came from the Russian aristocracy. The parents married on June 10, 1916 in Saint Petersburg .

Lilienfeld grew up in Stettin . She had a younger brother, Harald Ferdinand Otto "Harry" von Rosenberg (born January 7, 1920 in Stettin). Harry von Rosenberg was killed in action on June 23, 1942 at Alytus in Lithuania . On January 2, 1942, she married the submarine commander Oberleutnant zur See Erich von Lilienfeld, who was born on November 9, 1915 in Estonia at the Rocht manor (Estonian Rohu ) in the Wierland district . Erich von Lilienfeld was in command of the submarine U 661 , which was rammed and sunk on October 15, 1942 in the North Atlantic by the British destroyer HMS Viscount . All 44 men on board were killed. Their daughter was born in February 1943. She died in 1949.

After the expulsion she lived in Central Germany and studied philosophy , Slavic studies and philology at the University of Jena from 1947 to 1951 . She passed the exams in these subjects (Dipl. Phil.) And then received teaching assignments in Old Slavonic and Old Russian language and literature . She worked as a lecturer in Jena until 1955. From 1953 to 1957 she studied theology at the Catechetical College in Naumburg (Saale) . In 1961 she was promoted to Dr. theol. with a paper on Nil Sorskij and his writings. The crisis of tradition in Russia Ivan III. PhD.

In 1962 she was ordained in Magdeburg . As a pastor of the Evangelical Church of the ecclesiastical province of Saxony , she was a full-time lecturer in church history at the Catechetical College in Naumburg from 1962 to 1966 .

In 1966 she was offered a chair for the history and theology of the Christian East at the theological faculty of the University of Erlangen , where she worked until her retirement in 1984.

For Lilienfeld, this was also associated with the move from the GDR to the Federal Republic of Germany . According to her own statement, the GDR also let her go because she was dispensable as a theologian for the GDR. She was the first female Protestant theologian in the field of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bavaria . At the time of her appointment she was the first female theology professor in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Act

Focus

Lilienfeld's focus was on Slavic-Russian orthodoxy , questions of faith and knowledge, the “wisdom” of God, monasticism as a binding form of Christian life and the feedback of research into the history and theology of the Christian East to the teaching of the church fathers . She also dealt intensively with the ecclesiological problems of contemporary orthodoxy.

Memberships

• Dialogue Commission of the Evangelical Church in Germany for the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (1967 to 1992)
• Joint Commission of the Lutheran World Federation and the Orthodox Churches (1979 to 1992)
• Advisory Committee of the Conference of European Churches (1967 to 1986)

Honors

• 1985: Honorary member of the Moscow Spiritual Academy
• 1990: Honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Theology, University of Helsinki
• 1992: Full member of the Accademia Scientiarum et Artium Europaea Salzburg
• 2002: Federal Cross of Merit, 1st class
• 2010: Silver Rose of St. Nicholas (posthumously)

Publications (selection)

• Belief and deed. Nikolai Leskov. A Russian poet of Christian charity , Berlin 1956
• Nil Sorskij and his writings. The crisis d. Tradition in Russia Ivan III , Berlin 1963
• Karl Christian Felmy (ed.): Sophia, the wisdom of God. Collected articles 1983–1995 , Erlangen 1997
• Heaven in the heart: Old Russian legends of saints , selected, translated, introduced and explained by Fairy von Lilienfeld, Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder 1990, ISBN 3-451-22052-0 .

Trivia

Jürgen Roloff dedicated his book The Church in the New Testament (1993) to her.

literature

• Adelheid Rexheuser, Karl-Heinz Ruffmann (Hrsg.): Festschrift for Fairy von Lilienfeld. For the 65th birthday. Institute for Society and Science at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Erlangen 1982.
• Martin George , Vladimir Ivanov , Christian Stephan (eds.): Festschrift for Fairy von Lilienfeld. 80th birthday contributions. Berlin Diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate), Berlin-Karlshorst 1997.
• Gudrun Diestel: D. Dr. Fairy Baroness v. Lily field. In: Hannelore Erhart (ed.): Lexicon of early Protestant theologians. Neukirchener Verlagshaus, Neuenkirchen-Vluyn 2005, p. 244.
• Ruth Albrecht, Ruth Koch (ed.): Fairy von Lilienfeld 1917–2009. Reinhardt, Basel 2011.

Web links

• Literature by and about Fairy von Lilienfeld in the catalog of the German National Library
• Elke Wewetzer: The "three lives" of the Fairy von Lilienfeld. In: Sunday paper . July 7, 2002, archived from the original on April 14, 2016 . 
• Guido Vergauwen : laudation for Fairy Lilienfeld. (pdf, 61 kB) Eastern Church Institute Würzburg, April 10, 2010, archived from the original on December 20, 2014 . 
• Baltic Historical Commission (ed.): Entry on Fairy von Lilienfeld. In: BBLD - Baltic Biographical Lexicon digital

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Prof. Dr. Fairy von Lilienfeld on her 90th birthday. Mediendienst Aktuell No. 206/2007 of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, September 27, 2007, accessed on May 18, 2018 . 
2. ↑ On the 80th birthday of Prof. Dr. Fairy von Lilienfeld: Specialist in the theology of the Christian East. Mediendienst Aktuell No. 1545 of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, September 30, 1997, accessed on May 18, 2018 . 
3. ↑ Silver Rose of St. Nikolaus for Prof. Dr. Fairy von Lilienfeld. Eastern Church Institute Regensburg , accessed on May 18, 2018 .