Günter Jacob

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Günter (Karl August) Jacob (born February 8, 1906 in Berlin ; † September 29, 1993 ibid) was a German Protestant - United theologian and bishop administrator .

Life

Jacob came from the family of a teacher . At the grammar schools in Sorau and Cottbus , he prepared for his Abitur . In 1924 he began a study of Protestant theology in Tubingen , which he continued in Berlin until he is in Marburg as a licentiate successful completion of theology. In 1929 he became vicar of the Evangelical Church of the Old Prussian Union and attended the seminary in Berlin. From 1931 to 1932 he worked as an assistant preacher in the Pomeranian Körlin . In 1932 he was elected pastor of Noßdorf bei Forst (Lausitz) .

After the beginning of the Nazi regime , Jacob turned to the circles that spoke out against the introduction of the Aryan paragraph and was one of the founders of the Pastors' Emergency League . In the Confessing Church he became a member of their Brandenburg Provincial Brother Council . Jacob was several times in prison taken and received by court proceedings gag order . The cause was its widespread pamphlet entitled "Where are we now?" . In 1939 he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and took part in the Second World War as a non-commissioned officer on the Eastern Front .

After Günter Jacobs returned to Germany, the Church Emergency Aid employed him as a pastor in Marburg in 1945. In 1946 he was appointed general superintendent of Neumark and Niederlausitz with his office in Lübben . He held this office in Cottbus from 1949. In 1963 he was appointed part-time administrator of the Bishopric of the Eastern Region of the Evangelical Church Berlin-Brandenburg , which he held until 1967. He retired in 1972.

In 1952 his ecumenical activities included his membership in the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches , of which he was a member until 1968. In 1953 he was selected by the University of Tubingen for his work on Luther research and his lectures on the Confessing Church honorary doctorate doctorate .

Theological thinking and church political activity

Jacob's theological thinking and acting was determined by the concept of the “ Constantinian turn ”, by which he understood the reversal of the elevation of the Orthodox - Roman Church to the state church under Emperor Theodosius I. With the instinct of a Christian and churchman challenged by the church struggle during the Nazi era and the clearly restrictive church policy in the early years of the GDR , he campaigned for an avowed Christianity and churchism, one that relies on letting go and renouncing traditional privileges and reflecting on the authentic Word interpretation and confession-building saw a way into the future of the church. In a lecture to the Synod of the Evangelical Church in Germany , which met in 1956 in the Marienkirche (East Berlin), he reported on a particularly active community in the emerging socialist industrial center of Eisenhüttenstadt , “far removed from the Christian life-style or the 'idealistic backdrop the hereditary material of past centuries 'which he saw proliferate so dangerously in the west'. He saw the real challenge to the church in a "fortress mentality". He identified the real danger for the testimony of faith in the society of the GDR in the “musty rooms of traditional churchliness”, in the “greenhouse air of pious conventicles ” or in the “ casemates of an inwardness ”, in which one tries to hibernate before the storms of time . The beginning of the teaching work in the Niederlausitz area goes back to Jacobs' initiative . It organized itself in a "Lektorenkonvent der Lausitz". Continuous training for pastors was also important to him, and he was intensively promoting it.

Jacob research

For several years now, the work of Günter Jacobs has been researched in the Protestant theology department under the direction of Michael Hüttenhoff . The project “Günter Jacob (1906–1993). Understanding of the Church, Diagnosis of the Time and Church Action ”funded by the DFG. So far, only a fraction of the results produced by the project work have been published. In the future, more results will gradually be made available and put up for discussion.

Works

  • The light shines in the darkness. Stuttgart 1954
  • Church on Paths of Renewal. Berlin 1966
  • The message of the going God. Berlin 1968
  • The Christian in socialist society. Stuttgart 1975
  • World reality and faith in Christ. Against a false doctrine of two kingdoms. Stuttgart 1977
  • The feasts of Christianity. Stuttgart 1983
  • Repentance in distress. Stations on the way of the church from 1936 to 1985. Munich 1985
  • Judgment and grace. Berlin 1986.

Essays

Editing

  • (As co-editor :) The Evangelical Christianity in Germany. Stuttgart 1958

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Sabina Lietzmann: Reformer of Cottbus. In: time. January 3, 1957
  2. ^ Rüdiger Jungbluth : The Quandts - Germany's most successful family of entrepreneurs . Campus, Frankfurt / Main 2015. Letter from Harald Quandt to Günter Jacob, quoted on p. 170.
  3. ^ Ehrhart Neubert:  Jacob, Günter . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
  4. ↑ Lecturing in the Niederlausitz area. on the side of the Evangelical Church District Cottbus
  5. ↑ The Günter Jacob project at Saarland University of July 8, 2016, accessed on July 3, 2018.
predecessor Office successor
Otto Dibelius
( acting )		 General superintendent for
Neumark and Niederlausitz /
the Sprengel Cottbus
( renamed in 1949 )
1946–1972 		Gottfried Forck
personal data
SURNAME Jacob, Günter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Jacob, Günter Karl August (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Protestant theologian and bishop administrator
DATE OF BIRTH February 8, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH 29th September 1993
Place of death Berlin