Church order
In some Protestant regional churches in Germany, church order is the name for a church constitution (partly including the church life orders). In addition, church ordinance is the technical term for a genuinely new group of substantive legal texts that arose in the wake of the Reformation . Starting in Germany, church ordinances were then also created throughout Europe (e.g. in Switzerland and France as ordonnances ecclesiastiques ).
Recently, the term “church order” has also been used for texts from the time of the early church that deal with governance structures and the order of worship, e.g. B. the Didache , the Traditio Apostolica or the Didaskalia apostolorum .
history
In the cities and territories that had passed over to the Reformation , the rejection of episcopal and papal jurisdiction and canon law had created a legal free state into which spiritualists occasionally advanced with radical eschatological and egalitarian ideas. The introduction of Reformation (Protestant) church orders marked the beginning of the phase of consolidation.
In addition, since the late 15th century, due to the decline in imperial power on the one hand and the moral decline within some parts of the Catholic Church on the other, many sovereigns had already exerted influence on certain areas of legislation before the Reformation, which according to the legal understanding of the time was actually in the ecclesiastical Area (e.g. supervision of priests, marriage law, poor welfare).
As steps towards the drafting Reformation embossed church orders, the order of Wittenberg in 1521 (by Andreas Bodenstein of Carlstadt) and the model developed by Luther for the city Leisnig developed Leisniger caste mention of the 1,523th The ordinances on the visitation in Electoral Saxony , written by Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon in 1528, represent a further point of a systematized procedure for the enforcement of church order in the Reformation movement originating from Wittenberg. Important early church ordinances are then the church ordinances of Johannes Bugenhagen (e.g. . for Braunschweig 1528, for Lübeck 1531, for Pomerania from 1535 and Wolfenbüttel 1543) as well as the common church order of the margraviate Brandenburg and the imperial city Nuremberg from 1533 by Andreas Osiander .
However, the church ordinances only found widespread use after 1555, when, after the Peace of Augsburg , the principalities and imperial cities shaped by the Lutheran Reformation had finally achieved their denominational status under imperial law. Often times, a new church order was not drawn up for each principality or city, but a few orders were adopted by numerous territories with often only a few changes. Particularly influential in northern Germany were the church ordinances written by Johannes Bugenhagen and later the church ordinances for Mecklenburg , written in 1552 by Philipp Melanchthon , and in southern Germany the church ordinances for Württemberg by Johannes Brenz in 1553 .
As early as 1563, the Bugenhagen church ordinance was revised from 1535 for Pomerania. Drafts were still approved by Bugenhagen in 1542, but it was not until 1563 that the modernized revision by the Synod under the direction of Superintendent Runge confirmed these revised church regulations and put them into print. This is still considered the valid one today. Before the Second World War, there were only eight to ten originals of the old church order, since they were rejected as not valid. Many old copies were destroyed by the war, currently only two originals from 1535 remain.
Mention should also be made of the Calvinist- influenced Reformed church order for the Electoral Palatinate of 1563 as well as the resolutions of the Wesel Convention of 1568 and the Duisburg General Synod of 1610. The church orders of the Reformed and Lutheran communities in the duchies of Jülich-Kleve-Berg from 1662 are based on them , 1671 and 1687, in which the principles of the presbyterial-synodal constitution were largely able to prevail. Through the Rhenish-Westphalian church ordinance of 1835, they found their way into many subsequent church ordinances in the 19th century.
Content
Church ordinances today mostly regulate the status of confession , the responsibilities of the leadership offices , the ordination and visitation authority , the divine service ordinances or the rights and duties of the congregation (members) and the church officials.
Before 1918, especially in Germany, due to the close connection between “throne and altar” due to the sovereign church regiment, wide areas belonged to social law today , such as school law , poor welfare and social welfare, public order (according to the parlance at the time: the “good Policey " ) and especially marriage law in the area of" church order ".
Texts
The historically significant church ordinances of the Reformation period are edited in a comprehensive source edition, which was started in 1902 by Erlangen canon lawyer Emil Sehling and which is now overseen by the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences .
See also
Achim von Arnim published his short story " The Church Order " in 1821 .
Web links
- Homepage of the research center “Evangelical Church Regulations of the XVI. Century "
- Church regulations of the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland
Individual evidence
- ↑ See e.g. B. Ulrich Rhode : Canon Law. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2015 (Textbooks Theology; Vol. 24), ISBN 978-3-17-026227-0 , p. 22