Treysa Conference

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The conference of evangelical church leaders 27.-31. August 1945 (Treysa Conference) was a meeting of leading church representatives after the end of the Second World War . The conference served to prepare a new church constitution .

course

A few months after the end of the war there was a meeting of 120 Protestant church leaders in the diaconal institution Hephata in Treysa . The bishop of the Evangelical Church in Württemberg , Theophil Wurm , as the oldest bishop of an " intact church " had called the church leaders, especially from the circle of the Confessing Church, together to discuss a church constitution. Hesse was selected because it was on the one hand central and on the other hand in the American zone of occupation . The Americans were more open to such an assembly than the other occupying powers . Bishop Wurm hoped for a common Protestant church in Germany after a "work of unification" of the Protestant churches had already begun under National Socialism . At this church conference, to which he only invited the representatives of the leadership of the regional churches, a "church leadership in the universal church", supported by all forces with the exception of the German Christians , was to arise.

This means that the conference marks the birth of the EKD , the union of 28 regional churches at the time . After the end of the war and the collapse of the National Socialist dictatorship, the Treysa Assembly in 1945 came to the conclusion that a reorganization would not be necessary either through the restoration of the German Evangelical Church and its discredited offices or in connection with the German Evangelical Church Federation (DEK) founded in Wittenberg in 1922 due to a lack of working organs is possible.

Even before had in Frankfurt at the invitation of Martin Niemoller the Reichsbruderrat taken also because all members of the Council brother had not been invited to the conference Treysaer. Niemöller feared a resurgence of the “restorative-conservative tendencies”, which had always been very strong, especially in the “intact regional churches”. In Treysa, on the other hand, the Luther Council met and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Germany would have proclaimed if Wurm had not come to an understanding with Niemöller beforehand and had spoken out against the advance of the Bavarian Bishop Hans Meiser .

The conference, which had started with a service, ended after four days, on August 31, 1945, with the resolution: “The church assembly in Treysa calls a 'Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany'”.

consequences

It was not until the church assembly in Treysa in 1947 that, after previous differences between the Brother Council and the Luther Council, the common assessment was reached that “the EKD is a federation of Lutheran, Reformed and United churches”. They agreed on a denomination proposition: "The Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany consists of twelve members, six of them from Lutheran, four from United and two from Reformed church areas."

A few weeks later, the newly appointed EKD Council adopted the Stuttgart confession of guilt in Stuttgart , in which the church leadership confessed for the first time that Protestant Christians were complicit in the crimes of National Socialism. Complete church unity could not be achieved.

The basic order of the EKD was adopted in Eisenach in 1948. The individual regional churches are independent, but the EKD coordinates the uniform actions of the regional churches between the pulpit and communion communities . The main tasks of the EKD are questions of the church's public responsibility and external relations.

Assessments

Karl Barth wrote after the conference: "The majority of those who had learned little and forgotten little in the twelve years were very tough in Treysa."

Attendees

swell

  • Treysa 1945 - The Conference of Protestant Church Leaders 27.-31. August 1945. Heliand, Lüneburg 1946.
  • Gerhard Besier , Hartmut Ludwig, Jörg Thierfelder (Ed.): The compromise of Treysa. The emergence of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) 1945. A documentation. Deutscher Studien Verlag, Weinheim 1995, ISBN 3-89271-591-2 .
  • Michael Kühne: The Minutes of the Eastern Church Conference 1945–1949. In: Works on Church History: Sources. Vol. 9. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2005. [1] ISBN 3525557590 , 9783525557594

literature

  • Armin Boyens: Treysa 1945 - The Evangelical Church after the collapse of the Third Reich. In: Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 82, 1971, pp. 29–53.
  • Annemarie Smith-von Osten: From Treysa 1945 to Eisenach 1948. On the history of the basic order of the Evangelical Church in Germany (= work on contemporary church history B, Vol. 9). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1980. ISBN 3525557094 , 9783525557099
  • Gerhard Besier u. a. (Ed.): Church after the surrender. Vol. 1: The alliance between Geneva, Stuttgart and Bethel. Vol. 2: On the way to Treysa. W. Kohlhammer 1989/90.
  • Joachim Mehlhausen : The Treysa Convention. A look back after 40 years . In: Ders .: Vestigia Verbi. Essays on the history of Protestant theology. Berlin-New York 1999, pp. 485-499.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jörg Thierfelder : The church unification work of the Württemberg regional bishop Theophil Wurm (= work on contemporary church history. Series B. Representations, Vol. 1 ). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1975. ISBN 3-525-55700-0 ( digitized version ), p. 244.
  2. ↑ Tyra: Church after the surrender. 33.
  3. ↑ Michael Klein: West German Protestantism and Political Parties: Anti-Party Mentality and Party Political Engagement from 1945 to 1963 (= Contributions to Historical Theology , Vol. 129), Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2005, p. 365.
  4. ↑ Deutschlandfunkkultur 2015.
  5. ↑ evangelisch.de
  6. ↑ Deutschlandfunkkultur 2015.