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Church and State in Protestant Germany Before 1918
With Special Reference To Prussia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
Extract
In the castle of Coburg there is a singular emblematic fresco of the seventeenth century. It depicts the wedding procession of Duke John Casimir, which is led by knights, falconers, and musicians. Then, drawn by the nuptial car, defile two sets of attendants—four councillors for civil affairs and three for ecclesiastical. So the Duke sets forth for Cythera, the isle of Venus. Here is a graphic symbol of the twin bureaucracy at the service of every German prince.1 The principle of cujus regio, ejus religio inevitably made pleasure, convenience, and power the motive of administration, sacred as well as secular.
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- Copyright © American Society of Church History 1944
References
1 “Not a few of tim new-religionist princes… set the people the worst possible example. From their daily overloaded tables, from their state apartments hung with indecent pictures, went forth the Church ordinances, the suspensions of preachers … yea, even the death sentences, issued against those who did not think exactly as they did concerning faith and justification.” (Johann, Janssen, History of the German People, XVI, 2f.)Google Scholar
2 In 1557, the papal ambassador at the Imperial court estimated that in greater Gennany seven-tenths were Lutherans, two-tenths Reformed and only one-tenth Catholic.
3 Dowding, W. C., German Theology during the Thirty Years' War: The Life and Correspondence of George Calixtus(Oxford, 1863).Google Scholar
4 James, Bryce, Holy Roman Empire (London, 1880)Google Scholar. At the Reformation there were 7 electors (Kurfürsten), 50 prelates, 70 abbots and abbesses, 31 secular princes, 128 counts, 81 free cities. As late as 1750 there were 350 princely houses in the Empire.
5 See Herzog's Real Encyklopädie für prot. Theologie (3rd ed.), articles such as “Kirehenregiment,” “Kirchenordnung,” “Territorialsystem”. Also, New Schaff-Herzog Cyciopaedia of Religious Knowledge (New York, 1908);Google ScholarReligion in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Maemillan, K. D., Protestantism in Germany (Princeton, 1917)Google Scholar deals mainly with relations between church and state from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries; it has a good bibliography.
6 Lindsay, T. M., History of the Reformation (1906), I, chap. VI.Google Scholar
7 Richter collected 172 separate ecclesiastical constitutions (Die ev. Kirchenordnengen des 16. Jahrhunderts (Weimar, 1846)Google Scholar. Sehling published a complete collection, with the same title (Leipzig, 1902).
8 Winters, R. L., Francis Lambert of Avignon1 (Philadelphia, 1938).Google Scholar
9 Somo liturgiologists have rated this highly and have blamed Pietism and Rationalism for its disintegration (Graff, Geschiohte der Auflösung der alten gottesdienstlichen Formen).
10 The Swedish church retained “apostolic succession” more by undesigned circumstances than by conviction (Ainslie, J. L., Doctrines of Ministerial Order in the Reformed Churches [Edinburgh, 1940], 207.)Google Scholar
11 Allen, A. V. G., Christian Institutions, 253, 275f.Google Scholar
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13 The persecution of Calvinists was particularly sharp in Saxony, where the Chancellor was executed with a sword specially engraved “Beware, O Calvinist, Dr. Nicholas Krell.” The Emperor Maximilian II interceded in vain with the Elector for Peucer, languishing in a dungeon. After Louis XIV had ravaged the Palatmate of the Rhine, the Jesuits remained; they tried to conciliate the Lutherans, but persecuted the Reformed so savagely that German Protestants appealed to the Emperor, Joseph I, who used his influence in the interest of toleration. See Good, J. I., Origin of the Reformed Church in Germany (Reading, Pa., 1887)Google Scholar and his History of the Reformed Church in Germany, 1620–1690 (1894).
14 See Thomas Carlyle, Frederick the Great, I, for his predecessors; also, Marriett, J. A. R. and Robertson, C. G., The Evolution of Prussia (Oxford, 1917).Google Scholar
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18 Encyclopedia Britannica (11th ed.), article “Frederick William III”; Forster, E., an apologist for the territorial system, in Die Enstehung der preuss. Landeskirche… Friedrich Wilhelms III (Tübingen, 1905).Google Scholar
19 Pastor Scheibel of Breslau was suspended for refusing to conform. On comparing the King to Antiochus Epiphanes, he had to flee the country. In spite of the mediation of the Crown Prince, his followers were persecuted. Thus the King converted a firebraml into a hero. Whole congregations emigrated. As late as 1839 Pastor Grabau sailed with 1000 adherents and organized “The Synod of Exiles” at Buffalo, N. Y. Not till 1845 was belated recognition granted to the “Old Lutherans” of Prussia. They numbered only 51,600 members in 1905.
20 Most German states followed the example of Prussia in Church Union after 1817. There was no Union where the Reformed were numerically negligible, e. g., Hanover, Mcckleaburg. Saxony and Bavaria.
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24 The recovery of Romanism is well described in Goyau, G., L'Allemagne religieuse: le Catholicisme 1800148 (Paris, 1897, 1905)Google Scholar. Not even Prussia, rejuvenated and led by Bismarck, was successful in the Kulturkampf (1873–1876). State encouragement of the “Old Catholics” detached a mere fragment from Romanism.
25 For ecclesiatical and economic-social issues since 1870, see Goyau, G., L'Allemagne religieuse: le Protestantsme (Paris, 1896)Google Scholar. In 1810 Protestant and Catholic endowments in Prussia were confiscated, only the latter getting adequate compensation. By 1910 the minimum Protestant stipend was only M. 2,260 (theu equivalent to about $565 per annum). By 1911 the Prussian Church had 24 General Superintendents, 639 Superintendents, and 9,390 pastors (about one-half of the Protestant clergy in Germany).
26 Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th ed.), article “Establishment.”
27 Johann, Gerhard, Loci theologici, 1610–1920.Google Scholar
28 Martin, Chemnitz, Loci theotogici, 1592.Google Scholar
29 Forsyth, P. T., Church and Sacraments, 72.Google Scholar
30 Pinson, K. S., Pictism as a Factor in the Rise of German Nationalism (New York, 1934).Google Scholar This work brings into relief neglected aspects up to Schleiermach er's era. A fresh interpretation, with full bibliography.
31 Its final achievement was frenzied academic and clerical support for the German war effort, 1914–18, analyzed in a documented survey by a Danish theological professor, an admirer of true German culture; Bang, J. R., Hurrah and Hallelujah (London, 1915 and 1917).Google Scholar
32 “Territorialism” and militarism had a curious way of absorbing other movements. The “Christian Patriotism” of the Napoleonic wars, the Youth movement (Bursehensahaft) that followed, and pantheism prepared the way for visionary imperialism nfter 1870, viewing the church as a means to state ends. Professor de Lagardc of Göttingen looked for a German Church that would not only surmount eonfcuional differences, but also find room for vital elements in Germass paganism (see Will, R., Le Culte, III, 338f).Google Scholar
33 Allowing for the exaggeration of an Ultramontane, there is much in Janasen's charge that territorialism, linked to the doctrine of justification by faith alone, made Luthersnsm sterile in social ethics and philanthropy (History of the German People, XVI).
34 Fisher, H. A. L., ed., Social Germany in Luther's Time: Memoirs of B. Sastrow (London, 1902).Google Scholar
35 Peabody, F. G., Jesus Christ and the Social Question (New York, 1907)Google Scholar, is rich in references to the German literature on the subject. It is significant that Württcmberg, where the church possessed more autonomy than elsewhere, produced one of the most sensible “Utopias” ever written, Andreae, J. V., Christianoplis (1619, English translation by F. E. Held, New York, 1916).Google Scholar
36 e. g., the Gustavus Adoiphus Union (1832), the Eisenach Conference (1852, semi-official), the Protestantverein (1863), aiming at self-government within the church.
37 Eugen, Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution (London, 1938).Google Scholar
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42 The Reformierte Bund (1884) was founded to advance Reformed ideals; cf. Niesel, , Was heisst reformiert? Sasse. Was heisst lutherisch? (2nd ed., Munich, 1936)Google Scholar, is strongly confessional, opposed to union with the Reformed Church.
43 In 1905 12,000 Prussian Protestants renounced the church. Nominal membership is, however, still considerable (as in the national churches of Scotland and England). In spito of the secular spirit of the Weimar Republic and the anti-Christian tendency of the Nazi State, only 8,883,738 persons registered “no profession” out of 69,622,483 (cf. France, 29, 592, 784 out of 41,907,056).
44 In 18th century Württemberg, Bengel, with the support of the Consistory, dissuadod the Grand Duke from making it illegal for Protestants to separate from the Lutheran establishment. The Landeskirche there has been far more vigorous than in states like Saxony and Mecklenburg, where dissent has been severely restricted.
45 At present German dissent amounts to no more than. 44% of the total population. The oniy sect to canalise both political and religious discontent (since the Anabaptist) seems to have been Ulich's Liehtfreunde who multiplied in the years before the Revolution of 1848.
46 Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th ed.), art. “Rothe.” We can understand his stress on unification when we remember Weinel's remark, “There are more churches than states in Germany”; even when the number of states wan reduced to twenty-two in 1919, there still remained twenty-eight churches.
47 Between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, German Lutherans were pioneers in: foreign missions, in spite of the coldness of the official churches.
48 Partienlary such offshoots as the Missouri Synod. See Wentz, A. R.. The Lutheran Church in American History (Philadelphia, 1933)Google Scholar. Lutherans in America achieved a free, syrtoelical constitution, thus completing development arrested in Germany. Lord Acton's generalisation that “Lutheranism required to be sustained by the civil power” therefore is not true as a final judgment (McNeill, J. T., Uaitive Protestantism [New York, 1930], 124–27).Google Scholar
49 Isaiah 49:23.
50 An cminent refugee pastor has claimed that Germany knew no “state church” till the Nazi regime; he prefers to speak of a “royal church,” dependent on a “Christian ruler,” and argues that the advent of neutral or hostile rulers after 1918 “disestablished the churches almost automatically.” in the light of our present study, it is obvious that many a “godly prince” manipulated the church to his advantage despite a lofty profession of Christian principle. Kramm, H. H., “Orgaitisation… of German Protestant Churches” (Church Quarterly Review, 1944, No. 275).Google Scholar