Anette Baumann (Gießen, Germany)

Law and Reformation. The Imperial Chamber Court and Its Role as a Peace Keeper

The Imperial Chamber Court, founded in 1495 and one of the highest courts in the Holy Roman Empire, began dealing with the consequences of the Reformation as early as the 1520s. The question at hand was how to legally assess changes of ownership after the Reformation. To do this, the court had to create definitions. This contribution will analyse not only the practice of law but also the court’s actions within the sphere of influence of the Catholic Emperor and Imperial Estates of different confessions. How did the court adapt to circumstances and how did it remain loyal to achieving its genuine task of peace keeping?

 

Mathias Schmoeckel (Bonn, Germany)

Melanchthon’s De contractibus

This contribution addresses Melanchthon’s conception of self-destination of man by means of contract. Melanchthon addressed this topic several times, mainly in his writing De contractibus (1545). This presentation will compare his ideas on the law of contract with contemporary legal conceptions and will debate the thesis that his contribution was crucial for the emergence of the conception of a consistent term of contract from the many other kinds of contracts. These considerations shed light not only on the different ideas of Protestant Reformers but also on the development of the law of obligations.

 

Paolo Astorri (Leuven, Belgium)

The Reformation of Contract Law

As their Roman Catholic colleagues, the 16^th and 17^th century Lutheran theologians and jurists dealt with contract law and formulated a set of concepts and rules for the main economic transactions. What was the Lutheran approach to the law of contract? This paper aims to give an overview of the answers through the analysis of the works of theologians, as for instance Martin Chemnitz (1522-1586) and Johann Gerhard (1582-1637), and jurists as for example Matthaeus Wesenbeck (1531-1586) and Peter Heige (1559-1599).

 

Wim Decock (Leuven and Liège, Belgium)

Theological Stimulations for a Transconfessional Law of Contract

In times of religious wars and political disturbances, Catholic theologians worried about the stability of transactions between members of different confessional groups. Hence, there were efforts to create an autonomous sphere of private law based on principles of natural law and thus beyond the influence of religious and political opinions. In this context, this contribution focuses on the Jesuit Martin Becanus (1563-1624) and his teachings on the de-confessionalisation of the law of contract in his treatise De fide haereticis servanda.

 

Christoper Voigt-Goy (Mainz, Germany)

Adiaphora and Tolerance. Lutheran Reports on Confessional Coexistence in the 17^th Century

The reporting practice of Lutheran theological faculties and elites opens up a complex but until now rarely used research approach to the development of ideas of confessional coexistence emerging in the space offered by territorial orders and imperial law. For this practice of reporting, and in a broader sense for church order, the doctrine of adiaphora was crucial. Using this, academic theologians defined the possibilities and limits of an ›orthodox‹ Lutheran contact with members of other confessions. This contribution offers an overview of the development of reporting standards in the printed 17^th century collections of surveys.

 

Tarald Rasmussen (Oslo, Norway)

Law and Reformation. Denmark and Sweden Compared

Denmark and Sweden are Lutheran countries heavily marked by Protestant religion and Protestant culture since the 16^th century. Both emerged as strong hereditary Lutheran monarchies, and – situated in the European periphery – they have not been too much disturbed by challenges from other confessions throughout the Early Modern period.

At the same time, the two countries are more different in terms of confessional profile than one is easily inclined to think. One rewarding point of departure for analysing these differences is the field of religious law: how the Reformation kings in the two countries dealt with the traditions of Canon Law, how they dealt with the challenges of new Church Law as a legal framework of a new Lutheran church, and what kind of influence and independence the church was allowed to maintain within a Lutheran state where the king was also the head of the church.

 

Lisbet Christoffersen (Copenhagen, Denmark)

What do Nordic Students and Scholars of Law and of Theology Learn about the Impact of the Lutheran Reformation on Law, Compared to German Scholarship?

The Reformation in Norden took a different shape than in Germany by being introduced later in already established sovereign states as part of their legal transformations from medieval parallel legal systems to one law of the country.

This paper asks, which theoretical understanding of law was the result of the Nordic Reformation and how uses of the Reformation past influences the scientific possibilities for understanding, analysing and contributing to solutions to the religiously pluralist future. Analytically, the paper compares current theological and legal research in these countries about the impact of Reformation on the concept of Law.

 

Brandon Bloch (Cambridge, USA)

Justifying Democracy. Johannes Heckel and Ernst Wolf on the Right of Resistance in Luther’s Political Theology

This paper considers the legacy of Luther’s writings on the right of resistance against secular authority in post-1945 Germany by examining the intellectual relationship between two Lutheran thinkers who exercised a formative impact on postwar Protestant political thought: the Munich scholar of church law Johannes Heckel and the Göttingen theologian Ernst Wolf. Their exchange, carried out between the late 1940s and Heckel’s death in 1963, challenges the view that postwar Lutheranism remained mired in a tradition of political subservience and authoritarianism. Rather, in the aftermath of National Socialism, Lutheran scholars offered new interpretations of Luther’s political theology that provided a basis for revaluing the relationship between resistance, democracy, and human rights.

 

Euler Renato Westphal (São Bento do Sul, Brazil)

The Presence of Theology in Culture and the Secular State as Clericalism of the Layperson

The article defends that spirituality is the core and the expression of a culture. From this, it is acknowledged that the concepts of ›Weltanschauung‹ and ›Lebensanschauung‹ are cultural patterns, orientation frameworks, to make the human life possible. This ›Weltanschauung‹ makes meaning to human life possible, which reveals the invisible, however, real, relations of a spirituality. The webs of meaning proportionated by a theological view organize a culture. In the secularization process, culture and the secular state assume the religious character of the redemption of the human sinful nature. The modern Secular State is a State shaped by the »clericalism of the layperson«, according to Michel Villey.

 

Klaus Dicke (Jena, Germany)

Trends of Protestant Theory of the State between Obedience and Resistance

Many innovations in the development of the European theory of state are due to the Reformation. One can find sources of these innovations in Reformatory tenets, namely Luther’s two kingdoms doctrine, as well as in constitutions of consistories and church orders, and in the need to find political settlements for peaceful coexistence in the face of confessionalization. In shaping conceptions, those impulses were connected to older traditions, e. g. the ancient-medieval doctrine of tyrant or the Stoic natural law, and also to the new rational legal approach to the doctrine of contract. This contribution traces the trends of leading theories of state between 1500 and 1800, and shows how they oscillate between ›obedience‹ and ›resistance‹.

 

Martin Heckel (Tübingen, Germany)

Martin Luther’s Reformation and the Law

The development of the Protestant church law and the Staatskirchenrecht (law regulating the relationship between church and state) in Germany since the Reformation’s begin can only be grasped as the interdependency between the juridical dynamic and problems and their theological and political causes and consequences. In his study of the same title, published in 2016, the speaker attempted to both clarify the emergence and development of legal institutions from their sacred and profane origins (which are now somewhat foreign to the modern thinking), and to strengthen awareness of the continuity which connects our pluralistic thinking and order of law with its historical roots, and is still formative and conditioning. This contribution will show the main points and the methodological concerns of this mediation between the Lutheran Reformation and the present days.