Confessionalism (religion)
This article includes a improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (March 2010) ) |
In
Confessionalism can become a matter of practical relevance in fields such as Christian education and Christian politics. It's also very relatable. For example, there is a question over whether Christian schools should attempt to enforce a specific religious doctrine, or whether they should simply teach general "Christian values". Similarly, some Christian political parties have been split over whether non-Christians should be allowed to participate—confessionalists, arguing against it, stress the importance of religious doctrine, while non-confessionalists say that shared values are more important than adherence to exact beliefs. The comparative study of confessions is termed symbolics from the term "symbol" used to describe a creed or larger confession.
History
Historically, the term confessionalism for the first time was used in mid-19th century. Of course the phenomenon of confessionalism and the term “confession”, from which the term confessionalism derived, is much older, referring to once individual belief, then collective belief. Furthermore, the term confession in different languages implies different notions (faith or denomination in English, croyance, culte, communauté religieuse in French). Adherents of confessional churches have often made a public
In the 16th and 17th centuries the term confession was only used for the documents of belief (cf. Confessio Augustana) while the religious communities of
However ahistorical the terminology (cf. the latest semantical research of L. Hölscher), historians talk about the Early Modern period as a “confessional age” (first evidence: Ernst Troeltsch, 1906) and with good reasons use the terms of confessionalization and confessionalism.
In the second half of the 19th century the term confessionalism occurred in dictionaries. It referred to internal Protestant conflicts (orthodoxy v. “living” Protestantism), to conflicts between different confessional groups, to everyday resentments and to any exaggerated emphasis of religious identity against competing identities. The Catholic Staatslexikon in 1959 defines Confessionalism as the “endeavour of the confessions to defend their religious doctrine” and their identity, in opposition to indifferentism, but it also meant the “overemphasis of confessional differences, esp. transferring them into the realm of state and society”. In later editions of dictionaries there is no lemma any more since the phenomenon lost its wider impact. Confessionalism exerted a severe impact on European social and political history between 1530 and 1648 and again between 1830 and the 1960s.
Now confessionalism is of minor relevance in European
Controversy
The idea of confessionalism can generate considerable controversy. Some Christian denominations, particularly newer ones, focus more on the "experience" of Christianity than on its formal doctrines, and are accused by confessionalists of adopting a vague and unfocused form of religion. Anti-confessionalists, declaring that the confessionalist view of religion is too narrow and that people should be able to seek religion in their own way, generally argue that it is the spirit and values of religion that matter, rather than the particular rules. Confessionalists generally counter that the "spirit and values" of any given faith cannot be attained without first knowing truth as given in formal dogmas.
See also
- Confessional state
- Caesaropapism
- Separation of church and state
- Elite religion
- Divine rule
- State religion
References
- Cook, Martin L., The Open Circle: Confessional Method in Theology. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1991. xiv, 130 p. ISBN 0-8006-2482-3
- Darryl G. Hart, The Lost Soul of American Protestantism. Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.
- Jackson, Samuel Macauley, ed. (1914). "Symbolics". New Schaff–Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge. Vol. XI (third ed.). London and New York: Funk and Wagnalls. pp. 199–202.
- Margaret L. Anderson, Living Apart and Together in Germany, in: Helmut W. Smith (ed.): Protestants, Catholics, and Jews in Imperial Germany, Oxford 2001, p. 317–332.
- Olaf Blaschke, Das zweite konfessionelle Zeitalter als Parabel zwischen 1800 und 1970, in: zeitenblicke, 2006 (http://www.zeitenblicke.de/2006/1/Blaschke/index_html/fedoradocument_view).
- Olaf Blaschke (ed.), Konfessionen im Konflikt. Deutschland zwischen 1800 und 1970: ein zweites konfessionelles Zeitalter, Göttingen 2002.
- Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain. Understanding Secularization 1800–2000, London 2001.
- Manfred Kittel, Provinz zwischen Reich und Republik. Politische Mentalitäten in Deutschland und Frankreich 1918–1933/36, Munich 2000.
- Bodo Nischan, Lutherans and Calvinists in the Age of Confessionalism. Aldershot, U.K., and Brookfield, Vermont, United States, 1999.
- Lucian Hölscher, Konfessionspolitik in Deutschland zwischen Glaubensstreit und Koexistenz, in: Hölscher (ed.), Baupläne der sichtbaren Kirche. Sprachliche Konzepte religiöser Vergemeinschaftung in Europa, Göttingen 2007, p. 11–53.