The Highway Forums General Discussion Theology Discussion Forum The Prussian Union Between Lutherans and Reformed

"a Lutheran view".


The Prussian Union Between Lutherans and Reformed.(calvanists)


[compiled from various sources - not original material - posted for informational purposes] sure to draw some fire.
but history just the same.as was one read's it they will understand the prussian union and why religious freedom of America was so important.

The Prussian Union was "ecumenism from above" if not actually a shotgun
marriage. In his royal decree imposing unity on his kingdom's warring
Protestant communions, Frederick William III announced that on Reformation
Day, 1817, "both confessions will become one." It was a forced union
between Lutherans and Reformed (Calvinists).

Pietism motivated many German Protestants to find a way through the sterile
intellectual divide between the main Lutheran and Reformed branches of the
Reformation. Early in the 19th century, proposals for Lutheran-Reformed
union began to change the spiritual landscape of Germany. There were
political motives, too. The rapidly expanding Prussian Kingdom was absorbing
Lutheran, Reformed and Roman Catholic territories. Frederick the Great's
gesture to his new Roman Catholic subjects was to decree religious
toleration-a policy that was both politically useful and consonant with the
spirit of the European Enlightenment. But his son-Frederick William III
(1797-1840)-was faced with the problem of two competing Protestant
confessions. In 1817, he pressured the Lutheran and Reformed churches in
regions under Prussian rule to unite into a single state church-the
Evangelical Church of the Prussian Union.

After the crisis period of Prussia's humiliation by Napoleon had passed and
the German state had regained its feet as a military and political power,
Friedrich Wilhelm III turned his attention to controlling all areas of
Prussian life.Not least, he fixed on the church, for with the military, the
government bureaucracy, and the monarchy, the established Protestant Church
was one of the pillars of Prussian society. Under the ministry of
Hardenberg, after 1810, state control over the church was increased as
church properties were secularized, making the church financially dependent
on the state. Then in 1815, in order to gain control and religious unity in
the expanded Prussian state, local ecclesial governing bodies were replaced
by new Consistories, which were directly controlled by the state.

In 1816, the state, through its newly established general superintendencies,
claimed the right to ordain and appoint pastors. In 1817, the Church of the
Prussian Union, bringing together Lutheran and Reformed, was created. On
October 31, 1817, on the 300th anniversary of the Reformation, a joint
communion service was celebrated in Berlin; the language of its liturgy was
framed in such a way that the communion could be understood in either a
Lutheran or a Reformed way (via equivocation and ambiguity).
Prussia was not unique in creating a union church; the German states of
Baden, Nassau, and the Palatinate did the same in the years 1817-21. But
while their union churches were created with the consent of church leaders,
the Church of the Prussian Union was imposed from above by Friedrich
Wilhelm. When in 1822 he also imposed a particular order of service (Agende)
on the church, many objected. Thus ensued the Agendestreit (agenda strife).
In 1830 it was decreed that "Evangelical" be substituted for the distinctive
names "Lutheran" and "Reformed"; in 1832 the union was enforced in the army
and the Bonn faculty; the new agenda was prescribed 1834. In some cases,
armed guards were placed at the back of Lutheran churches and ordered to
shoot if Lutheran pastors did not observe the unionistic Reformed
ceremonial, especially in matters of the Lord's Supper. One particular
ceremony that was imposed upon the Lutherans was the fraction of the host
during the consecration. There were some pastors who were shot for not
undertaking the fraction ceremony with its Reformed connotations.
At the time of the king's push for a union of Lutheran and Reformed
churches, Pastor Friedrich Schleiermacher, of Trinity Church in Berlin, was
the Presiding Officer of the Synod of Berlin. Schleiermacher favored the
union and considered himself a theologian of the union (Evangelical) church,
but he resisted the imposition of the union by royal fiat. He defended the
union in print against conservative Lutheran critics even as he affirmed the
church's independence from state interference.

Conflict with the Prussian government came to a head with the liturgical
dispute (Agendestreit) of 1822-29. Friedrich Wilhelm Ill wanted unionistic
liturgy imposed in the Prussian churches; when the unionistic liturgy and
forms of worship he proposed was not accepted voluntarily, he imposed it on
the basis of his authority as head of state and ipso facto head of the
church.

The unionistic clergyman, Schleiermacher found the liturgy "too Catholic."
He particularly opposed making the sign of the cross, saying the Apostles'
Creed, and praying with his back to the congregation. The dispute raged on
for seven years, finally ending when the king made an ultimatum: conform or
lose your pastorate. Schleiermacher defined the church as a "free
association of like-minded individuals." This clearly was formative for his
unionistic views and the direction of the Reformed church in Germany and
beyond.

Plans to unify Protestant churches met with stiff resistance by those on
both sides who wanted to maintain their doctrinal/confessional heritage
because they believed it was the truth and biblical. Such tactics aroused
Lutheran consciences. To "awakened" Lutherans, unionism appearedas a logical
counterpart to the careless rationalism that had run rampant in the land over the last century.At issue: who decides what the church is--the civil
rulers, or the Scriptures and confessions? Some confessionalists suffered
persecution. Many immigrated to the U.S., where confessionalism arose in
various forms among Lutherans, Presbyterians, and others who perceived
ecumenism and liberalism as detrimental to theological identity.

It was in this atmosphere in which many confessionally-minded Lutherans left
Germany to preserve and spread the Lutheran faith, since they believed it
was thoroughly biblical and not to be water-down by unionism with the
Reformed or others of disparate faiths.