Prussian Union of Churches


The Prussian Union of Churches was a major Protestant church body which emerged in 1817 from a series of decrees by Frederick William III of Prussia that united both Lutheran and Reformed denominations in Prussia. Although not the first of its kind, the Prussian Union was the first to occur in a major German state.
It became the biggest independent religious organization in the German Empire and later Weimar Germany, with about 18 million parishioners. The church underwent two schisms, due to changes in governments and their policies. After being the favoured state church of Prussia in the 19th century, it suffered interference and oppression at several times in the 20th century, including the persecution of many parishioners.
In the 1920s, the Second Polish Republic and Lithuania, and in the 1950s to 1970s, East Germany, the People's Republic of Poland, and the Soviet Union, imposed permanent or temporary organizational divisions, eliminated entire congregations, and expropriated church property, transferring it either to secular uses or to different churches more favoured by these various governments. In the course of the Second World War, church property was either damaged or destroyed by strategic bombing, and by war's end, many parishioners had fled from the advancing Soviet forces. After the war, complete ecclesiastical provinces vanished following the flight and expulsion of Germans living east of the Oder-Neiße line.
The two post-war periods saw major reforms within the Church, strengthening the parishioners' democratic participation. The Church counted many renowned theologians as its members, including Friedrich Schleiermacher, Julius Wellhausen, Adolf von Harnack, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Martin Niemöller, to name only a few. In the early 1950s, the church body was transformed into an umbrella, after its prior ecclesiastical provinces had assumed independence in the late 1940s. Following the decline in number of parishioners due to the German demographic crisis and growing irreligion, the Church was subsumed into the Union of Evangelical Churches in 2003.

Status and official names

The many changes in the Church throughout its history are reflected in its several name changes. These include:
  • 1817–1821: The church union was still being regulated by Prussian officials, and no official name was taken up for it yet. Informal names reported elsewhere included Prussian Union of Churches and the Union of Churches in Prussia.
  • 1821–1845: Evangelical Church in the Royal Prussian Lands – the state church
  • 1845–1875: Evangelical State Church of Prussia – the state church besides other recognised Protestant church bodies
  • 1875–1922: Evangelical State Church of Prussia's older Provinces – the state church in the old provinces of Prussia besides other recognised Protestant church bodies
  • 1922–1933, 24 June: Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union – an independent church among other recognised Protestant church bodies
  • 24 June to 15 July 1933: State control abolished the freedom of religion and a Nazi-loyal leadership was imposed
  • 15 July 1933 – 28 February 1934: Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union under new streamlined leadership
  • 1 March to 20 November 1934: The streamlined leadership abolished the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union as an independent church body and merged it in the new Nazi-submissive German Evangelical Church
  • 29 May 1934 – 1945: Confessing Christians declared that the imposed Nazi-inspired leadership had brought the church to a schism, with the Confessing Church and their newly created bodies representing the true Evangelical church.
  • 20 November 1934 – 1945: The Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union restored by the verdict of the Landgericht, resulting in two church bodies–one Nazi-recognised and one gradually driven underground–each claiming to represent the true church.
  • 1945–1953: The Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union partially cleansed its leading bodies of German Christians and appointed Nazi opponents and persons of moderate neutrality.
  • 1953–2003: Evangelical Church of the Union, an independent ecclesiastical umbrella among other recognised Protestant umbrellas and church bodies.
  • 2004: The Evangelical Church of the Union merged in the Union of Evangelical Churches.

    History

The Calvinist and Lutheran Protestant churches had existed in parallel after Prince-Elector John Sigismund declared his conversion from Lutheranism to Calvinism in 1617, with most of his subjects remaining Lutheran. However, a significant Calvinist minority had grown due to the reception of thousands of Calvinists refugees fleeing oppression by the Catholic Counter-Reformation in Bohemia, France, the Low Countries, and Wallonia or migrants from Jülich-Cleves-Berg, the Netherlands, Poland, or Switzerland. Their descendants made up the bulk of the Calvinists in Brandenburg. At issue over many decades was how to unite into one church.

Royal attempts to merge Lutherans and Calvinists

One year after he ascended to the throne in 1798, Frederick William III, being Supreme Governor of the Protestant Churches, decreed a new common liturgical agenda to be published for use in both the Lutheran and Reformed congregations. The king, a Reformed Christian, lived in a denominationally mixed marriage with the Lutheran Queen Louise, which is why they never partook of Communion together. A commission was formed in order to prepare this common agenda. This liturgical agenda was the culmination of the efforts of his predecessors to unify the two Protestant churches in Prussia and in its predecessor, the Electorate of Brandenburg.
Major reforms to the administration of Prussia were undertaken after the defeat by Napoléon's army at the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt. As a part of these reforms, the separate leadership structures of both the Lutheran Church, 1750–1808, and the Reformed Churches ; 1701–1808, and the all-Prussian German-speaking Reformed Kirchendirektorium were abolished and the tasks of the three administrations were taken on by the Sektion für den Kultus und öffentlichen Unterricht, also competent for the Catholic church and the Jewish congregations, forming a department in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior.
Since the Reformation, the two Protestant denominations in Brandenburg had had their own ecclesiastical governments under state control through the crown as Supreme Governor. However, under the new absolutism then in vogue, the churches were under a civil bureaucratic state supervision by a ministerial section. In 1808, the Reformed Friedrich Schleiermacher, pastor of Trinity Church, issued his ideas for a constitutional reform of the Protestant Churches, also proposing a union.
Under the influence of the centralising movement of absolutism and the Napoleonic Age, after the defeat of Napoléon I in 1815, rather than reestablishing the previous denominational leadership structures, all religious communities were placed under a single consistory in each of the then ten Prussian provinces. This differed from the old structure in that the new leadership administered the affairs of all faiths; Catholics, Jews, Lutherans, Mennonites, Moravians, and Calvinists.
In 1814, the Principality of Neuchâtel had been restituted to the Berlin-based Hohenzollern. In 1815, Frederick William III agreed that this French-speaking territory could join the Swiss Confederation as the Canton of Neuchâtel. The church body of the prevailingly Calvinist Neuchâtelians did not rank as a state church but was independent, since at the time of its foundation in 1540, the ruling princely House of Orléans-Longueville was Catholic. Furthermore, no Lutheran congregation existed in Neuchâtel. Thus the was not an object of Frederick William's Union policy.
In January 1817, the cult and public instruction section was separated off as the, usually called Cult Ministry. Karl vom Stein zum Altenstein was appointed as minister. The Reformed churches and the Lutheran church were thus administered by one department within the same ministry. The ministry introduced the preaching gown as the usual clerical clothing.
On 27 September 1817, Frederick William announced, through a text written by Eylert, that Potsdam's Reformed court and garrison congregation, led by Court Preacher, and the Lutheran garrison congregation, both of whom used the Calvinist Garrison Church, would unite into one Evangelical Christian congregation on Reformation Day, 31 October, the 300th anniversary of the Reformation. Already the day before Lutherans and Reformed Christians celebrated the Lord's Supper together in Berlin's Lutheran St. Nicholas' Church.
On 7 November, Frederick William expressed his desire to see the Protestant congregations around Prussia follow this example, and become Union congregations. Lutherans of the Lutheran state church of Nassau-Saarbrücken, and Calvinists in the southerly Saar area had already formed a church united in administration on 24 October. However, because of the unique constitutive role of congregations in Protestantism, no congregation was forced by the King's decree into merger. Thus, in the years that followed, many Lutheran and Reformed congregations did follow the example of Potsdam, and became merged congregations, while others maintained their former Lutheran or Reformed denomination.
Especially in many Rhenish places, Lutherans and Calvinists merged their parishes to form United Protestant congregations. When Prussia finally received a parliament in 1847, some church leadership offices included a seat in the first chamber of non-elected, but appointed members.
A number of steps were taken to effect the number of pastors that would become Union pastors. Candidates for ministry, from 1820 onwards were required to state whether they would be willing to join the Union. All of the theological faculty at the Rhenish Frederick William's University in Bonn belonged to the Union. An ecumenical ordination vow in which the pastor avowed allegiance to the Evangelical Church was also formulated.