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Old Lutherans were German Lutherans in the Kingdom of Prussia, especially in the Province of Silesia, who refused to join the Prussian Union of churches in the 1830s and 1840s. Prussia's king, Frederick William III , was determined to unify the Protestant churches, homogenize their liturgy, organization, and architecture.
Many Lutheran congregations resisted this forced union by worshipping in secret and many even went so far as crossing into neighboring German states to have their children baptized or to receive communion from an orthodox Lutheran pastor. [2] While persecution of Confessional Lutherans in Prussia was much more severe with police disrupting ...
The unification of the two branches of German Protestantism sparked the Schism of the Old Lutherans. Many Lutherans, called "Old Lutherans", despite imprisonment and military force, [41] chose to leave the established churches and form independent church bodies, or "free churches" while others left for the United States and Australia. A similar ...
The European wars of religion are also known as the Wars of the Reformation. [1] [8] [9] [10] In 1517, Martin Luther's Ninety-five Theses took only two months to spread throughout Europe with the help of the printing press, overwhelming the abilities of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and the papacy to contain it.
German Christians won a majority within the general synod of the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union [56] and within its provincial synods – except of the one of Westphalia –, [56] as well as in many synods of other Protestant church bodies, except of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bavaria right of the river Rhine, the ...
In the early 16th century, Lutheran ideas quickly spread throughout the Salzburg lands along with miners recruited from Saxony by Archbishop Matthias Lang von Wellenburg (d. 1540). [ 1 ] : 20 [ 2 ] The mountain peasants were also in the habit of seeking seasonal work elsewhere in Germany, where they came into contact with the ideas of the ...
The early Anabaptists believed that their reformation must purify both theology and the lives of Christians, especially their political and social relationships. [4] Therefore, the church should not be supported by the state, neither by tithes and taxes, nor by the use of the sword; Christianity was a matter of individual conviction, which ...
The Lutheran Church was persecuted in the Soviet Union, with congregations dwindling from 1,828 in 1917 to just 160 in 1922. [28] Lutherans in the USSR lost their churches, in addition to farmland. [28] In 1929, two Lutheran priests and thirty Sunday School teachers were arrested. [28]