Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des XVI. Jahrhunderts

In addition to modern church orders, which concern internal church structure and church doctrine, this work provides detailed source material on the history of the relationship between church and state and on social and cultural history as well as the history of piety. Some of the reprinted texts were nominally valid at least until 1918 due to the connection between »the throne and the altar« in the German Empire, and their influence was still perceptible in the 20th century in the privileged position of the Christian churches in Germany as well as in the state legislation e.g. to protect Sundays.

With the establishment of the Reformation in a territory or an imperial city, the regional rulers and the city authorities had to provide their communities with various new systems in order to regulate the broad spectrum of church life. The integral parts of church orders are the regulation of church services, liturgies, rules of the agenda and forms of prayer, requirements for and types of employment for clergymen as well as church discipline and rules for excommunication. The deputy clergymen in the southwestern imperial cities who had a theological education (Johannes Bader in Landau, Michael Diller in Speyer or Leonhard Brunner in Worms) created influential new rules for church life: In 1526 Bader published the first protestant catechism ever, and in Worms 1524 one of the earliest forms for a German Protestant Mass was printed.