Caspar Sevian – Wikipedia
Caspar , also Kaspar Olevianus (born August 10, 1536 in Trier, † March 15, 1587 in Herborn) was a German reformed theologian and an important representative of the “Second Reformation” in Germany. He worked as a professor in Heidelberg, where he was involved in the final version of Heidelberg Catechism as a member of the Commission, as well as in the high school Herborn.
Caspar Olevian was born as the son of a baker, guild master, councilor and urban rentman. His mother was the daughter of a butcher guild and councilor. The father derived the name Olevian from today’s Trier district of Olewig, from which the family originally came. Caspar Olevian attended various schools in Trier. At the age of 13 he left the city; He was sent to Paris for further training in the upper classes of the high school and the study of the Artes. He later studied law in Orléans and Bourge, where he was Dr. under the civil lawyer Franciscus Duaren. Juris received his doctorate.
During Caspar Olevian’s studies, French Protestantism experienced its early great spread and its first organizational level in secret communities. In Bourges there is its reason for Caspar Olevian’s living orientation, here it was shaped and permanently aligned in the spirit of Calvinism. The student Olevian became Evangelical there in a secret Huguenot community. Two of his professors were also personally Protestants, his doctoral supervisor Duarenus with alignment with the prevailing Catholic conditions.
In 1556 Caspar Olevian was in great danger. Out -of -life students had brought their barge to capsizing on a river near Bourges and had all drowned. Caspar Olevian, who had observed the accident from the shore, was in danger in trying to help help. In death he praised that he also devoted himself to studying theology and the spread of the gospel if he could get away with life.
Because of this vow, Caspar Olevian decided to prepare for the Reformation preaching office in Switzerland and to start studying theology. In March 1558 he traveled to Geneva via Strasbourg for this purpose, where he heard from Johannes Calvin theology. Because of Calvin’s illness, he moved to the Schola Carolina in Zurich to Peter Martyr Vermigli. There he also heard Heinrich Bullinger, in Lausanne he was a student of Theodor Beza.
In June 1559 he returned to Trier. He was initially formally hired by the city council as a Latin teacher and taught at the burse. Later he set up a German catechism class and from August 1559 as a public preacher, he increased the inlet to the initially small Evangelical community on site through his powerful appearance and his stirring evangelical sermon, so that within a short time about a third of the population of the population City of Trier belonged to the community.
In the same year, Trier fell at the instigation of the archbishop Johann VI. From the Leyen to the Catholic side. A majority of the council like the guilds of the city of Caspar Olevian banned the sermon in urban rooms, but not at a different site. However, such a ban was expressed by the councilors of the Archbishop and Elector of Trier and thus justified that Trier was not a Reichsstadt, the provisions of the Augsburg Religious Peace of 1555 (“Cuius Regio Eius Religio”) therefore do not apply to the city and its magistrate. The Reich Chamber Court later confirmed this reasoning.
Several Trier Protestants, including Caspar Olevian, were trapped during this time and only released after they praised to either return to the legitimate Catholic faith or to leave the city. Many said they wanted to become Catholic again, a not small number of citizens emigrated. The Reformation in Trier had failed.
Caspar Olevian also left the city after ten weeks. He followed a call of Elector Friedrich III. From the Palatinate (1559–1576) to Heidelberg, where he was initially employed as a teacher at the Collegium Sapientiae, a kind of preacher seminar. In 1560 he briefly took over a theology professorship at Heidelberg University, but gave up this position because it was more of its kind to be in the practical church service. In 1561 Caspar Olevian married the widow Philippine of Metz. Three children emerged from the marriage, two sons and one daughter. Olevian then acted as a pastor at the Peterskirche and later at the Heiliggeistkirche and as a court preacher. The elector gave him his full trust and called him to the member of the church council, which was newly built in 1562. From this position, he was significantly involved in the reorganization of the Palatinate church system according to Reformed-Calvinist principles and experienced the emergence of Heidelberg Catechism.
“The old thesis that Olevianus was a co -author of catechism was no longer durable, and not the recent hypothesis that the final version of the German text goes back to him. Olevianus was a member of the commission among others. He was personally not satisfied with the final catechism. He would have liked him more Calvin. As a senior church man, however, he was significantly involved in the church introduction of catechism. ” [first] Olevianus prompted the elector to complement the catechism by question 80, which “was in the spirit of Friedrich.” [2]
At the Reformed church order for the Kurpfalz, which was published on November 15, 1563, [first] With their presbyterial synodal elements in addition to the sovereign consistory, with their new practice of the sacrament distribution and above all with their strict regulations of church breeding, which are monitored and controlled by the presbytery instead of the sovereign police force. As the influential confidant of the Palatinate Elector, he traveled to the religious talks in Maulbronn (1564), in Oppenheim (1565) and in Amberg in the Upper Palatinate (1566). Olevian also accompanied Elector Friedrich more often during the cancellations of monasteries and donations in the Kurpfalz, where there were often violent attacks, on May 9, 1565 in the Cyriacstift (Worms). There the entire facility was destroyed and burned it; Caspar Olevian broke up the tabernacle by hand and the elector crumbled the founded hosts with his hands under his approving comments. [3] [4]
Caspar Olevian was instrumental in the execution of the unitarian heretical Johannes Sylvanus on December 23, 1572 in Heidelberg. The need for execution was controversial in the church council, since Sylvanus, who was also an opponent of Olevian’s emphasis on church breeding, had revoked his punishment for the divinity of Jesus Christ. Olevian and two other theologians were nevertheless on the beheading, since a protective “the most grayed mercy against the Christian community” was. [5]
After the death of the death of Calvinist Friedrich III. in autumn 1576 and the government of his Lutheran son Ludwig VI. (1576–1583) had to leave Caspar Olevian Heidelberg. In 1577 he was admitted to the court of Count Ludwig I von Wittgenstein in Berleburg, where he led the education of the count’s sons. From Berleburg he influenced the progress of the Reformation in the county as in the nearby Nassau principalities and counties of the Wetterau to Solms-Braunfels and Wied. In those years, he wrote a “farmers’ catechism” tailored to the needs of the country people and was committed to meetings and synods.
In 1584 Count Johann VI called him. From Nassau-Dillenburg into his territory and entrusted him with the foundation of the high school in Herborn, which was created in the same year. Caspar Olevian became her first rector and, alongside Johannes Piscator, was her leading theologian. One last highlight in Caspar Olevian’s life was the Herborner General Synod in 1586, which he headed and on which the reformed churches of Nassau-Dillenburg, Wittgenstein, Solms-Braunfels and Wied-Runkel were represented. The a total of 26 theologians merged into a conversal church, so for the first time in Germany overcurred the exclusively territorial character of a reformatory church and, after long and violent clashes, opted for a church constitution that was a mixed form of presbyterial and consistorial elements.
Caspar Olevian himself also overcame many boundaries in the course of his life: first the circling limit from the baker’s son to a student, then the language border from French to German, the faculty boundary from jurisprudence to theology and, above all, the denomination limit from Catholicism to Protestantism. This open -mindedness for the new and the search for the truth on the one hand and the acceptance of limits by drawing positions on the other are Caspar Olevians. In doing so, he – as one of the most important reformers in Germany – made himself a guide for the People’s Church.
Caspar Olevian died on March 15, 1587 of the consequences of an accident that he had already suffered on December 30, 1586. When visiting the sick, he had fallen heavily on a icy path and had carried out inner injuries that were neither recognized nor treated at the time. His last word has become famous: When asked by his colleague Ulsted, whether he was certain of his salvation, he replied “Certissimus”. On March 18, 1587, Caspar Olevian was buried in the Evangelical City Church Herborn, where he was set a neo -Gothic epitaph in 1887.
As a dogmatist, Caspar Olevian developed the federal (federal) theology taken over by Heinrich Bullinger and continued in his main work The substance meeting free between God and the elect (1585) the idea of a federal government with people on the basis of his biblical understanding. He understood the entire history of God with humanity under this sign: With Adam God has a natural covenant ( league nature ) agreed that the people had broken through the sin, whereupon God had closed a new covenant with them, and sealed by the death of his son. The core of this Association of Mercy is the election of people that he conveys the certainty of salvation, and in it it is realized in it. Caspar Olevian combined the Gnadenbund of God with the kingdom of God, and he represents how the certainty of salvation, belonging to the kingdom of God, is awarded to man: by the progressive faith and by the external means of the visible church, the word in the word Sermon and the sacraments.
At the exegesis of the Bible, Caspar Olevian tried only a small scale, for example on the paulus letters. In it he differs from his teachers Calvin and Bullinger.
March 15th in the Protestant name calendar.
- Friedrich Wilhelm Cuno: Olevian, caspar . In: General German biography (ADB). Volume 24, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1887, pp. 286–289.
- Real cyclopedia for Protestant theology and church. Volume 14, p. 358 and Volume 24, p. 292.
- Karl-Ernst Riedesel: Church order and the training of the reformed denomination . Wittgenstein 69, 1981, S. 82–94.
- Gerhard Menk: Caspar Olevian during the Berleburger and Herborner time (1577-1587). A contribution to the self -image of early German Calvinism. In: Monthly books for the Protestant church history of the Rhineland 37/38 (1988/1989), S. 139–204.
- Volkmar Wittmütz: Sevian, caspar. In: Biographical-bibliographical church lexicon (BBKL). Band 6, Bautz, Herzberg 1993, ISBN 3-88309-044-1, Sp. 1197–1200.
- J. F. Gerhard Goeters: Olevian, Kaspar. In: Theological real cyclopedia. Band 25, 1995, S. 237–239.
- Wilhelm Holtmann: Sevian, caspar. In: New German biography (Ndb). Volume 19, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-428-00200-8, p. 519 f. ( Digitized ).
- Andreas Mühling: Caspar Olevian. Christ, church politician and theologian . Zug 2008, ISBN 978-3-905351-13-2.
- ↑ a b Johann Friedrich Gerhard Goeters: On the history of catechism ; In: Evangelical Reformed Church (Synod Ev.-Ref. Churches in Bavaria and Northwest Germany), Lippische Landeskirche, Reformed Bund (ed.): Heidelberg Catechism. Revised edition 1997 ; S. 89. Online as HTML page ( Memento of the Originals from January 28, 2013 in Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been used automatically and not yet checked. Please check original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this note. or as PDF file (201 KB) .
- ↑ Johann Friedrich Gerhard Goeters: On the history of catechism. In: Evangelical Reformed Church (Synod Ev.-Ref. Churches in Bavaria and Northwest Germany), Lippische Landeskirche, Reformed Bund (ed.): Heidelberg Catechism. Revised edition 1997 ; S. 90. Online as HTML page ( Memento of the Originals from January 28, 2013 in Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been used automatically and not yet checked. Please check original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this note. or as PDF file (201 KB) .
- ↑ Caspar Olevian and Elector Friedrich III. When lifting the Cyriacus pencil Neuhausen
- ↑ Contemporary report on the events in the lifting of the Cyriacus pencil Worms-Neuhausen and the Mikittelstift Sinsheim
- ↑ Karl Müller: Caspar Olevian – Passionate Reformer. On the 400th anniversary of death on March 15, 1987. In: Monthly books for Protestant church history of the Rhineland 37/38 (1988/1989). Pp. 13–138. Quote here p. 59; Tobias Weimer: On December 23, 1572 on the beheading of John Sylvanus in Heidelberg. A contribution to the Reformation in the Kurpfalz with special consideration of church breeding. In: Yearbook for Baden Church and Religious History 5 (2011), S. 11–23 ( PDF file ).
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