It was opened after a joint dinner by Prof. Wolfram Kinzig (Bonn), who introduced the topic of the conference. Kinzig defined the term "soft power", which goes back to the American political scientist and politician Joseph Nye, as the exertion of influence without physical force, which was to be considered at the conference primarily in a Christian and Jewish context. The question was how forms of hierarchies and asymmetrical dependencies had developed through the use of "soft power". Soft power is characterized by three characteristics: It arises between two or more actors*, is based on the ability of one to control the other and is usually supported by institutional contexts so that the power imbalance is maintained.
After this brief introduction, Kinzig also gave the first lecture entitled "What must we believe? Synodal authority and dogmatic coercion in the early church". He analyzed the phenomenon of "soft power" in the early church using the phenomenon of the anathema (Greek ἀνάθημα for curse). Wolfram Kinzig cited the anathema of the Nicene Creed as a prominent example of this, which concludes by placing a curse on all false teachings relating to the relationship between Father and Son. Kinzig emphasized that the anathema could not be equated with excommunication, nor were the consequences precisely specified. As the imperial population in the West probably only had minimal theological knowledge and hardly knew the background of the creeds in detail, he classified the power of the anathemata as rather "soft". Rather, they served primarily as a rhetorical device in intra-clerical disputes.
Prof. Lutz Doering (Münster) opened the second day of the conference with a lecture on "Authority and (soft) power in texts from Qumran", paying particular attention to the authoritative character of the Damascus scroll and the community rule. Both writings set out rules and duties as well as offices and ranks for the community. However, the writings also record punishments for offenses, ranging from temporary exclusion from festivals or gatherings to food rationing or permanent exclusion. As the scriptures sometimes prescribed life-threatening punishments for offenses, the character of the Damascus scriptures and the community rules could also be described as authoritarian, according to Doering.
This was followed by the lecture "Power through exclusion. Spiritual and pragmatic authority of the church in Gaul (550-750 AD)" by Dr. Julia Winnebeck (Bonn). She used books of penance to examine the question of the authority with which the church carried out penance in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. She distinguished between pragmatic and spiritual authority. Thus, the phenomenon of penance must be understood as an interweaving of secular and spiritual power, as it served both social balance and the salvation of souls.
Lunch was followed by a series of short presentations. First, Johanna Schwarz (Bonn) spoke on the topic "Between ruler and shepherd. Authority and responsibility of the early medieval abbot in the field of tension between theological concepts". Based on the Regula Benedicti, Schwarz characterized the role of the abbot in the early Middle Ages as a vices (representative) of Christ, who led the monks with charisma as a role model, as Christus medicus, who looked after the salvation of souls in the monastery, as a good shepherd who had to care for his flock, and as miles Christi, who led his soldiers into battle against the mythical powers of sin as a general. In structural terms, she emphasized that the abbot in the monastery weighed up punishment and leniency in his discretio towards the monks in order to assume his responsibility from an eschatological perspective. The abbot's power was also dependent on the consent of the monks. Thus, the early medieval abbot moved between "hard" authority and "soft power" in his functions.
The second short lecture "Exodus from Patriarchy. Feminist transformation of Jewish tradition" was given by Reinhild Beer (Bamberg) and dealt with the topic of the feminist reworking of Jewish rituals. Beer presented the transformation of Jewish rituals using the phenomenon of the orange on the Seder plate. The orange on the Seder plate was established in the 1980s by Susannah Heschel as a symbol against homophobia. This was later reinterpreted in feminist terms. She then described a three-step process for the emergence of feminist rituals, in which they are introduced, popularized and transformed by one or more inventors. She illustrated this with examples of rituals relating to birth, marriage, divorce, mikvah and bat mitzvah, which were given a feminist update.
Finally, Dr. Martin Lüstraeten (Mainz) gave a lecture entitled "Between office, charisma, authority and tradition. The struggle for the position and task of the exorcist in the early church". Lüstraeten presented the history of the emergence of the office of the exorcist, from the exorcisms in the Acts of the Apostles, to the charism of exorcism as described by Irenaeus of Lyon, to the activity of exorcism by bishops as described by Ambrose of Milan. Lüstraeten's main thesis was that the office of exorcist had emptied itself of content over the course of history and had ultimately only been a factually meaningless transit station in the ecclesiastical cursus honorum.
In the evening, the keynote lecture "The de-secularization of Zionism - the unstoppable takeover by Israeli Orthodoxy" by Prof. Moshe Zimmermann (Jerusalem) took place in the main building of the University of Bonn to great acclaim. Zimmermann spoke about the use of "soft power" by the Israeli orthodox and nationalist movement with the aim of seizing power in the Israeli state. He outlined the rise of the religious-nationalist alliance since the Six-Day War and the intensification of the Israel-Palestine conflict, which continues to this day and continues to escalate. Zimmermann particularly emphasized the religious charging of the originally secular Zionism by Orthodox Judaism. Since 1977, this has led to an upswing in the settlement movement in the West Bank and the orthodox-religious penetration of society. As a result, secular education was increasingly interspersed with nationalist-religious elements, which led to a fundamental change in the Zionist movement.
The last day began with a lecture by Prof. Julia Hillner (Bonn) on "The authority of the empress. Helena and Jewish-Christian conversion narratives". Hillner traced different images of Helena in the versions of the story of the finding of the cross and the Actus Silvestri. As an actor in the various versions, she applied both "hard" and "soft power".
Finally, Prof. Susanne Talabardon (Bamberg) gave the lecture "The paradoxical power of the powerless", which dealt with power structures in Hasidic communities and the office of the tzaddik. From a formerly socially critical office of a Torah interpreter for the community, the tzaddik had developed into the figure of a God-human mediator who had assumed a central position of power within the community.
The conference was concluded with a discussion in which the participants once again took up the topic of "authority and 'soft power'". The main topic of the discussion was the added value of the term and the question of whether the term, which originates from political science, is precise enough to describe historical phenomena in a hermeneutically useful way.
