Rudolph Sohm

Gotthold Julius Rudolph Sohm (29 October 1841 in – 16 May 1917 in Leipzig) was a German jurist and Church historian as well as a theologian. He published works concerning Roman and German law, Canon law and Church History.

A Lutheran, Sohm studied Law in Rostock, Berlin, Heidelberg and Munich between 1860 and 1864. His doctoral dissertation in 1864 at the was on Roman Law; he then worked on German legal history and devoted himself to ecclesiastical law. He lectured in German Law and Commercial Law at the University of Göttingen from 1866 to 1870, before being appointed professor at that university in 1870. He was professor in Canon Law and German Law at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau 1870 to 1872, and at the University of Strasbourg from 1872 to 1887, and was appointed Rector in 1882. From 1887 until his death in 1917 he was professor of Canon Law and German Law in the Faculty of Law at the University of Leipzig.

In 1892 he published the first volume of his great work Kirchenrecht (Canon Law). The second volume was published posthumously in 1923. In this work Sohm argued that the Early Church had no legal constitution. He stated that "ecclesiastical law stands in contradiction to the nature of Ecclesia." The Early Church, he argued, was ruled not by legal concepts but by a power he called "charisma" (from the Greek 'charis'), which is "a gift of grace" bestowed by the Holy Spirit. In his work Sohm explored how the charismatically based Jesus movement of the Early Church changed into the legalistic bureaucracy of Roman Catholicism. The sociologist Max Weber derived his concept 'charismatic authority' from Sohm's 'charismatic organization,' a term Sohm had coined in Kirchenrecht to describe the social organization of primitive Christianity.

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