PFAFF, CHRISTOPH MATTHÄUS. - Lutheran theologian, b. at Stoccarda on 24 Dec. 1686, d. at Giessen on 19 Nov. 1760. Pietism (v.) at the court of Württemberg, as ducal tutor, and as professor at the University of Tubinga and later at Giessen.
Through the dogmatic indifference characteristic of Pietism, he promoted the union of the Protestant Churches, provoking the reaction of intransigent Lutherans. A versatile but superficial writer, he owes a disputed renown to the publication of four fragments of Ireneo, shown to be apocryphal, perhaps forged by himself.
A canonist, his name is connected with the first formulation of a theory concerning the structure of the Lutheran Church, which found wide application in the nineteenth century: the so-called “collegial system,” according to which the Church would essentially be an association (collegium aequale), in which the full right to regulate the associated life would originally belong to the body of the faithful; priests would be merely simple officials of the association, and the territorial lord would hold ecclesiastical power as summus episcopus only by the tacit or explicit consent of the association; this system prepared the separation of Church and State in Germany.