Throughout Europe, church building has always been shaped by a combination of architecture, theology and historical context. The interior and exterior architectonic constituents of a building, in other words its form and content, are always experienced as a whole. Still, today it is churches from the Romanesque, Gothic and baroque periods that most people regard as being archetypal Christian buildings. Despite the Reformation and its appeal against dogma - ecclesia semper reformanda - it was not until the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century that any long-standing fundamentals were first challenged. Later, during the 19th and 20th centuries, the doctrine of Christianity became the subject of constant revision. Debates such as the relation between faith and reason on the one hand, or the law and the grace of God on the other, have resurfaced since then again and again. Whether or not one’s perspective of the church is that of an insider or outsider, the authority and autonomy it embodies is a paradox, evident since long before the upheavals of the 1960s, that is resolved anew with each generation. And if one were to subscribe to the hypothesis put forward more recently by the Egyptologist Jan Assmann, then suddenly the Jewish, and not least the Christian and Islamic monotheisms stand accused of bringing about new forms of conflict in the world through their rejection of Cosmotheism or polytheism and the introduction of a “Mosaic distinction” - the establishment of criteria such as “right” and “wrong” or “true” and “false” in religion.