The Augsburg Confession of Faith by Philipp Melanchthon

First published:Confessio Augustana, 1530 (English translation, 1536)

Edition used:The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, translated and edited by Theodore G. Tappert in collaboration with Jaroslav Pelikan, Robert H. Fischer, and Arthur C. Piepkorn. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1959

Genre: Nonfiction

Subgenre: Theology

Core issues: Evangelization; faith; Lutherans and Lutheranism; Protestants and Protestantism

Overview

By 1530 Germany had become divided into Catholic and Lutheran states over which the Holy Roman Emperor exercised an ineffective rule. To promote imperial unity in the face of the Turkish military threat in Eastern Europe, the monarch asked the princes of the empire to meet. Because religious dissension impaired concerted military and political action, Charles V was eager to achieve a resolution. Concerned officials met in Augsburg, Bavaria.

Before receiving the imperial summons to Augsburg, the German Evangelicals had adopted the Schwabach Articles to express their understanding of the Christian faith, and they soon drafted the Torgau Articles, a list of complaints against practices of the papal church that they deemed abusive or corrupt. Philipp Melanchthon, a professor at the University of Wittenberg and close collaborator with Martin Luther, combined the two documents for presentation to the Imperial Diet on June 25, 1530. It thereafter became The Augsburg Confession of Faith.

To combat accusations of heresy, Melanchthon stressed the historical character of Lutheran beliefs by linking them to ancient creeds and writings of the church fathers, especially Saint Augustine. This reformer argued that nothing the Evangelicals affirmed conflicted with the teachings of Scripture and the faith of the ancient church.

The twenty-eight articles that make up The Augsburg Confession of Faith consist of twenty-one statements of doctrine and seven long declarations about abuses, together with demands for reforms. Although Melanchthon and his associates compiled the confession, Luther approved it as an accurate account of his doctrine. Luther could not attend the diet because he was under the ban of the empire and subject to arrest.

Public presentation of the Augsburg confession was the work of Christian Beyer, chancellor of Saxony in the employ of Prince-Elector John. Some time before the convocation, the Protestants had agreed to present a German rather than a Saxon front before the emperor, as the margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach and the landgrave of Hesse joined with the city government of Nuremberg in endorsing the effort. Soon five other princes and municipal officials from Reutlingen also signed the confession.

Aligning the Evangelicals with historic orthodoxy, the confession begins by affirming a trinitarian view of God and scorns all who reject the doctrine of Original Sin. It emphatically declares the deity and humanity of Christ in the manner of ancient creeds, while asserting that Jesus died as a sacrifice for all sin, original and volitional.

Article 4 declares justification through faith alone in opposition to the common medieval belief in salvation by grace plus works of merit. This article is the cornerstone for the rest of the confession, for it specifies the arch distinctive in the Protestant understanding of salvation as an undeserved gift from God. That is, sinners cannot merit divine favor, but God requires perfect righteousness from them nevertheless. Justification sola fide (through faith alone) means that God confers on unworthy people who embrace Christ by faith the very righteousness he demands. In a transaction of imputation, the righteousness of Christ becomes the possession of believers as a gift of grace. Article 6 of the confession cites Saint Ambrose in support of this doctrine, thereby connecting it with ancient Catholic teachings.

Article 6 rebuts the charge that the Evangelicals’ doctrine of justification disparages good works by teaching that such deeds follow as fruits of justification. While such works contribute nothing to justification, they flow from it as necessary consequences. This conflicts with the Roman Catholic view that good works form faith and make it acceptable to God.

The Augsburg Confession of Faith is explicit in defining the church as the body of all true believers in Christ, the context within which the preaching of the Gospel and the proper administration of the sacraments occur. This church does not require hierarchical government, as Rome contended.

In addition to its teachings contrary to Catholicism, the Augsburg confession condemns the Anabaptists for rejecting infant baptism and for disdaining Christian participation in civil government as incompatible with true faith. The confession, on the contrary, calls for Christians to regard civil rulers as agents of God, and it urges believers to enter civil service if they have the opportunity. In making these assertions, the Evangelicals dissociated themselves from radicals, some of whom had engaged in violent social revolts.

A bitterly contested subject in the debates of that era pertained to the effects of sin on the human will, a matter that had engaged Luther against Desiderius Erasmus in 1524-1525. The confession upholds Luther’s teaching that the fall of humans into sin robbed them of genuine freedom in their relationship with God. Article 18 admits that people possess free will in their contacts with one another and they are able to achieve a sort of civic righteousness by deeds that benefit society. They cannot, however, please God unless his Holy Spirit regenerates them and empowers them to believe the Gospel and trust in Christ for forgiveness. Only as justified believers can they will to love God and obey his commandments.

Beginning in article 22, the Augsburg confession identifies specific practices of the Roman Church that the Evangelicals deemed contrary to Scripture and therefore were matters for reform. Prominent among them was the imposition of celibacy on the clergy, the contention that the Mass is a sacrificial reenactment of Calvary, and the inviolability of monastic vows. The confession rejects all these teachings as without biblical foundation. The controlling position of justification sola fide in Lutheran theology made rejection of such practices inevitable. At the root of the controversy with Rome was the issue of authority, because the Evangelicals insisted on the supremacy of Scripture as the arbiter in all matters of doctrine and practice. Although the Roman Church had, to that point, issued no official pronouncement about the relative authority of the Bible and the papacy, it became clear that this was the fundamental issue between Rome and Wittenberg. Melanchthon addressed that matter in his Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope in 1537.

Christian Themes

The desire of Charles V to achieve unity at Augsburg was not to be; Catholic theologians perceived correctly that, despite Melanchthon’s conciliatory language, the Catholic and Lutheran positions were incompatible, and while the diet was still in session, several more German states endorsed the Augsburg confession. The emperor then allowed a team of Catholic scholars to compose a confutation of the confession, which, he declared, had refuted the errors of the Evangelicals. He would not permit the dissidents to have a copy of the confutation, but they took notes during the reading, and Melanchthon soon produced Apologie de Confession aus dem Latin verdeudschet (1531; The Apologie, 1536). When the Protestants presented this to the emperor, he refused to accept it. The Apologie appeared in print in 1531 and quickly gained acceptance in Lutheran states. In 1537, Lutheran theologians meeting in Smalcald formally endorsed it as another confession of their church. In contrast to the pacific language of the Augsburg confession, that of The Apologie is polemical, even belligerent, evidence there was no longer any expectation of reconciliation with Rome. Luther often extolled Melanchthon’s confessional works as accurate summaries of Christian doctrine.

The history of the Augsburg confession after 1530 reflects the seriousness with which the Evangelicals regarded doctrinal precision. Melanchthon made several revisions of the confession, some of them relating to the condition of human nature as a consequence of the Fall. Rigorist Lutherans considered such revisions compromises with Rome, and they therefore insisted on adherence to the unaltered edition of 1531. When, in 1580, to heal intramural disputes about doctrine, Lutheran scholars and officials published their theological documents as the Konkordienbuch (1580; The Book of Concord, 1882), they included only the unaltered version of the Augsburg confession. It thereby became the primary statement of Lutheran orthodoxy, which it remains.

An English translation of the Confessio Augustana appeared in 1536, evidence of Luther’s broadening influence. When English and German theologians met at the request of King Henry VIII in 1538, they referred to the Augsburg confession as a basis for possible collaboration against Rome, and the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, which became the official declaration of the Anglican Church in 1563, shows the influence of the Augsburg confession. Luther maintained all who adhere to that document are brothers in Christ, and it is worthy to note that John Calvin was among numerous Protestant reformers to sign the confession, even though Lutherans and Calvinists became critical of one another after their mentors died.

Sources for Further Study

Bergendoff, Conrad. The Church of the Lutheran Reformation. St. Louis, Mo.: Concordia, 1967. This historical survey of Lutheranism is of great value for placing theological disputes within their contexts and showing how and why church leaders found it necessary to draft statements of faith.

Burgess, Joseph A., and George Lindbeck, eds. The Role of the Augsburg Confession: Catholic and Lutheran Views. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980. This collection of essays by distinguished scholars, Lutheran and Catholic, who seek a basis for reconciliation between their churches, contains much valuable historical information.

Junghans, Helmar. “Augsburg Confession.” In Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1996. This succinct yet substantial article presents events leading to adoption of the Augsburg confession in chronological sequence and demonstrates the concern for precise doctrine characteristic of the Evangelical reformers.

Kolb, Robert. Confessing the Faith. St. Louis, Mo.: Concordia, 1991. Written from a confessional point of view, this is a helpful examination of Lutheran beliefs in general and the role of the Augsburg Confession in particular.

Kolb, Robert, and Timothy J. Wengert, eds. The Book of Concord. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2000. This contains all historic doctrinal statements of the Lutheran Church in a fresh translation together with insightful introductions that relate each item to its context in history.