June 25, 2005

450 Years Book of Concord, 475 Years Augsburg Confession

The Augsburg Confession

On June 25, 1530, a handful of German princes supportive of the biblical teachings of Martin Luther and his associates presented a statement of faith or “confession” to the German Emperor Charles V. This document, written by Luther’s co-worker Philip Melanchthon, became known as the Augsburg Confession because at the time the Emperor and the princes of the German Empire were assembled at Augsburg for political and religious deliberations and decisions. In this confession, the “Lutherans” stated the main tenets of their teaching to show to all concerned: We are not teaching anything new; we’ve merely done away with the un-Biblical teachings and anti-Biblical practices that had crept into the Church in the course of past centuries.

To this very day, the Augsburg Confession of 1530 is held in high esteem among those who desire to be confessing Lutherans: We do not only recognize it as an interesting piece of our church’s history or “tradition.” We actually submit our teaching to this “old” document. Why do we do that? Aren’t we supposed to follow only the Bible? True. But Lutherans nonetheless submit to the norm of the Augsburg Confession simply because it is no more, and no less, than a summary of God’s Word, the Bible, which is, of course, the sole source and norm of all doctrine in the Christian Church. This is certainly one important reason for holding to the Augsburg Confession to this very day.

There is, however, another reason for this. After many centuries of darkness, the Augsburg Confession again brought the light of the pure Biblical Gospel of Jesus Christ. What is this Gospel? That we are declared righteous, free of all sin, saved, purely because of the life and death of the God-man, Jesus Christ. That the means of grace (God’s Word, Baptism, the Lord’s Supper) are not our works of obedience, but God’s works of grace which effectively convey Christ’s saving benefit to us by way of Gospel-promises. And that the benefit of Christ’s life and death is apprehended by faith alone, without any good works. This Gospel had been obscured by all sorts of man-made teachings that, in one way or another, placed the burden of salvation on our all-too weak shoulders. In tragic self-delusion, sinners love this sort of legalism because it gives us something “important” to do and takes away from God’s glory who wants to be our sole Savior. This, then, is the second key reason why Lutherans gladly submit to the Augsburg Confession, and why they invite others to do the same.

The Book of Concord

The Augsburg Confession is an accurate summary of God’s Word. But it is not an exhaustive one. It chiefly addresses only those questions which were controversial between Lutherans and Catholics at the time. However, after Luther’s death in 1546 inner-Lutheran controversies broke out and threatened to wipe the truth off the earth once more. These controversies came about when compromising Lutherans sought to bridge the painful gaps that had emerged between them and the Roman Church on the one hand and between them and the Reformed Churches on the other hand. It did not help matters that Luther’s close associate and self-styled successor, Ph. Melanchthon, was one of those who compromised the confessional and evangelical clarity of the Augsburg Confession for the sake of outward peace and harmony.

Many were the conflicts that raged within the Lutheran Churches in those years. The doctrinal consensus expressed in the Augsburg Confession seemed gone for good. However, in the 1570s a new generation of Lutheran theologians was raised up. They were able to unite the divided Lutherans around a new confession, which, in fact, is no more than a restatement of the Augsburg Confession. This new confession addresses all the recent divisions by God’s Word; in other words, it is another summary of Holy Scripture. It is called the Bergen Book, better known as the Formula of Concord. It was published on May 29, 1577. On June 25, 1580, fifty years after the first public reading of the Augsburg Confession before the German Emperor, the Book of Concord was published. This date was chosen to commemorate the Augsburg Confession and the recently restored doctrinal concord and consensus it has come to represent for Lutherans. The Book of Concord contains ten statements of faith altogether. It begins with the three ancient creeds we to this day use in our services, the Apostles’, the Nicene, and the Athanasian Creeds, which summarizes Scripture’s teaching on God and Christ. It furthermore includes the 1530 Augsburg Confession; the 1531 Apology (Defense) of the Augsburg Confession; the 1529 Small and Large Catechisms of Luther; the 1537 Smalcald Articles and the Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope; and, finally, the 1577 Formula of Concord.

Lutherans regard the entire Book of Concord, like the Augsburg Confession contained in it, as a faithful summary of God’s Word. This is why it determines what we believe, teach, and confess to this very day. If there is a teaching that does not agree with the Book of Concord, it has no place in our churches because then it also does not agree with God’s Word itself. Those who agree with the teachings of the Book of Concord also agree with the teachings of Scripture. That is, we – who as Pastor and Congregation have vowed to submit our teaching to this collection of confessions – stand in direct continuity with the church of the Scriptures, the church of the prophets and apostles: the one, holy, Christian, and apostolic Church of all times and all places. We teach as it teaches. This is not a reason for pride; we have done nothing to deserve this. It is, rather, a reason for gratitude that our merciful God still grants us unthankful sinners the light of his truth. It is also a commission for service: to reach out to those in the darkness of sinful error with the splendor of the truth of the pure Gospel of Jesus Christ, as it is revealed in the Scriptures and faithfully confessed in the Book of Concord.

Confessing Today

All congregations and all pastors of the Missouri Synod have subscribed to the Book of Concord. That is, we all accept it as being in full agreement with God’s Word. Not all Lutherans accept the Book of Concord in this way. The ELCA, for example, sees it merely as an important milestone in the “development” of Christian teaching. In other words, for the largest American Lutheran church body, the Book of Concord is of historical interest only: It tells us what people believed a long time ago; our own teaching must be different because we live in a different time and place. (This view is not surprising because the ELCA has already some time ago rejected Holy Scripture as God’s Word, that is, as the church’s only norm of faith and life; the results of the self-destructive action are becoming more and more apparent. – And if you don’t have God’s Word, you also can’t summarize it.) In fact, many today are very reluctant to make, or accept, any binding statements of faith. Isn’t faith too private a matter, they wonder. Who would want to “judge” whether the sincerely-held belief of one person is wrong or not? Can’t Christians honestly disagree on what God’s Word means, e.g., when it comes to Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, or to Scripture and justification? Isn’t it enough to subscribe to a few general statements to consider ourselves “Christian” and even “united in the faith” – why get into all the divisive details?

The confessors of 1530 and 1580 remind us: We cannot remain silent where God’s Word has spoken (see Amos 3:8). We are not at liberty to set God’s Word (as a whole or in part) aside to achieve peace and harmony in the church; indifference toward false teaching is not a Christian virtue. Christ has commissioned his church to teach his entire Word, not to pick and choose what finds the approval of unbelievers (see Matt. 28:20; Luke 9:26; John 8:31). This commission, on the one hand, will create divisions, because sinful man, unless it is granted to him, will not, and cannot, accept any of God’s Word; he will want to remain in charge and decide for himself which “minor detail” to accept and which to reject. And according to God’s Word, those divisive people who teach, or believe, their own words instead of God’s Word need to be avoided (see Rom. 16:17; 2 Thess. 3:6, 14; Tit. 3:10), lest a little leaven leavens the whole lump (Gal. 5:9). – On the other hand, Christ’s commission will again and again create true God-pleasing unity in the Church and in worship, a unity that is based, not on human compromise, but on a joint confession of what God has said in his unchanging Word, the Bible (see Rom. 15:5-6; 1 Cor. 1:10). Let us rejoice and join in this confession of God’s abiding and saving truth!