Augsburg Confession
Latin Confessio Augustana,
the 28 articles that constitute the basic confession of the Lutheran churches, presented June 25, 1530, in German and Latin at the Diet of Augsburg to the emperor Karl V by seven Lutheran princes and two imperial free cities. The principal author was the Reformer Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560), who drew on earlier Lutheran statements of faith. The purpose was to defend the Lutherans against misrepresentations and to provide a statement of their theology that would be acceptable to the Roman Catholics in the Holy Roman Empire. On August 3 the Catholic theologians replied with the so-called Confutation, which condemned 13 articles of the Confession, accepted 9 without qualifications, and approved 6 with qualifications. The emperor refused to receive a Lutheran counter-reply offered on September 22, but Melanchthon used it as the basis for his Apology of the Augsburg Confession (1531). The unaltered 1530 version of the Confession has always been authoritative for Lutherans, but proponents of the eucharistic doctrine of Zwingli (1484-1531) and Calvin (1509-1564) received a modified edition prepared by Melanchthon (the Variata of 1540).
The first 21 articles of the Unaltered Augsburg Confession set forth the Lutherans' overall doctrine in order to demonstrate that “they dissent in no article of faith from the Catholic Church.? The remaining seven articles discuss abuses that had crept into the Western Church in the centuries immediately preceding the Reformation: Communion under one kind (the people received the bread only), enforced priestly celibacy, the mass as an expiatory sacrifice, compulsory confession, human institutions designed to merit grace, abuses in connection with monasticism, and the expanded authority claimed by the bishops.
The Confession was translated into English in 1536 and was a definite influence on the Thirty-nine Articles of the Anglicans and the Twenty-five Articles of Religion of the Methodists.
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Sources
- Encylopedia Britannica 2002, Expanded Edition DVD
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