Back in the early days of blogging (yes, I’m old enough to start posts constructed in this manner), I launched a blog on Blogger called Lutheran Confessions. I was at that time quite fascinated by the Lutheran confessional documents—I was in seminary, after all, and seminarians in our tradition take an entire semester course just on the Lutheran confessions.
I also like the double entendre—a Lutheran making confession, -or-, confessions of a Lutheran. I don’t know, it seemed clever at the time and I still basically like the name.
Fast forward 21 years (the blog is still up, you can still go back and see the early posts that began December of 2002), and here we are over at Substack, still blogging as Lutheran confessions, while admittedly operating out of some new theological centers than those that caught my attention as a young seminarian.
So I asked myself: what if I began a series on the blog now bringing some of the same intentions as back then, essentially offering an ongoing commentary on portions of THE Lutheran confessions? Would this be helpful? Would anyone read it?
Whoever it is who answers when I ask myself rhetorical questions responded, “Yes, some people would read it. Probably people new to Lutheranism, or new to our church, plus seminarians and maybe some colleagues and who knows who else…”
Then I asked, “Is this the series you should experiment with as a paid supplement to the blog, for paid subscribers, and I nervously answered with, “Yes?”
I really would like readers to financially support the new kind of publishing a lot of us are doing these days. Many of us would gladly head over to the bookstore later today and buy a novel or a commentary on the Lutheran confessions. Which then sits on the shelf and sometimes gets read.
But those of you who follow this blog read it when it arrives in your inbox, presumably. And over the course of a year you receive far more written content than one book.
So is this worth $5 a month, or $50 a year? I’d like to think it might be.
So, beginning this weekend, you can watch for the first installment in a series on the Lutheran confessional documents. You can pick up The Book of Concord and/or you can access it (in an older and a bit more dated translation) online. That’s what the Lutheran confessions are called when collected as a book.
The series will be for paid subscribers. I invite anyone who wants to support the blog in that way to do so now, or you can take a look over the weekend and decide whether it’s worth the subscription.
And of course if you just can’t pay for a blog right now but want to read it, send me a note and let me know. I’ll get you in.
So what are the Lutheran Confessions, and why do they matter now? Well, they are the distinguishing mark of Lutheranism. Episcopalians have their prayer book and Presbyterians have their church structure and Evangelicals have Christian Nationalism, etc., but the thing that distinguishes Lutheranism from other Protestant movements is its status as a confessional church.
Some Lutheran churches across the planet don’t even call themselves Lutheran… they call themselves Churches of the (Unaltered) Augsburg Confession. So we are defined as a movement especially by one document in the Book of Concord, the Augsburg Confession, and then there is further clarity on what Lutherans believe in a few other confessions included in the book, like the Formula of Concord and the Smalcald Articles and an entire DEFENSE of the Augsburg Confession.
There’s also a couple of catechisms, the large and the small, and a wholly intriguing entry on “the power and primacy of the pope.”
We’ll probably need to include essays over the next year on topics like “why is the Augsburg Confession the main confession,” and “why do some groups emphasize the AC only in its unaltered form?” We’ll probably need some entries on why I love the Smalcald Articles best, why I could pretty much do without the Formula of Concord, and also why Melanchthon is the primary author of so much of this book.
Sometimes we may just go in a series. There are 28 articles in the Augsburg Confession, for example, so we could if we wanted spend half a year on those, one article at a time.
But I suspect some of these will have more or less interest for readers (not to mention me as a blogger) so I can’t guarantee we’ll accomplish an exhaustive commentary on the whole of the confessions. Likely it will be more like forays, strolls through the forest.
What I can guarantee is we’ll be on a journey together asking ourselves a rather fundamental question for Lutheranism in 2023, “Is being a confessional church of any enduring value? Can these texts, now about 500 years old, still function as interpretive guides to the faith as we understand it presented in Scripture and the Christian life? Do we need new confessions? Are confessions even helpful in our new ways of living and thinking as Christians?
If that interests you, I invite you to sign up.