[This marks week #3 in what will be a year-long series on the Lutheran confessions. Today I’m providing the entirety of it without a pay-wall, to give readers a sense of what you get each week if you become a paid subscriber. Thanks to all those who support this blog!]
If you examine the table of contents of the Book of Concord, you’ll notice the majority of it was written in a brief period between 1529 and 1537.
Having just made the rounds among new Lutheran parishes in and around Wittenberg (and discovered considerable lack of basic knowledge of the Christian faith), in 1529 Luther and Melanchthon had gotten busy writing the Large and Small Catechisms for use in parishes.
Soon after, in 1530, the Augsburg Confession was made before the authorities, Melanchthon published an apology to the AC in 1531, and then two further documents were published that eventually warranted inclusion in the collected Lutheran confessions: a set of articles much like the Augsburg Confession that is my favorite part of the whole of the confessions, Luther’s Smalcald Articles, and the long essay/treatise on the power and primacy of the pope.
After 1537, nothing else is written that warrants inclusion. In 1545, Martin Luther dies, and the ensuing years (from roughly 1550-1567) mark a major Lutheran confessional period. Various Lutherans mark out some unique positions on practical and theological matters, and eventually a final document is published designed to resolve some additional disputes among them: this last portion is the Formula of Concord, published in 1577.
As a reader of these texts, I find myself much less drawn to that Formula than I do to some of the earliest texts, and it does make me wonder why. I believe the answer may reside in the extent to which some of the confessions are “personal,” that is, written by one person and marked by their personality and manner of thinking; vs. those texts that are more of a document-by-committee, which is certainly closer to the way the Formula was “formulated.”
Now, to be clear, there are actual authors of the Formula also. After Luther’s death, a division had arisen among Lutherans between the so-called Gnesio-Lutherans and the Philippists. The Gnesio-Lutherans, led by Matthias Flacius, claimed to derive their theological viewpoint from the “pure” teachings of Luther. Alternatively the Philippists forwarded the work of Philip Melanchthon, sometimes to extremes.
A few of those theologians working these fields of thought such as Martin Chemnitz, James Andreae, Luke Osiander and Balthasar Bidembach, each drafted portions of the text that became, when assembled, the Formula. So the Formula does have an “authorship.” But probably what puts me off from it as just a simple reader is the reality that although in all the other texts of the Book of Concord you have the direct work of Luther and Melanchthon but in the Formula you have a “laboratory” in Lutheran theology.1
If you haven’t yet done so, I encourage all those following this blog to try this exercise: open each section of the Lutheran confessions and just read the beginning of each. It’s interesting to get a sense of the tone or approach. As just one comparison, the Formula starts out with rather long and heady formulaic titles and approaches, whereas the Smalcald Articles begin with a preface of Dr. Martin Luther.
Personal voice vs. draft by committee…
Quite intriguingly, in that preface to the Smalcald Articles, Martin Luther has this to say:
I have decided to published these articles so that, if I should die before a council meets (which I fully expect, for those knaves who shun the light and flee from the day take such wretched pains to postpone and prevent the council), those who live after me may have my testimony and confession to show where I have stood until now and where, by God’s grace, I continue to stand…
Why do I say this? Why should I complain? I am still alive. I am still writing, preaching, and lecturing every day. Yet there are some who are so spiteful—not only among our adversaries, but also false brethren among those who profess to be adherents of our party—that they dare to cite my writings and teachings against me. They let me look on and listen, although they know very well that I teach otherwise. They try to clothe their venomous spirits in the garments of my labor and thus mislead the poor people in my name. Imagine what will happen after I am dead!
Here Luther is naming the “founder effect” and saying the quiet part out loud. It’s something almost all movements must deal with and address. For example, even in Scripture itself, the New Testament is so chock full of texts written by one person (Paul) that a not insignificant work of exegesis is determining to what extent what we read in Paul counts as “Scripture” and what is idiosyncratically just Paul being Paul.
Sometimes Paul even mentions this himself in his letter, at one point in 1 Corinthians saying, “To rest I say this (I and not the Lord),” thus intriguingly presenting all of us readers with a situation where we must consider not only that the letters of Paul are considered Scripture and therefore a word from the Lord, but that even Paul as the author of the letter believed them to be “the Lord,” except in an instance where he says it isn’t.
Returning to the Lutheran Confessions, we begin to discover the hermeneutical complexity of confessions. We’re presented with the need to decide the level of authority such confessions have over against other texts. Yes, the catechisms written by Luther are part of the confessions, but then what about all the other writings of Luther?
Yes, the authors of the Formula gathered over 8000 signatures and published the Formula on the 50th anniversary of the reading of the Augsburg Confession before Charles V, but does that mean we read the Formula as having the same authority as the texts Luther wrote before he died, knowing as we do that the Formula is more Luther’s theological conclusions set out on the basis of Melanchthon’s method and filtered through the emerging voices of that major confessional period from 1550-1567.
And we ask ourselves all these questions before we even introduce all kinds of other hermeneutical questions about Scripture and confessions given the critical literary and historical tools now in place in modern and post-modern thought.
In the end, although each Christian community will have to decide for themselves whether a confession like the Lutheran confessions is something they might subscribe to as a faithful interpretation of Scripture, they will be better served in deciding such if they also recognize that even the Lutheran confessions had a developmental process, one keyed to the greatest publishing phenomenon Europe had ever seen, then filtered through the method of one of the greatest systematic communicators and letter-writers of that same generation.
How much credibility, interpretive power, can such a text carry into the present? Luther stakes a lot on writing it all down even though he witnesses adversaries citing his own writing against him while he is still alive. “Those who live after me may have my testimony and confession to show where I have stood until now and where, by God’s grace, I continue to stand.”
In another sense this is also what a confession is: like a last will and testament to what we have and continue to believe.
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Ok, I’ve now mentioned a couple of times that the Smalcald Articles are my favorite part of the confessions. So as not to keep teasing that point without leaning into it, plan on seeing a mini-series the next few weeks specifically on those articles. Until next week…
Maybe it’s like the difference between reading one of the original Dune novels vs. reading later novels in the Dune franchise.