I’ll always remember with an admixture of nostalgia and bemusement my first year of seminary. It’s a strange new world, full of language study and all the equipment of graduate school but with the earnestness of a whole student body who want to help people.
Early in the coursework students were dropped into a course called Confessions. The syllabus included The Book of Concord, plus a bunch of other commentaries and material written by that rather small subset of (mostly white male) theologians who made living writing commentaries on confessional documents.1
The professors for the course were Jim Nestingen and Gerhard Forde. Nestingen, somewhat famously at least within Midwest Lutheran circles, was a church historian who had produced a popular series of lectures on the Small Catechism2, delivered with the quasi-North Dakotan/Canadian accent he had somewhat affectedly adopted during his career. Forde was the systematic theologian, a profoundly generative theologian I’ve written about elsewhere.
I’ll confess: I didn’t know there WAS a Book of Concord until I went to seminary. I had studied the Small Catechism in confirmation (still the era when we had to memorize it), but wasn’t aware there was a whole collection of confessional texts. But, there’s nothing like the zeal of young seminarians, so as the pictorial directory for our class was produced, at least a few of the students chose to take their pictures with their copy of The Book of Concord IN the headshot next to their heads.
I still have my copy of the confessions from that time, the red Tappert translation. There has subsequently been a new translation made, in blue binding, the Wengert translation. My nostalgia has me going back to the red volume as I write these blog posts; perhaps also the usefulness of the notes I’ve written in the margins.
Overall, both Forde and Nestingen liked Luther more than Melanchthon, so not surprisingly I was trained to especially appreciate the portions of the catechism directly authored by Luther. Those would be the Small Catechism, the Large Catechism, and the Smalcald Articles3. Smalcald in particular are fascinating because, although they were not originally adopted as confessions of the Lutheran Church when first presented, they were later adopted and taken up into the collection. Designed at first for whatever Church Council the Roman Catholics would host to examine the Lutheran movement (this ended up being the Council of Trent in 1545, about eight years after the Smalcald Articles were written), they are a statement of what the Lutherans “could or could not yield.”
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