Settling the Quarrels Luther Left Behind

Luther's death in 1546 removed the one voice whose personal authority had kept Lutheran disagreements from splitting into open parties, and within a decade two camps had formed. Philippists, following Melanchthon's later and more conciliatory positions, clashed with Gnesio-Lutherans, self-styled genuine Lutherans who accused the Philippists of conceding too much to Rome and to the Reformed on free will, the necessity of good works, and above all the Lord's Supper, where the question was whether Christ's body is truly present even for unbelievers who receive the bread unworthily.

Jakob Andreae spent the 1570s touring Lutheran courts and universities trying to broker peace, and the text that resulted, refined with Martin Chemnitz and other theologians at Torgau and Bergen Abbey, took the form of a Solid Declaration answering twelve disputed articles point by point, each opening with the shared affirmative teaching and then listing the positions it rejected on both sides. It confirmed a strict doctrine of the real presence against both Zwinglian and Calvinist accounts of a merely spiritual eating, affirmed that good works are the necessary fruit of faith without being its cause, and treated the human will after the fall as capable of resisting grace but incapable of turning to God unaided. It closed debates that had run for thirty years, though not without losing the Philippist party in several territories that refused to sign.