Augsburg Confession

Philip Melanchthon drafted the Augsburg Confession in the spring of 1530 as Emperor Charles V summoned the German princes to Augsburg to settle the religious division that had opened since Luther's protest thirteen years earlier. Melanchthon worked from the Schwabach and Torgau articles that Luther and his colleagues had already prepared, softening some of the language in the hope of a settlement the emperor might accept, while Luther himself stayed away, still under imperial ban and confined at the Coburg fortress reading drafts sent to him by courier.

The confession that resulted has two parts. Twenty one articles state the doctrine the reforming territories held in common with the ancient church, on God, original sin, the person of Christ, justification by faith and the church, phrased to show continuity rather than novelty wherever the drafters honestly could. Seven further articles defend specific changes already made in practice, communion in both kinds, clerical marriage, the abolition of private masses and monastic vows, arguing that each corrected an abuse rather than broke with catholic order.

Read publicly in German before the emperor on 25 June 1530, it satisfied neither the Catholic theologians who answered it with a Confutation nor the more radical reformers who thought it conceded too much, but it became the founding document of a distinct confessional church rather than the reconciling statement Melanchthon had hoped to produce.

The 1530 wording, soon called the Invariata to distinguish it from Melanchthon's own later revisions, became the confessional standard to which Lutheran ordination candidates and church constitutions still subscribe, printed at the head of the Book of Concord that Lutheran territories assembled in 1580 to close a generation of internal doctrinal disputes.

Melanchthon himself produced a revised Variata in 1540, softening the article on the Lord's Supper in a direction some Reformed theologians could accept, a text John Calvin was willing to sign but that confessional Lutherans came to regard as compromised and set aside in favor of the original. The confession gave its name to an entire church family: Augsburg Confession churches or evangelical Lutheran churches are still the working legal titles used in several European countries and their overseas daughter churches. Twentieth century ecumenical contact has treated the document as common ground rather than a barrier.

The Lutheran World Federation and the Roman Catholic Church signed a Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification in 1999, stating that the condemnations the two sides once traded over the article the Augsburg Confession states most sharply no longer apply to the other side's current teaching as each now presents it, a formal narrowing of a division that the Confutation of 1530 had first made official.