Formula of Concord

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.

The Formula was folded into the Book of Concord in 1580, alongside the three ecumenical creeds, both of Luther's catechisms, the Augsburg Confession and its Apology, and the Smalcald Articles, giving Lutheranism a single bound collection of confessional documents comparable to what the Reformed churches assembled piecemeal over the following century.

Around eight thousand clergy and officials across the German territories signed the Book of Concord in the years around 1580, an unusually broad subscription for the period, though several important territories, including electoral Brandenburg for a time and the city of Bremen, refused it and kept their churches on the Augsburg Confession alone. That split has outlasted the sixteenth century.

Confessional Lutheran bodies, including most Lutheran state churches and the conservative American synods, still require office bearers to subscribe to the whole Book of Concord as a correct exposition of Scripture. Other Lutheran churches, particularly those shaped by nineteenth century revivalism or twentieth century ecumenism, receive only the Augsburg Confession and Luther's Small Catechism as binding and treat the Formula of Concord as a historical document rather than a present standard, which is why a visitor cannot assume from the name Lutheran alone how much of the 1580 book a given congregation actually holds.