Lutheran Confessions and Catechisms
Origin. The Lutheran confessional tradition originated with a work which has never achieved official ‘confessional’ standing in the Lutheran churches—*Martin Luther’s Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper of 1528. In the third part of that work, following his extensive polemic against *Zwingli, Luther presented an overview of his teaching, in order to hinder the use of his name in support of error after his death: ‘I want in this work to confess my faith, point by point, before God and the whole world. I mean to abide in this faith until death, and in it to depart from this world (may God help me so to do) and come before the judgement seat of my Lord Jesus Christ’ (WA 26:499).
Luther’s personal confession was not only a crucial source for other confessional writings, especially the Augsburg Confession, but it also shaped in an abiding way the Lutheran understanding of what is at stake in confessions of faith. A confessional statement is not only an instrument of church order or an expression of negotiated consensus; it is always also an eschatological declaration, a public account of that by which a community pledges to live and die and stand before divine judgement. In the background are the words of Jesus in Matthew 10:32: ‘Everyone therefore who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven; but whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven’ (nrsv). This eschatological dimension of ‘confessions’ should not be forgotten even as other factors in the development of Lutheran confessionalism are taken seriously. Two such factors are of particular importance.
In the first place, in sixteenth-century Europe questions of religious faith were inevitably public questions, which engaged civil society as a whole. It was thus necessary for those who accepted the Wittenberg Reformation to give a public account of their doctrine before the larger Christian community, within which church and state were not easily disentangled. This is the background especially of the Augsburg Confession (1530), its Apology (1531), the Schmalkaldic Articles (1537) and the Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope (1537). A second factor was the internal need of the Lutheran churches themselves. The Saxon Church Visitation of 1528 disclosed a level of ignorance and disarray in the congregations which Luther and his colleagues found shocking. Luther’s Small Catechism (1529) and Large Catechism (1529) were written in part to address this situation. Another form of internal need arose from intra-Lutheran controversy, especially after Luther’s death, when the unity of the German Lutheran churches was nearly shattered by contending parties claiming to represent the true legacy of the Reformer. This was the background to the ‘Formula of Concord’ (1577), as well as to the gathering of the whole body of Lutheran confessional writings in the Book of Concord (1580).
The following summary follows the order in which the Confessions appear in the Book of Concord, which deviates from chronological sequence in its placement of the Catechisms.
The three chief symbols or creeds of the Christian faith. The Book of Concord begins not with sixteenth-century writings but with three texts from the ancient church: the *Apostles’ Creed, the *Nicene Creed and the so-called *Athanasian Creed. This was not an afterthought of the compilers but corresponds to the content of the sixteenth-century confessions themselves, which persistently refer to and ground themselves on the creedal inheritance represented by these documents. The Augsburg Confession begins by affirming the ‘decree of the Council of Nicaea’ as ‘true and to be believed without any doubting’ (Art. 1). The Schmalkaldic Articles likewise begin with the ‘high articles of the divine Majesty’ (Pt. 1), the Trinitarian and Christological dogmas of the ancient church. At the centre of the Catechisms is the exposition of the Apostles’ Creed. The ‘Formula of Concord’ pledges itself to the creedal orthodoxy of the ancient catholic church and describes the Lutheran Reformation as continuing the struggle of the Fathers on behalf of pure doctrine. This consistent and unambiguous affirmation of continuity in faith with the ancient church is of considerable importance for the interpretation of the confessional writings as a whole.
The Augsburg Confession. On 21 January 1530, the Emperor Charles V summoned a diet to address the widening religious division in the empire, ‘so that we might all live in one fellowship, church, and unity’ (‘Preface’, citing the imperial summons). The imperial estates met in Augsburg starting in May of that year. The Augsburg Confession (or Confessio Augustana, sometimes referred to simply as the ‘Augustana’) was produced there on behalf of the evangelical estates amidst a complex process of negotiation, going through multiple drafts and redrafts in a comparatively short period of time. *Philip Melanchthon acted as chief theological adviser to the evangelical princes and city governments, and he was the chief author of the confession. Luther, who was outlawed in the empire, could not attend but stayed restlessly at Castle Coburg, where he was consulted by letter. The confession was written in both German and Latin; while it was the German text which was publicly read to the emperor, both versions have been regarded as authoritative in the subsequent Lutheran tradition.
The initial assumption of the Wittenbergers was that the diet would chiefly discuss disputed points of church practice, since the imperial summons seemed to assume that all parties shared a common faith. Upon arriving at Augsburg, however, they discovered a much chillier atmosphere than anticipated. The emperor was in any case inclined to defend established belief and practice, and Luther’s old enemy, *Johann Eck, had presented him with a list of 404 heretical statements drawn both from the Wittenberg theologians and their opponents on the left. The catholic faith of the evangelical estates and churches was therefore under attack. It was in this context that the confession took its eventual form.
As finally presented to the emperor on 25 June 1530, the Augsburg Confession falls into two main parts. The first part (Art. 1–21) deals with matters of faith. In Articles 1–3, the evangelicals declare their agreement with both the Trinitarian and Christological teaching of the ancient church, and the western *Augustinian consensus on original sin. Articles 4–20 set forth the evangelical theology of salvation, treating the themes of justification, church, sacraments and newness of life, as well as a handful of miscellaneous issues. The second part (Art. 22–28) takes up a series of disputed points of church practice: the distribution of the cup to the laity in the Lord’s Supper, clerical marriage, the Mass, private confession, rules regarding fasting and other ceremonies, monastic vows and church government.
The overall strategy of the Augsburg Confession is to argue (1) that the faith of the evangelicals is grounded in Scripture and not contrary to the teaching of the universal church; and (2) that in view of such agreement in faith, differences in practice do not give the old-believing bishops and estates legitimate grounds to break church fellowship, for example by the bishops refusing to ordain evangelicals to the priesthood. In its historical context, therefore, the Augustana was anything but a denominational declaration of independence; it was an ecumenical appeal written not to justify, but if possible to prevent, the division of the church.
Signed by seven princes and the representatives of two free cities, the Augsburg Confession nonetheless speaks on behalf of ‘the churches among us’ and thus claims ecclesial significance. Given its solemn and highly public character, as well as its own intrinsic merits, it quickly became an authoritative identity marker for the churches of the Wittenberg Reformation; eventually it was recognized in law as the confessional basis for the Lutheran estates within the empire. Thus, contrary to its original ecumenical intention, the Augustana came to function as the charter of a special denominational tradition within a divided church.
Philip Melanchthon, it should be noted, continued throughout his life to regard the confession as an instrument of Christian unity. However, he put this concern into practice by periodically rewriting the text to address new ecumenical junctures, not only with Roman Catholics but also with the Reformed. This was greeted with suspicion and anger by many other Lutherans, who regarded the text as the public property of the Lutheran churches, no longer under its author’s control. Thus subsequent Lutheran tradition often refers pointedly to the ‘Unaltered Augsburg Confession’ (Confessio Augustana Invariata) of 1530 as the authoritative text.
The Apology of the Augsburg Confession. On 3 August 1530, the Roman party at Augsburg presented the emperor with a point-by-point rebuttal of the Augsburg Confession, known as the Roman Confutation (Confutatio Pontificia). The emperor demanded that the evangelicals admit on the spot that their views had been refuted, and he refused to allow them to have a copy of the Confutation until they did so. Instead, Melanchthon was assigned the task of writing a response on the basis of notes taken during the reading; though a draft was prepared by 22 September, the emperor refused to receive it. After his return to Wittenberg, Melanchthon continued to revise and enlarge his response, finally acquiring the text of the Confutation in October. The completed Apology of the Augsburg Confession was published at the end of April or the beginning of May of 1531. Originally appearing as a private work of Melanchthon, it acquired corporate standing when it was adopted as a statement of faith by the Schmalkaldic League in 1537.
In character, the Apology is unmistakably a theological treatise. It deals extensively with the points at which the Roman Confutation rejected the doctrine of the Augsburg Confession, especially the doctrine of justification. The original Augsburg strategy is continued: Melanchthon argues that the teaching of the Augustana is founded on Scripture and consistent with the consensus of the Fathers, differing only from the distortion of the faith by late-medieval scholastic theologians, especially the *nominalists.
The Apology is in certain respects unique among the Lutheran confessional texts. On the one hand, its presence in the confessional tradition prevents the much starker formulations of the Augsburg Confession from being received in too bare and schematic a fashion, for Melanchthon’s defence roots the confessional formulations deeply in the history of doctrine and thus provides them with a richness of resonance that would otherwise be lacking. On the other hand, how is its authority as public doctrine to be understood, if it is not to bind the whole subsequent theological tradition to Melanchthon’s particular development of Reformation themes? The ‘Formula of Concord’ (Solid Declaration, Rule and Norm) suggests that it be read as an interpretive guide to the Augsburg Confession, which thus retains its central place. On the basis of the Apology, readings of the Augustana that caricature or distort its doctrine can be ruled out, and the precise scope of its positive teaching can be clarified.
The Schmalkaldic Articles. In June 1536, Pope Paul III called a council to meet in Mantua the following year. Though the council did not actually convene until 1545 in Trent, the papal summons presented the Lutherans with a challenge. The elector of Saxony responded by asking Luther to draw up a statement distinguishing those issues on which the faith itself was at stake from those on which concessions might be made. Luther complied despite severe illness and produced what later became known as the Schmalkaldic Articles, which were reviewed, amended and signed by a small group of theologians in December of 1536.
The subsequent history of the Articles is a complex lesson in the dynamics of the reception of doctrine in the church. The elector took the Articles with him to Schmalkalden in February of 1537 in the hope that they might be adopted as an official statement of the Schmalkaldic League, a defensive alliance of the evangelical estates. Yet despite these hopes, and despite the name eventually attached to them, the Schmalkaldic Articles were not adopted by the Schmalkaldic League at Schmalkalden. Philip Melanchthon, who had signed, the Articles in December, was instrumental in persuading the representatives of the League that they would be counterproductive if officially adopted (Luther was present at Schmalkalden, but he was bedridden the entire time). At the same time, the Articles were signed by a large number of the theologians and clergy who were present. Luther published the Articles in 1538, and over subsequent decades they came to be widely acknowledged as an authentic witness to Lutheran teaching and were received as such into the Book of Concord.
In the background is the character of the Articles themselves, and the circumstances of their composition. Luther was suffering with excruciating attacks of kidney stones and gallstones while he wrote them, and he believed quite soberly that he was dying. Thus the Articles are an intensely personal document, written in Luther’s least accommodating style—clear, pointed and almost flamboyantly polemical. The division of the evangelicals from the ‘Papists’ is declared to be eternal and irreparable, and the pope is solemnly declared to be the antichrist prophesied in Scripture. Their character as ‘Luther’s theological testament’ added immensely to the authority of the Articles in the churches, while at the same time rendering them less plausible for the purposes of the League. The tension between the ecumenical hopefulness of the Augsburg Confession and the apocalyptic defiance of the Schmalkaldic Articles is perhaps impossible to resolve. At the same time, the Articles contain some of Luther’s most lucid theological writing, including the strongest articulation within the confessional writings of the characteristic Lutheran doctrine of the essential role of the ‘outward’ or ‘bodily’ word (Pt. III, Art. 8).
The Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope. This brief essay was written by Melanchthon at the request of the authorities assembled at Schmalkalden; unlike Luther’s Articles, it was adopted officially by the League, along with the Augsburg Confession and the Apology. The Treatise was commissioned as a supplement to the Augsburg Confession, which had deliberately avoided any discussion of the papacy; by 1537 it had become clear that the issue was inescapable. The Treatise attacks the claims of both pope and bishops to govern the church by divine right; its arguments must be carefully situated against the background of late-medieval papal and episcopal theories, and it should not be assumed to respond directly to subsequent accounts of papal and episcopal authority. In the course of its primarily negative arguments, the Treatise sets forth many important principles of the early Lutheran understanding of church, ministry and authority.
The Small and Large Catechisms. Luther’s Catechisms were written in response to the internal needs of the evangelical churches. As early as 1525, Luther had delegated the writing of a handbook of religious instruction to his friends Justus Jonas and Johannes Agricola, but this did not take place, and in the context of the Saxon Church Visitation of 1528 Luther himself undertook the task. Drawing on three series of sermons preached in 1528, Luther started writing the Large Catechism in the autumn of that year and began the Small Catechism in December. The Large Catechism was published in April 1529 as the German Catechism; it received its present title after 1541. The completed Small Catechism was published as an illustrated pamphlet in May 1529.
The Catechisms are, in essence, commentaries on five basic Christian texts: the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer and the biblical passages in which baptism and the Lord’s Supper are instituted. Both Catechisms in their final form deal also with private confession and absolution; the Small Catechism incorporates a brief liturgical order for this rite. The Small Catechism also adds instructions for family prayer, and a ‘Table of Duties’ (Haustafel), made up of Scripture passages which specify the obligations of the various members of the household. In addition, many editions of the Small Catechism have included Luther’s ‘Baptism Booklet’ (Taufbuchlein) and ‘Marriage Booklet’ (Traubuchlein), liturgical orders with theological prefaces. Some editions have also included the ‘German Litany’.
The two Catechisms are independent, if closely associated, works. The Small Catechism is not merely an abridgement of the large Catechism, nor is the latter an expansion of the former. The Small Catechism, written in question and-answer form with lucid simplicity and a complete absence of polemic, was intended for laypeople—and especially for children. Its resonant phrasing lends itself to memorization. The Large Catechism is a manual for those with the responsibility for teaching, especially pastors and schoolmasters. More discursive, and therefore more polemical than the Small Catechism, it nonetheless displays a comparable clarity and vigour, as well as a disciplined focus on the basic structure and inner coherence of the faith.
Despite their independence in detail, the two Catechisms display a common theological structure. The Ten Commandments and the First Article of the Apostles’ Creed are bound together as instruction about the will of the Creator, who calls human creatures to live before him in fear, love and trust. The Second and Third Articles of the Creed describe God’s rescue of human beings when we had fallen under the tyranny of the devil: the Son of God has acquired our salvation by shedding his holy and innocent blood on the cross, and the Holy Spirit distributes this salvation through the word and the sacraments in the Christian church. The exposition of the Lord’s Prayer then depicts the embattled holiness of the little flock, which is sanctified by the Spirit in daily conflict with the world, the flesh and the devil. The presentation of the sacraments describes the concrete means by which we are protected from the devil’s spite and brought to Christ in order to live under his gracious rule. Thus the five main parts of the Catechism form a sort of triptych, with the Decalogue and the First Article of the Creed as one side panel, the Third Article, the Lord’s Prayer and the sacraments, as the other, and in the centre the exposition of the Second Article, focused in both Catechisms on the confession of Jesus Christ as ‘Lord’.
The Catechisms were immediately popular, and they had been through many printings and been included in several church orders and collections of confessional documents before they were received into the Book of Concord. Their significance in the Lutheran tradition is indicated by the description given them in the ‘Formula’: they are ‘the layperson’s Bible, in which everything is contained which is treated more extensively in Holy Scripture, and which is necessary for a Christian to know in order to be saved’ (Epitome, Rule and Norm). The Small Catechism in particular has been not only a textbook but also a prayer book for generations of Lutherans; it has perhaps shaped *Lutheranism as a form of lived and practised Christianity as much or more than the Augsburg Confession.
The ‘Formula of Concord’. Martin Luther died in 1546, and in 1547 the evangelical estates suffered crushing military defeat at the hands of the emperor. German Lutheranism entered the 1550s demoralized and dispirited, and under strong pressure to seek religious and political alliances in either the Reformed or the Roman direction.
During the 1550s, moreover, theological tension mounted between rival theological factions. On the one side were the so-called ‘Gnesio-Lutherans’, (the ‘authentic’ Lutherans) who took their stand on what they believed to be Luther’s teaching, while at the same time often pressing his thought to extreme conclusions. Thus Matthias Flacius Illyricus, the brilliantly obdurate theologian who was the most distinguished representative of this tendency, taught that after the Fall sin has become the very essence of the human creature; while Nicholas von Amsdorf, an old comrade-in-arms of Luther’s, taught that good works were actually detrimental to salvation. Both theologians were making serious points, but at the price of a rupture with the western theological tradition which other Lutherans were not willing to countenance. On the other side were the so called ‘Philippists’, named after their teacher, Philip Melanchthon, who were ready to make concessions to Rome on both the doctrine of grace and issues of church practice, and to Geneva on the theology of the Eucharist. A whole array of secondary controversies arose at the same time to complicate the situation. By 1557 it had become clear that the Lutherans were seriously divided, and attempts by evangelical princes to negotiate a truce in 1558 and 1561 were ineffective.
The ‘Formula of Concord’ was the outcome of a process of consensus-formation led by a diverse team of younger theologians—especially Jakob Andreae and *Martin Chemnitz—who were convinced that the authentic Lutheran ground lay somewhere between the two conflicting parties. Like the Gnesio-Lutherans, they were committed to a robust reception of Luther’s teaching on justification and the sacraments; but they shared with the Philippists a commitment to articulating Lutheran themes in substantial continuity with the western theological tradition. With financial support from a group of evangelical princes, these theologians orchestrated a Large-scale doctrinal colloquy that lasted from 1568 to 1577. Draft texts were produced by individuals or small committees of theologians and circulated to universities, conferences of clergy and distinguished colleagues, and then new drafts were prepared on the basis of comments received. The final text in the process was achieved at Bergen Abbey in 1577, and it largely achieved its goal of halting the disintegration of German Lutheranism by marking out a common ground capable of wide acceptance. Between 1577 and 1580 it was signed by three electors, 20 dukes and princes, 24 counts, four barons, 35 imperial cities and 8,188 theologians, pastors and teachers.
The ‘Formula of Concord’ in its final form consists of two parts, the so-called Epitome and the Solid Declaration. The Epitome is a relatively concise summary of the Solid Declaration, which is itself the final text of 1577, the so called ‘Bergen Book’. The ‘Formula’ contains an opening account of the criteria of pure doctrine and the confessional basis of Lutheranism, followed by twelve articles which address the divisive issues of the previous three decades: (1) original sin, (2) grace and free will, (3) the righteousness of faith, (4) good works and salvation, (5) the distinction of law and gospel, (6) the function of the law for believers, (7) the Lord’s Supper, (8) the person of Christ, (9) his descent into hell, (10) church practices not commanded by divine law (known as adiaphora or ‘things indifferent’) and (11) divine election. The twelfth article repudiates a disparate bundle of miscellaneous errors ascribed to *Anabaptists, Schwenkfelders and anti—Trinitarians. A Catalog of Testimonies was also added to the ‘Formula’, which was essentially an anthology of patristic citations supporting the Christological teaching of Article 8.
The ‘Formula’ was decisively important for the definition of Lutheranism as a particular confessional theology in the post-Reformation divided church. Combining a strong emphasis on sola scriptura with a lively appreciation for church doctrine, an austerely Augustinian theology of sin and grace with rejection of *Calvinist double-predestinarianism, a forensic account of justification with an articulate concern for sanctification and renewal of life, and a high doctrine of Christ’s bodily real presence in the Eucharist with rejection of transubstantiation and the sacrifice of the Mass, the ‘Formula’ marked out the distinctive ground Lutherans would occupy for centuries to come—and at the same time it set up tensions that would motivate, energize and sometimes frustrate the subsequent Lutheran theological tradition.
The Book of Concord. A last stage in the formation of the Lutheran Confessions was the assembly and publication of the Book of Concord itself by the same team of theologians who had produced the ‘Formula’. The establishment of a normative canon of confessional texts is itself necessarily a confessional act—a point not wasted on the theologians, who saw to it that the Book of Concord was published on 25 June 1580, fifty years to the day after the presentation of the Augsburg Confession to Charles V. The collection was introduced by a preface discussing at some length the preceding history and describing the nature of the doctrinal ‘concord’ achieved; this preface was written in the name of the princes and city governments who accepted the Book of Concord as a body of public doctrine in their territories, and it is they who are its signatories.
Reception and interpretation. The ‘Formula of Concord’ was addressed primarily to the woes of the Lutheran churches in Germany, and it was never received as a normative confession of faith in the churches of Norway, Denmark and Iceland. Indeed, in 1580, the sovereign of all three realms, Frederick II, fearing the introduction of the German controversies into his dominions, declared it a capital offence to import, sell or possess a copy of the ‘Formula’! Even in Germany, moreover, acceptance of the ‘Formula’ by the Lutheran territories was not universal, though it was sufficient to redefine the Lutheran theological centre.
Still today, the Lutheran churches of the world receive the Lutheran confessional tradition in different ways. Particular Lutheran church bodies accept different documents as normative and ascribe different weights to the documents they receive. Three patterns of reception are most common. Some churches receive the entire Book of Concord as a unified body of doctrine without internal differentiation among its parts. Other churches receive the Book of Concord in a differentiated way, giving special weight to the Augsburg Confession and the Small Catechism. Finally, still other Lutheran bodies accept only the Augsburg Confession and the Small Catechism as normative.
These differences in reception are complicated by differences in the way the Confessions are interpreted. In the post-Reformation period, the confessions of faith received by a particular church came to have the force of public law, prescribing the boundaries within which church life and theological teaching were constrained to proceed. Since these legal arrangements came to an end all over Europe in the nineteenth century, and since they were never operative to begin with in non-European Lutheran churches, issues of confessional hermeneutics have been continually under discussion among Lutherans.
Some Lutherans have regarded the Book of Concord as a body of essentially timeless theological teaching, all of which is normative in the same way. Other Lutherans have insisted on reading the Confessions historically: they record normative decisions made in specific historical circumstances in the face of specific challenges. It is these decisions which are confessionally normative on this view, and not necessarily the conceptualities in which they are articulated, or the terms in which the alternatives are described.
In another direction, many Lutherans have viewed the Confessions primarily as exegesis of Holy Scripture. For some, the Confessions faithfully gather and present the revealed truths taught in Scripture, so that agreement with Scripture and agreement with the Confessions turn out simply to coincide with one another. For others, the relation between Scripture and Confession is more complex. The Confessions provide a perspective on Scripture, a way into its essential dynamic, yet at the same time it is possible that the fullness of Scripture exceeds the scope of the confessional formulations and may indeed correct them.
Still other Lutherans have interpreted the Confessions with primary reference to Christian experience. For some Lutherans coming out of the nineteenth-century revivals, a full account of the inner experience of the converted individual required the whole panoply of confessional doctrine. Other Lutherans have thought more in terms of corporate experience: the Confessions represent the theological underpinnings of the Christian communal life form in its purity. This perspective helps recapture the intertwining of faith and common life that is especially visible in different ways in the Augsburg Confession and the Catechisms, but without the reference to Scripture it risks devolving into a view of the Confessions as the charter of denominational or even ethnic folkways.
Finally, Lutherans differ in the way they relate the Confessions to the ecumenical situation of the divided church. One hermeneutic of the Confessions reads them as constitutive of a distinctive and self-contained form of Christianity; the very function of the Confessions is to found the separate reality of ‘Lutheranism’ as a mode of corporate life and individual believing irreducible to any other. A different hermeneutic takes its lead from the priority of ancient creeds within the Book of Concord and the ecumenical intentionality of the Augsburg Confession. On this account, the Confessions propose to the whole church a way of receiving the faith and life of the ancient catholic church in fidelity to the gospel. Thus for this hermeneutic the ecumenical hope of the Augsburg Confession remains valid, while the other regards the sixteenth-century disappointment of that hope as having permanent normative significance for the way in which the Confessions must now be read.
David S. Yeago
FURTHER READING: Charles P. Arand, Testing the Boundaries: Windows to Lutheran Identity (St Louis, MO, 1995); Die Bekenntnisschriften der evangelischlutherischen Kirche: Herausgegeben im Gedenkjahr der Augsburgischen Konfession 1930 (Göttingen, 12th edn, 1999), the standard edition of the primary texts; George W. Forell and James F. McCue (eds.), Confessing One Faith: A Joint Commentary on the Augsburg Confession by Lutheran and Catholic Theologians (Minneapolis, 1982), an ecumenical milestone; Günther Gassmann and Scott Hendrix, Fortress Introduction to the Lutheran Confessions (Minneapolis, 1999); Eric W. Gritsch and Robert W. Jenson, Lutheranism: The Theological Movement and Its Confessional Writings (Philadelphia, 1976); Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (eds.), The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Minneapolis, 2000); Wilhelm Maurer, Historical Commentary on the Augsburg Confession (Philadelphia, 1986), detailed study of the development of the text which also pays significant attention to theological issues; Albrecht Peters, Kommentar zu Luthers Katechismen (5 vols.; Göttingen, 1990–), theologically rich study; Edmund Schlink, Theology of the Lutheran Confessions (Philadelphia, 1961); Gunther Wenz, Theologie der Bekenntnisschriften der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche: Eine historische und systematische Einführung in das Konkordienbuch (2 vols.; Berlin / New York, 1996–), magisterial study.
WA Weimarer Ausgabe. D. Martin Luthers Warke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar