An Introduction to the Augsburg Confession

So Scott, you're sort of the resident expert on this sort of thing, actually teaching this in higher education and are just coming off of, as we record this introduction episode, doing that.

So you were teaching Confessions.

So what are we talking about when we talk about a confession? Why is it even important to have a confession as a, as a church body or as a tradition? And what is it that makes up the Lutheran Confessions? How does this even come about?

Yeah.

So I'll pass some of this off to Caleb right off the bat.

I do teach this at Concordia when it comes up in their master's program, and I enjoy it a lot.

It's been something...

It's been a topic of study for me for, gosh, man, it feels weird saying this kind of thing, but 30 years.

So that's a little strange.

Since Caleb has been a wee bab.

But at any rate, I think Caleb is sort of prepped up to do sort of, you know, how does sola scriptura play into the Confessions? But in general, it's just easy to say the Lutheran Confessions are a set of documents that were produced in the 1500s during sort of the heyday and towards the end of what you would call the, the Lutheran Reformation proper, that were meant to do a couple things.

One, to positively state what these new evangelical churches or Lutheran churches or churches of the Lutheran Reformation or, there's many different ways to say this, what they believe, what they taught, and what they confessed, then they would support those beliefs, teachings, and confessions based on Holy Scripture.

In many, many cases, they'd sometimes even refer to the writings of church fathers to show that they, in all things that have been orthodox through the years, that they were in alignment with what would be Christian orthodoxy in general.

And then they spend a decent amount of time refuting people that during the Reformation are teaching differently than what is the correct confession of faith.

And so within the Lutheran Confessions especially, you, you very often will see the positive statement, "This is what we believe, teach, and confess," and the negative statement, "This is what we condemn." It's put together into several confessions.

It's made up of the Augsburg Confession, the Apology or Defense of the Augsburg Confession, Martin Luther's Small and Large Catechism, Martin Luther's one sort of confession that was written as a confession and not as a, a teaching document, a catechism, called the Smalcald Articles, named for the town where the conference was held, uh, when the confession was presented, Philip Melanchthon's articles on the power and primacy of the pope, and then something called the Formula of Concord, which just means a formula of unity, which was a confession that was meant to bring sort of Lutheran segments together that by later in the 1500s had started to disagree with each other.

And that's broken into g- two smaller documents called the Solid Declaration and the Epitome.

At the beginning of any Book of Concord, though, you're going to see the three ecumenical creeds, the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed.

That's what makes up the Lutheran Confessions.

Depending on what church body you're in, Lutheran church body you're in, your church body will, all of them to some degree, will hold to these documents, some more strongly and with a greater emphasis and a greater ability to hold them to account for that confession, and some a little less formally.

But in general, if you are

arePart of a Lutheran church, and you have a Lutheran pastor that was trained at a Lutheran seminary, they would have gone through these documents and to some degree been asked to hold to them.

Yeah, and, and one thing that's maybe different about the Lutheran Confessions than other confessional documents, like you might think like, "Okay, I'm used to seeing like a statement of faith or whatever on a church website or something like that," and it just sort of like posits what this church believes.

Like this is what we believe about scripture and sin and God and salvation or whatever.

And even if you go to other, you know, if, like whether it's a 1689 London Baptist Confession or something like that, the Lutheran Confessions are a little bit different.