Pursuing Concord - The Augsburg Confession: Son, Savior, Intercessor

All right.

So I've named this session, Session Four: Son, Savior, and Intercessor, uh, which means to say we're talking about Jesus Christ.

Now, that al- that is always true when you're doing a lesson, learning about the faith, learning about God and His Word, uh, but it's very much true today because we're looking at Articles III and Articles XXI of the Augsburg Confession.

So how the Augsburg Confession is broken up, the first chunk of articles are all confessing the faith, the doctrine of the faith.

These are basics of basics, more or less, and laying out how the Lutheran Church is a, a consistent confession of faith as the entire church since Christ and beyond, right? So th- they're laying out how they're not doing anything new, they're just going back to how the church is supposed to be.

Then the last few articles of the faith, the last section of the Augsburg Confession is, these are the polemic arguments.

These are when they say, "Look, this is what you guys are doing that we don't agree with." So that's why we're looking at Article III, which is a ground faith statement about who is Jesus, and then we're gonna look at Article XXI, which is about the whole question of the saints.

Do we pray to the saints? What's the purpose of the saints? All that.

Uh, if you're familiar with Catholicism, still a thing.

It was m- it was more of a thing back then.

So these two are kind of paired together, and we'll get into that as we go.

But like I said, we did start late, so we'll see how much g- ground we're able to cover.

Uh, again, this is beginning our Concordia series, our, uh, Pursuing Concord, we've called it.

This is looking at the book of doctrine for the Lutheran Church.

This is the Book of Concord, okay? And our, the, uh, Augsburg Confession is the foundational document in this collection of documents.

So that's what we're looking at today.

I just wanna make sure we're focused on that, centered on what we're doing here.

And, but I'm just, I'm happy to see you guys.

Good to see you.

[laughs] Uh, I think we get a little bit more people down here when we have the treats down here, so maybe we should move the, the coffee and the, the cookies down here.

Then people feel obligated to stick around, and I like that.

So all right.