Confessio Augustana. Presented to the Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Augsburg on 25 June 1530, and read aloud in German before the assembled estates of the Holy Roman Empire. It is the first and foundational confession of the Reformation era, and the charter document of the Lutheran churches, which have ever since been called simply the churches of the Augsburg Confession.

Its importance is not merely Lutheran. This was the first time the evangelical faith was set down in an orderly public statement and laid before the highest authority in Europe by men who expected to suffer for it. Every Protestant confession that followed — Tetrapolitan, Scots, Belgic, Helvetic, Westminster — was written in the space Augsburg opened. Schaff judged that it “struck the key-note to other evangelical confessions, and strengthened the cause of the Reformation every where.”¹

The Occasion

Charles V summoned the Diet to Augsburg in January 1530 and commanded the evangelical princes to present an explicit statement of their faith. His aim was not theological but strategic. He wanted the religious quarrel settled so that Catholic and Protestant might be united against the Ottoman advance. Schaff notes the Emperor's purpose plainly: that the controversy be composed and both parties joined “in a war against the common enemies, the Turks.”²

But the deeper cause lay elsewhere. There was, as Schaff puts it, an inner necessity to confess and formularize the evangelical faith — something already attempted in the Fifteen Articles of Marburg (1529), the Seventeen Articles of Schwabach (1529), and the Articles of Torgau (1530). Augsburg gathered these labors and gave them public form.

The political stakes were not small. To subscribe such a document before an emperor was to risk lands, titles, and life. When Melanchthon warned the Elector John of Saxony what his signature might cost, the Elector answered:

I will do what is right, unconcerned about my electoral dignity; I will confess my Lord, whose cross I esteem more highly than all the power of the earth.

Seven princes and the deputies of two free cities, Nuremberg and Reutlingen, put their names to it.

Melanchthon and Luther

The Confession was drafted by Philip Melanchthon through April, May, and June of 1530, at Coburg and then at Augsburg, with Luther's full approval. Luther himself could not come. He had stood under papal excommunication and the imperial ban since the Diet of Worms in 1521, and to enter Augsburg would have been to walk into the hands of his enemies. He waited instead at the Castle of Coburg on the Saxon frontier, roughly a hundred and fifty miles off, watching the proceedings, translating the prophets, writing to his children, counseling at every step, and steadying his anxious friend.

Schaff's summary of the division of labor is the one worth keeping: Luther produced the doctrinal matter, while Melanchthon's methodical mind reworked it into final shape, and his gentler spirit gave it a conservative and moderate tone. Luther was the primary author of the contents, Melanchthon the secondary; but Melanchthon was the sole author of its style and temper.³

Luther read the draft in May and wrote to the Elector on the fifteenth:

I have read the Apology of Master Philip; it pleases me very well, and I know of nothing by which I could better it or change it, nor would it be becoming, for I can not move so softly and gently.

That last clause is the whole matter in a sentence. The only complaint Luther ever registered against the Augsburg Confession was that it was too gentle — that it did not denounce the Pope or the doctrine of purgatory. He was almost certainly right that he could not have written it. It is equally likely that had he written it, it would not have been heard.

The Reading, 25 June 1530

The final text was adopted and subscribed on 23 June. The Emperor intended to receive the document privately at the session of 24 June, but the evangelical princes asked that it be read in public. The request was refused. The princes replied that they would not surrender the Confession at all unless it were read aloud. Charles relented, and the 25th was fixed for its presentation — though to limit the crowd, the reading was moved from the spacious city hall to the small chapel of the episcopal palace.

Christian Beyer, chancellor of Electoral Saxony, read the German text. It took two hours. The windows stood open against the summer heat, and he read so distinctly that the crowd shut out of the chapel heard every word from the street.

The reaction is among the more remarkable scenes of the Reformation. Schaff records that the Roman party was surprised at the Confession's moderation, that the Bishop of Augsburg said privately it contained nothing but the pure truth, and that Duke William of Bavaria rebuked Johann Eck for having misrepresented Lutheran teaching to him. When Eck answered that he could refute it from the Fathers, though not from the Scriptures, the Duke replied:

I am to understand, then, that the Lutherans are within the Scriptures, and we are on the outside.

The Emperor, by Schaff's account, listened respectfully for a while and then fell asleep. He accepted the Latin copy for himself and gave the German to the Elector of Mainz for the imperial archives, forbidding publication without his permission. Neither original survives. The German copy was probably sent to the Council of Trent and then to Rome; the Latin to Brussels or Spain. No trace of either has been found.

The Twenty-Eight Articles

The Confession proper falls into two parts. The first is positive and doctrinal; the second addresses abuses. In the manuscripts and earliest editions the articles carry numbers only — the familiar titles were added later.

Two features of the arrangement are worth noticing. First, the doctrine of justification, though it is the material principle of the whole Reformation, gets a remarkably brief statement in Article IV — because, as Schaff observes, it is everywhere else assumed and referred to as the very essence of the gospel. Second, the Preface to the Emperor and the closing Epilogue are not Melanchthon's work at all but the Saxon chancellor Brück's, and several manuscripts omit them as no proper part of the Confession.

The Confutation and the Apology

The Diet appointed some twenty Roman theologians — Eck, Faber, Cochlæus, and Wimpina among them — to answer the Confession on the spot. Their Confutatio Pontificia, the product of five successive drafts, was read on 3 August. Schaff calls it a far inferior production that made little impression on the Diet, though it fairly expressed the mind of the Emperor and the majority, and was accepted as a sufficient refutation.

Melanchthon replied with the Apology of the Augsburg Confession. The Diet refused even to receive it. On 22 September and 19 November 1530 the Diet resolved to proceed by force against the Protestants unless they returned to Rome by 15 April following. The Elector John — called the Constant, and rightly — would not compromise, and resolved to stand by the imperishable Word of God. Out of that season came Luther's setting of Psalm 46, Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott.

The refusal at Augsburg drove the evangelical estates together into the Schmalkaldic League, and the Apology was formally subscribed at its meeting in 1537. Rome offered no further official answer until the Council of Trent.

Invariata and Variata

This distinction matters, and it trips people up.

Melanchthon did not regard the Confession as a fixed and binding creed but as a basis for continuing negotiation, and he went on improving it openly in each new edition as he would his own work. The first edition he issued himself, in both languages with the Apology, at Wittenberg in 1531. Revisions before 1540 were largely verbal.

The edition of 1540, however, altered the sense — most consequentially in Article X on the Lord's Supper, softening it toward the Reformed. This came to be called the Variata, the Altered Confession, over against the Invariata of 1530–31. It drew little notice until after Melanchthon's death in 1560, after which, in Schaff's comparison, it caused as much trouble as the insertion of the filioque into the Nicene Creed.

The consequence for Reformed readers is worth stating plainly. The Variata extended a hand toward the Reformed churches, and in that qualified sense the Augsburg Confession was subscribed by Reformed men — by Calvin himself while ministering at Strasbourg and as a delegate at Ratisbon in 1541, and by Farel and Beza at Worms in 1557. Until the close of the Thirty Years' War in 1648, the Reformed were tolerated in the Empire only as allies of the Augsburg Confession. The Invariata, by contrast, is a properly Lutheran symbol, and was received as such into the Book of Concord in 1580.

Note also that Philip of Hesse, who sympathized openly with Zwingli, had to be urged by Luther to subscribe at all, and signed with a stated dissent from Article X. The four cities of Strasbourg, Constance, Memmingen, and Lindau could not sign over the same article, and submitted the Tetrapolitan Confession instead.

Why It Matters

The Augsburg Confession is not aggressive. Its original and modest name was simply an Apology, in the old sense the persecuted church had used — a defense, not an attack. It pleads for toleration and peace, avoids harsh terms, condemns only the heresies already punishable under imperial law, and deliberately leaves the door open to reconciliation with Rome. Schaff's assessment is that it breathes throughout an earnest and devout evangelical spirit in clear, mild, dignified language.

That restraint was a strength and, in one respect, a fault. The same instinct that made Melanchthon careful with Rome made him unjust toward fellow Protestants, who differed from him far less than both differed from the Romanists. Article X names no Zwinglian but shuts one out. It is a sobering thing that the first great confession of the Reformation was also the first great line drawn within it.

Still, what happened on 25 June 1530 was this: men who could have kept silent stood in a small chapel before the most powerful monarch in the world and said what they believed Scripture taught, in their own language, loudly enough for the street to hear. They did not protest. They confessed. And the Word they confessed did the work.

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