The Formula of Concord

Jakob Andreae, Martin Chemnitz, and four colleagues · presented to Elector August of Saxony, May 28, 1577 · published in the Book of Concord, June 25, 1580.

The last of the great Lutheran symbols, and the only one written by no single hand. Thirty years after Luther's death, the movement he began was tearing itself apart from within. The Formula of Concord was the document that stopped it — and, in stopping it, fixed the boundary between Lutheran and Reformed where it has stood ever since.

It is a strange kind of confession. The earlier symbols were written against Rome. This one was written against fellow Lutherans, and it takes the shape of a courtroom: each of its twelve articles states the disputed question, then the affirmative theses to be believed, then the antitheses to be rejected. It settles arguments rather than opening them.

After Luther

Luther died in February 1546. Within eighteen months the Schmalkaldic League had been crushed at Mühlberg, the Elector John Frederick was a prisoner, and Charles V was in a position to dictate terms to the German churches. The Augsburg Interim of 1548, and the Leipzig Interim that followed it in Saxony, required the evangelicals to restore a range of Roman ceremonies while conceding them a married clergy and the cup.

Melanchthon, seeking to preserve what could be preserved, judged that the disputed ceremonies were adiaphora — matters indifferent, which might be accepted under duress without betraying the gospel. Others judged that a thing indifferent in itself ceases to be indifferent when it is demanded as the price of surrender.

That disagreement broke Lutheranism into two parties. Those who followed Melanchthon were called Philippists; those who claimed to hold Luther without modification called themselves Gnesio-Lutherans, the genuine Lutherans. For the next quarter century they fought each other in print, in pulpits, and through their princes, on question after question. Two political conferences convened to settle matters, at Frankfurt in 1558 and Naumburg in 1561, and both failed.

The Controversies

The Formula's twelve articles are not an abstract system. Each one answers a specific quarrel, and the document is far easier to read once you know which. In rough order of outbreak:

The Road to Bergen

The Formula did not arrive at once. It was assembled over four years through a succession of drafts, each circulated, criticized, and rewritten — which is why it carries the weight it does.

The Six Authors

Jakob Andreae of Tübingen, who drove the project from beginning to end; Martin Chemnitz of Brunswick, the finest theological mind of the second Lutheran generation; Nikolaus Selnecker of Leipzig; David Chytraeus of Rostock; Andreas Musculus and Christoph Körner of Brandenburg.

Chemnitz is the one to know. It was said of him that if the second Martin had not come, the first Martin would scarcely have stood — a compliment that would have irritated both men, but which captures why the Formula reads as it does. Where Luther thundered, Chemnitz distinguished.

The Twelve Articles

Each article follows the same three-part shape: the status controversiae, or statement of the question in dispute; the affirmative theses, introduced by the formula we believe, teach, and confess; and the antitheses, the contrary errors rejected and condemned. The pattern makes the Formula unusually easy to consult and unusually cold to read.

The Rule and Norm

Before the twelve articles the Formula sets a preface on authority, and it is the part of the document that belongs to the whole church rather than to Lutheranism alone:

We believe, teach, and confess that the sole rule and standard according to which all dogmas together with all teachers should be estimated and judged are the prophetic and apostolic Scriptures of the Old and of the New Testament alone. Formula of Concord1577, Epitome

The creeds and confessions are then explicitly subordinated — received not as judges but as witnesses, testifying how Scripture was understood by the faithful in their own day. Fifty years after Augsburg, and at the close of a generation of bitter intramural warfare, the Lutheran churches wrote sola Scriptura at the head of the settlement. A confession that begins by denying its own final authority is doing something worth noticing.

Reception and Limits

Subscription was broad but not universal. Three electors, some twenty dukes and princes, twenty-four counts, four barons, thirty-five free imperial cities, and about eight thousand pastors signed — roughly two-thirds of Lutheran Germany. Pastors were given three years to read the draft and propose amendments before signing, which is part of why the number is so large.

The other third did not sign. The Formula was rejected outright in Denmark, and was not adopted in several German territories where Philippist sympathies remained strong. Schaff's verdict is worth recording as a corrective to Lutheran accounts: the Form of Concord was never generally received, was decidedly rejected in several countries, and is disowned by the Melanchthonian and unionistic schools within the Lutheran Church itself.¹

What it did accomplish was real. It ended thirty years of civil war within German Lutheranism and gave the Lutheran churches a stable confessional identity that survived the Thirty Years' War. Whether that was worth the price is a question the document itself cannot answer.

A Reformed Assessment

This site holds the Reformed confession, and honesty requires saying plainly that the Formula of Concord is not ours.

On a great deal we stand together, and the agreement is not trivial. Article I against the Flacians, Article II against the synergists, Article III against Osiander, Article IV against Major, Article XI's insistence that election is unconditional and in Christ — a Reformed reader will find these largely congenial, and Article II on the bondage of the will is as strong as anything in Dort.

The division falls at Articles VII and VIII. The Formula affirms that the body and blood of Christ are received orally by all communicants, believing and unbelieving alike, and grounds this in a communication of attributes by which the properties of Christ's divine nature are imparted to His human nature — so that His body may be present wherever He wills. The Reformed churches answered that this dissolves the true humanity of the Mediator, and that Christ's body, being a real body, is in heaven at the Father's right hand, from which believers truly feed on Him by the Spirit through faith. Article XII's condemnations, aimed at the Anabaptists and the Schwenkfeldians, also catch positions no Reformed church has held.

Nothing is gained by softening this. The Formula of Concord is where the two great branches of the magisterial Reformation stopped trying to be one church. It is presented here for the same reason the site presents Trent's opponents and Rome's defenders — because you cannot understand the Reformation by reading only the documents you agree with, and because these men were contending for the same gospel we confess, on ground where we believe they took a wrong turn.

Read the Formula

Read the Epitome first. It states each of the twelve questions, the affirmative theses, and the errors rejected, and it can be read through in an evening. Turn to the Solid Declaration for the argument behind any article that matters to you.

Creeds and Confessions