Resumen
Resumen de Confesión de Augsburgo
Para quién es
For readers who love Reformation history and theology, and anyone who wants to read a founding text of the Lutheran churches in its own words.
De qué trata este libro
The Augsburg Confession is the statement of faith that Lutheran princes and city councils laid before the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, in June 1530. Philipp Melanchthon, a scholar of Greek and a colleague of Martin Luther at Wittenberg, wrote it. Luther was under imperial ban and could not attend, so he waited at the fortress of Coburg and approved the text from a distance.
The emperor wanted peace in his lands, and he wanted the religious quarrel settled. Melanchthon's task was to show what the reforming churches believed and why they were not rebels against the true church. The document has twenty-eight articles. The first twenty-one set out what is taught. The last seven name practices that the reformers say had gone wrong. In this summary you will hear the setting, the shared creed, the teaching on faith and good works, the account of church and sacraments, the list of abuses, and the long afterlife of the text. Let us begin with the room in which it was read.
En este resumen
- 1A statement written for an emperorFree
- 2Begin from the creed all share
- 3People are made right by faith alone
- 4The church is where the gospel is taught
- 5Seven abuses the reformers wanted mended
- 6What followed after Augsburg
Idea clave 1 de 6
A statement written for an emperor
The Diet of Augsburg met in 1530, and Charles V came to it after years of absence from Germany. He faced two problems at once. The Ottoman armies pressed on the eastern border, and his German territories were splitting over religion. He needed his princes united, so he asked the reforming party to explain their beliefs.
Melanchthon had been drafting statements for some time, and he reworked earlier material from Saxony and Luther's own writings. Luther stayed at Coburg because the Edict of Worms of 1521 had declared him an outlaw. He read the draft and found it acceptable, though he remarked that he could not tread so softly himself. Melanchthon was by temperament a peacemaker, and the tone of the text shows it.
On 25 June 1530 the German text was read aloud in the chapel of the bishop's palace by the Saxon chancellor. The princes who signed included John, Elector of Saxony, and several other territorial rulers, along with the representatives of two imperial cities. Signing meant risking their lands and possibly their lives, and that gave the plain words real weight.
The document does not present itself as a new religion. Its repeated claim is that nothing in it differs from the teaching of the universal church or of the Roman church, as far as that can be known from the writings of the early fathers. The authors want to be heard as loyal Christians who object to particular errors. That aim shapes every article that follows.
That’s 1 of 6 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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About this edition
Every format is free to start, and print and large print are at cost.
- LengthAbout 15,000 words
- Reading timeAbout 1 h
- Listening time1 h 40 min
- FormatseBook, large-print eBook, audiobook, 15-minute summary
- LanguagesEnglish and 12 other languages