Augsburg Confession

The Augsburg Confession is the founding confessional statement of Lutheranism, drafted chiefly by Philipp Melanchthon and presented to Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Augsburg on June 25, 1530.¹ It is the oldest Protestant confession and remains the one doctrinal standard accepted across all Lutheran churches, consisting of twenty-one articles stating Lutheran doctrine positively and seven more rejecting what it took to be the Roman church’s principal errors.¹

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession postdates the Augsburg Confession by over a century and shares its Reformation-era commitment to justification by faith, but the two diverge sharply on the Lord’s Supper. Augsburg Art. 10 states that “in the Lord’s Supper the body and blood of Christ are truly and substantially present, and that together with the bread and wine they are truly distributed and received,” received “not only spiritually through faith, but also by the mouth.”² The 1689 confession instead holds that the bread and wine “in substance, and nature… still remain truly, and only Bread, and Wine, as they were before,” and that worthy receivers “really and indeed, yet not carnally, and corporally, but spiritually receive, and feed upon Christ crucified.”³

That divergence was not settled at Augsburg itself. Melanchthon’s own 1540 revision of the confession, distinguished from the original “Invariata” as the “Variata,” moved toward sacramental language “more nearly corresponding with those prevailing among the Reformed Churches,”¹ and the document’s original wording left enough room that Calvin himself, during his residence in Strasbourg, found it consistent with his own convictions to subscribe to it.¹

Historical Development

Charles V called the Diet of Augsburg hoping to secure doctrinal unity among the German princes and free cities against the external threat of Ottoman advance, and to that end asked the Lutheran territories to state their beliefs.¹ Melanchthon, Luther’s colleague at Wittenberg, drafted the resulting confession, which the Protestant princes and leaders signed before its presentation to the emperor.¹ When it was read publicly at the diet, Roman theologians disputed it, and Melanchthon answered the following year with the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, defending its positions article by article.⁴

Other Lutheran symbolic writings followed it: the Apology itself, Luther’s Larger and Smaller Catechisms (1529), the Articles of Smalcald (1536), and, after further controversies within Lutheranism over grace and the Lord’s Supper, the Formula of Concord (1577).¹ Hodge describes the confession’s content as Augustinian in its account of grace, though “not as precise in statement as the more perfect Calvinistic Confessions,” and it carries from the outset the distinctively Lutheran view of the sacraments that would later separate Lutheran and Reformed Protestantism.¹

Opposing Views

Reformed and Anglican churches. Reformed confessions of the same era rejected Augsburg’s language of a bodily, orally-received presence of Christ in the Supper. Charles Hodge explains the Reformed alternative: Christ is present at the Supper the way any spiritual object is present to the mind, “intellectually apprehended” and acting on the believer through faith, not by any local presence of his human nature, which Reformed theology held to remain in heaven.⁵ Even Zwingli was willing to call this presence “real,” though in a sense he understood very differently from either Rome’s or Wittenberg’s use of the word.⁵

Objections and Responses

If the Augsburg Confession denies that the bread becomes Christ’s body, how is its doctrine different from the Reformed view it seems to resemble? Augsburg’s own language ties the “truly and substantially present” body and blood to the human nature of Christ itself, received “not after a capernaitish, but a supernatural and celestial manner”², a claim that requires Christ’s glorified body to be present, in some sense, wherever the sacrament is celebrated. Charles Hodge traces this to the Lutheran doctrine that the divine attribute of omnipresence was communicated to Christ’s human nature at the incarnation, and raises two objections to it directly: that it “is an attempt to explain the inscrutable,” and that its explanation was shaped specifically by Luther’s prior conviction about the Supper rather than derived independently.⁶ That Christological question, the communicatio idiomatum, is treated in its own article rather than here.

Related Doctrines

References

Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 7, “Creeds and Confessions,” 122-124. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 43, “The Lord’s Supper,” 648-649. ↩ ↩²
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 30, “Of the Lord’s Supper,” paras. 5, 7. ↩
Jared Heath Moore, A Biblical and Historical Appraisal of Concupiscence with Special Attention to Same-Sex Attraction (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), chap. 3, 87. ↩
Charles Hodge, “Chapter XX. The Means of Grace,” in Systematic Theology, Volume III (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 634-635. ↩ ↩²
Charles Hodge, “Chapter III. Person of Christ,” in Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 411-412. ↩