ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONFESSIONS 1 CON1-Q005 JANUARY 2005 CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY: CAPTION FIRST, INC. P.O. BOX 1924 LOMBARD, IL 60148 * * * * * This text is being provided in a rough-draft format. Communications Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. * * * * >> JOSHUA: Isn't our collection of Lutheran Confessions known as The Book of Concord? What is the Book of Concord? And why is it so named? >> DR. CHARLES P. ARAND: The easy answer to your second question, why is it so named, is the title Book of Concord simply comes from the original Latin edition which had the title Concordia, which incidentally, you'll notice almost every institution within our synod is named Concordia. That is, it's named after the Book of Concord or at least the Latin title for the Book of Concord. With regard to your first question, what is the Book of Concord. Well, the Book of Concord is that book which contains all of our confessional texts or confessional documents. So, for example, it contains the three ecumenical creeds, the Augsburg Confession and the Apology, or the defense of the Augsburg Confession, the small (inaudible) the treatise on the (inaudible) the small and arch catechisms and the Formula of Concord. So you might say a collection or bringing together of those creeds and confessions that guide us within the Lutheran church. How did it come about? Well, the easy answer, I suppose a short answer, is that in the latter half of the 16th century, probably from about the time of Luther's death in 1546 up until about 1576, a span of 30 years, Lutherans were plunged into a number of serious controversies. Part is a result of a war initiated by Emperor Charles V, who saw an opportunity to destroy Lutheranism once and for all, now that Luther was dead. Partly due to a vacuum of leadership with the passing away of Luther and what direction Lutherans should go in dealing with Charles. Well, those 30 years of controversy created a great deal of havoc upon the Lutheran Church, perhaps prevented the expansion of its territories, for lack of a better word. It inhibited its growth in many ways. And finally, though, in the 1570s, there was an opportunity initiated by a man such as *Jacob Andrea and *Martin Kemnitz to finally bring everyone together around, once again, a common confession of faith. In other words, they sought for a number of years how can we restore unity or concord within our churches once again? After exploring a number of options, they finally settled on one that was proposed primarily by *Martin Kemnitz, and said, look, if we're going to resolve these, we can't talk past one another. We can't ignore them. We're going to deal with them head on. So in the Formula of Concord, they developed a pattern whereby they said, let�s identify the exact question at issue in these controversies so that we're all on the same page, and we're addressing the same issue. For example, on Article 2 of the Formula of Concord the debate was about the role of free will and conversion. They said, okay, the issue is not whether human beings have a free will after creation and before the fall. The issue is not whether human beings have a free will in external matters after the fall. For example, do we have a free will in deciding what kind of a house I'm going to buy, what kind of car am I going to buy, what kind of cereal I�m going to buy. Nor is the issue do human beings have free choice after conversion that they can willingly cooperate with the Holy Spirit. No. The issue is what role does the human will or does human choice play after the fall into sin and before conversion in spiritual matters pertaining to God. And then they said, okay, let's lay out both sides of the debate fairly and accurately so that we fully understand the different sides. Then after that, they then said, here is what we think is the solution to that controversy. Here is what we believe, teach and confess. Part of the answer, then, to resolving those controversies was to sort of settle on, you might say, certain authorities or certain common bases, certain common grounds that they�re all going to use to guide themselves. So they all started out by saying, we�re all going to agree on scripture as the sole source and fountain of all theology, of all of our teaching. Note, there, they use the metaphor fountain because that highlights that scriptures are the source from which we take our doctrine. They never use that metaphor for the confessions. But then they say, after the scriptures, we will look to the ecumenical creeds as corroborating witness says for what we say regarding the teachings of scripture. And we're all going to agree on the Augsburg Confession, the Apology, and the (inaudible) treatise and the catechisms. So they were identifying the documents that would provide the basis for their common life together, for their teaching of the faith together and the confession of faith together. It might be roughly analogous to a country that has certain texts as the basis for rendering judgments, developing laws, you know, such as a constitution and a declaration of independence and the like. They identified these are the texts that provide a basis for our life together as a church. They didn�t see these, by the way, as parochial Lutheran texts. If anything, the Lutherans were proposing the Augsburg Confession, making a proposal to all of Christendom that this could be the next ecumenical creed alongside the Apostles, Nicene, and Athanasian Creed. A text, I think still applies to us today. So they identified these texts, and on the basis of these texts, they were able to resolve the controversies that had grafted Lutheranism and finally brought out of that harmony or concord. That's why you have the text called the Formula of Concord or the book in which all these texts are contained referring to the Book of Concord because it was a time of great celebration that the controversies had been resolved. I might add one final note to this. Lutherans are somewhat unique in having these texts because one of the major concerns we ought to have, I think, about the Christian church today is, yes, we can have a *sola scriptorum. We ought to have scripture alone as the source of all of our teaching. At the same time recognize that has given rise to over 20,000 denominations within the world today. Some would cite it as high as 34,000 denominations. One might kind of, aha, that�s what *sola scriptorum has gotten us. In other words, anybody can read the Bible and come up with their own confession, if you will. They can come up with their own denomination. To some extent, I think Lutherans have been protected against that tendency because in addition to scriptures, we have these common texts that we have agreed guide our reading of the scriptures and our proclamation of the faith and the teaching of the faith. And for that reason are extremely important today still for us in terms of maintaining unity of the faith.