ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONFESSIONS 1 CON1-Q030 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. * * * * >> PAUL: Almost every article rejects positions that are contrary to what is confessed. How important are these antitheses, and are some now outdated? >> DR. KLAUS DETLEV SHULTZ: You are correct in stating, Paul, that every article in the Augsburg Confession, almost every article, has an antithesis next to its positive statement. Why are we having antitheses? Well, the Nicene Creed already shows us that its version of 325 had already an antitheses stating clearly what it agreed with Arius, that presbyter of Alexandria who claimed a subordinationism for Jesus Christ in the Trinity. The Augsburg Confession also goes back to many heresies of the early church. For example, the *Mohammedans, the *Samosatarians, the *Valentinians, the Arians, of course, all those who deny the triune God. Article 2 refers to Pelagius, an Irish monk, who stated that man can cooperate by his own powers with God towards his own salvation. That had to be clearly rejected. Article 3 and 4 do not reject anyone, or at least do not have an explicit antitheses. Some articles such as Article 7 also rejects no one. Article 8, however, has a statement against the Donatists. And on other articles throughout the Augsburg Confession, we find therein that they explicitly reject the Anabaptists, a contemporary movement at the time of the 16th century, that gave Luther and many other theologians a huge task and a huge challenge to address. What was the problem with the Anabaptists? The Anabaptists denied the mediation of God's word as the means bringing grace and forgiveness. The Anabaptists also excluded themselves from civil responsibility building their own cities. In many ways, they also shared the sentiments of iconoclasm, those that believed that symbols were not necessary in the church. Do these Anabaptists still exist today, and the other heretics that are refuted in the articles of the Augsburg Confession? Well, today we look at a number of heresies as well, the Mormons, the Pentecostals, the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Amish, for example, who like the Anabaptists also deny civil responsibility in this world. The Pentecostals deny the external mediation of God's word, and so also do the Jehovah�s Witnesses deny the equal status of Jesus Christ with God the Father, the *homo ouzious. You might now ask: Why don't we put these new heresies in our church today or outside of it and challenging us and our theology into the statements of the Augsburg Confession, new antitheses perhaps? Some churches, such as the *Bhata Church of Indonesia has attempted that by explicitly referring in its antitheses to those heresies around its midst in Indonesia. However, most Lutheran churches are reluctant to do that because there has to be a certain consensus upon which they all agree, an ecumenicity that I have spoken of so clearly before. We do not want to add this or that heresy without making clear that we all agree upon it. And so, it is necessary to see that the heresies that are rejected already now in the articles of the Augsburg Confession actually have a *contemporanaity that does speak out clearly to us today and against those heresies that plague us. Although the names like Anabaptism is not found today, but then again, such movements as Pentecostalism and those of the Jehovah�s Witness do resound certain sentiments such as those of Arius or the Anabaptists. In this way, I do not think that the antitheses, upon a second look, are outdated.