The Augsburg Confession — History for Humans

A companion to the Augsburg Confession scenario in Ecclesiastical Politics. The game never reads this file. It's here for anyone who wants the history behind the summer, before, during, or after playing it.

The short version

In the summer of 1530, the princes and cities of the Holy Roman Empire that had accepted the Reformation were summoned to an imperial diet at Augsburg to explain themselves to Emperor Charles V. Their answer was a written confession of faith, drafted by Philip Melanchthon, signed by seven princes and two cities, and read aloud before the emperor on 25 June. Martin Luther, an outlaw under imperial law, could not attend. He spent the summer at the Saxon fortress of the Coburg, four days' ride to the north, following everything by letter.

The emperor's theologians answered with a Confutation. Committees from both sides then came surprisingly close to agreement on doctrine before breaking down over the practices of worship and church government. In September the diet declared the confession refuted and gave its signers until April 1531 to submit. They refused, formed a defensive league, and waited for a war that did not come for another sixteen years. The Augsburg Confession became, and remains, the defining statement of faith of the Lutheran churches.

How it got here

Worms, 1521. Luther stood before the young emperor and the princes of the Empire and refused to recant. The Edict of Worms made him an outlaw and his books contraband. It was never repealed, and by 1530 every evangelical prince governed in open breach of it.

The quiet years. Charles then spent nine years away from Germany, fighting France for Italy, sacking Rome in 1527 without quite meaning to, and making peace with the pope he had humbled. In his absence the Reformation became churches. Saxony, Hesse, Brandenburg-Ansbach, Lüneburg, and city after imperial city reordered worship, gave the laity the cup, let priests marry, emptied monasteries, and sent visitors through the parishes to find out what ordinary people actually knew. The first Diet of Speyer (1526) let each estate act as it could answer for before God and the emperor, a truce that was read as a permission.

Speyer, 1529. The second Diet of Speyer revoked that truce. The evangelical minority entered a formal protest, the protestatio from which their enemies soon coined the word "Protestant." Its argument was that in matters of God's honor and the soul's salvation a majority vote cannot bind anyone's conscience, and each estate must answer to God for itself.

Marburg, 1529. A defensive alliance needed a common confession. That October, at Landgrave Philip of Hesse's invitation, Luther and the Zurich reformer Ulrich Zwingli met at Marburg. They agreed on fourteen articles and parted over the fifteenth: whether Christ's body and blood are truly present in the bread and wine of the Supper, or whether the rite is a sign and memorial. Luther would not call Zwingli a brother across that line. The Wittenberg theologians then drew up the Schwabach Articles as the basis for any league, and the southern cities, Strasbourg foremost, could not sign them.

The Turk. In the autumn of 1529 the Ottoman sultan Suleiman besieged Vienna and withdrew. Everyone expected him back. The emperor needed money and men from the very estates his churchmen urged him to crush, and all summer the Turkish grant and the question of faith were traded against each other.

The summons. On 21 January 1530, from Bologna, where the pope would crown him a month later, Charles called a diet to Augsburg in strikingly gentle language: every party's opinions were to be heard in love and kindness, errors on both sides set right, and all brought back to one Christian truth. The Elector of Saxony ordered his theologians to prepare articles on the disputed practices, the Torgau Articles. At first the plan was a defense of Saxon practice. Two things made it a confession of the whole faith. One was Johann Eck's 404 Articles, printed for the diet, which gathered propositions from Luther, Zwingli, the Anabaptists, and worse, laid them all at the evangelicals' door, and dressed them in the names of ancient heresies. That could not be answered by discussing ceremonies. The other was the summons itself: if the emperor wanted to know what they believed, they would tell him, from God the Father onward, and show that it was the old faith of the catholic Church.

The Empire and its diet

The Holy Roman Empire was not a kingdom but a roof over some hundreds of territories. There were seven electors (the archbishops of Mainz, Cologne, and Trier, the Count Palatine, the Duke of Saxony, the Margrave of Brandenburg, and the King of Bohemia), the princes, spiritual and temporal, and the free imperial cities. Each governed itself and was bound to emperor and Empire by law, custom, and interest.

A diet (Reichstag) was their assembly. The emperor set out what he wanted in a proposition. The estates deliberated in three colleges, electors, princes, and cities, in descending order of weight, and negotiated their answer, with committees doing most of the real work. The diet ended in a recess (Abschied), its decisions engrossed as imperial law. The protest of Speyer rested on the claim that no recess could settle the things of God.

Several instruments hung over the summer. The ban (Acht), imperial outlawry, lay on Luther and could be laid on princes; it stripped a man of legal protection and invited his neighbors to enforce judgment. Enfeoffment, the emperor's formal regrant of a prince's lands and titles, could be delayed as pressure, and Charles delayed it for Saxony all summer. And the emperor had needs he never stated in session: the Turkish grant, a quiet Empire so he could leave it again, and the electors' votes to make his brother Ferdinand King of the Romans, his designated successor. Saxony's vote was among those he needed.

The summer of 1530

The Saxon party left Torgau in early April and reached Coburg on Good Friday. Luther preached there through Easter week. Nuremberg had declined to lodge an outlaw with the emperor coming, so before dawn on 24 April he went up to the fortress above the town with his secretary, Veit Dietrich, and his nephew Cyriakus Kaufmann. The rest rode on to Augsburg, arriving on 2 May, weeks before the emperor.

In the long wait Melanchthon turned the Torgau papers into a confession, sent a draft north, and received Luther's verdict on 15 May: it pleased him very well, and he could not have trodden so softly and gently himself. Then the letters from Augsburg stopped for about three weeks, and Luther's grew first hurt and then furious. On 5 June, Pentecost, word reached him that his father had died at Mansfeld. He took his Psalter to his room and was not seen for two days.

Charles reached Augsburg on 15 June, the eve of Corpus Christi. That night he demanded that the evangelical princes silence their preachers and walk in the next day's procession. Margrave George of Brandenburg-Ansbach answered that he would rather kneel and have his head cut off than deny his God. The princes stayed away from the procession, and in the following days every pulpit in the city, evangelical and Catholic, was silenced by imperial order.

On the evening of 23 June the text was settled and signed. On 25 June, in the chapter room of the bishop's palace, chosen because it was small, the Saxon chancellor Christian Beyer read the German version aloud for about two hours. The windows were open and the courtyard was packed. The emperor kept the Latin copy and gave the German to the Elector of Mainz's chancery. Neither original survives.

In July the southern cities presented their own Tetrapolitan Confession, largely Martin Bucer's work, and Zwingli sent a confession of his own. Neither was read to the diet. Meanwhile some twenty Catholic theologians under Eck wrote a Confutation. The emperor rejected the first draft as too long and too harsh, and the revised text was read on 3 August. A copy was offered only on conditions the confessors could not accept, so that evening they reconstructed it from memory and from the notes of Melanchthon's friend Joachim Camerarius, and Melanchthon began a reply, the Apology.

On the night of 6 August, Philip of Hesse, refused leave to go home to his sick wife, slipped out of the city without permission. For some days war seemed likely. Instead the diet turned to committees. The Committee of Fourteen, from 16 August, found agreement or near-agreement on almost all the doctrinal articles. By Eck's own account only the invocation of saints remained, along with a dispute over the word "merit," and the evangelicals accepted a formula on justification without the word "alone." The practices proved immovable: the sacrifice of the Mass, private Masses, communion in one kind, monastic vows, the bishops' jurisdiction, and church property already secularized. A smaller Committee of Six met from 22 to 28 August and failed on the same points. From the Coburg, Luther's letters said again and again that the doctrine was God's and not theirs to trade.

On 22 September the draft recess declared the confession refuted and gave its signers until 15 April 1531 to conform. Gregor Brück, the Saxon chancellor, refused it on their behalf and offered the Apology. Charles began to take it and, at a word from Ferdinand, did not. The Elector left Augsburg the next day. At the end of September Bucer visited Luther at the Coburg to talk about the Supper, and Luther received him with more warmth than anyone expected. On 4 October the Elector's party collected Luther at the Coburg and rode home to Wittenberg together.

After Augsburg

The final recess of 19 November confirmed the refutation, ordered church property restored, sharpened the imperial chamber court as an instrument of enforcement, and promised a general council. The confessing estates met at Schmalkalden at Christmas and in February 1531 formed the Schmalkaldic League, a defensive alliance with the confession as its standard. In January 1531 Ferdinand was elected King of the Romans at Cologne and crowned at Aachen, over Saxony's protest. The Apology was printed that spring with the first authorized edition of the confession.

The deadline of April 1531 passed quietly. In 1532, needing Protestant help against the Turks, Charles agreed at Nuremberg to leave the confessing estates in peace until a council met. Bucer's conversations with the Wittenbergers ended in the Wittenberg Concord of 1536, which let the southern cities accept the confession. War finally came in 1546, the year of Luther's death, and the emperor won it at Mühlberg in 1547. But the confession outlasted the defeat. The Peace of Augsburg in 1555 gave each prince of the Empire the right to choose between the Catholic faith and the faith of the Augsburg Confession for his lands.

Melanchthon kept revising his text, and his altered edition of 1540, the Variata, became a quarrel of its own. The Book of Concord of 1580, which gathered the Lutheran confessions, printed the confession in its unaltered form.

The confession itself

The Augsburg Confession has twenty-eight articles. The first twenty-one set out doctrine: God, sin, Christ, justification, the ministry, the Church, the sacraments, and the rest. The last seven explain practices the evangelical churches had changed and why: communion in both kinds, the marriage of priests, the Mass, confession, rules about food and fasting, monastic vows, and the power of bishops. A preface addressed to the emperor, largely Brück's work, frames the whole.

Its tone is deliberately conciliatory. It claims to teach nothing contrary to Scripture or to the catholic Church, and it largely proves the claim by quoting the Church Fathers. It says nothing about purgatory and never names the papacy, choices Luther noticed. Article IV, on justification by grace through faith, is its center. Article X, on the Lord's Supper, teaches the true presence of Christ's body and blood in terms no follower of Zwingli could sign, which is why the southern cities wrote their own confession.

The German and Latin texts were written together and are close but not identical. The confessors regarded themselves as members of the catholic Church, reformed, and not as founders of a new one.

The people

Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560). Professor of Greek at Wittenberg, Luther's closest colleague, and the confession's author. Brilliant, gentle, and anxious, he went further toward conciliation that summer than any of his colleagues were comfortable with, and historians still argue over whether that was wisdom or weakness.

Martin Luther (1483–1546). Under the ban of the Empire since 1521, he spent the diet at the Coburg, writing, translating the prophets, suffering from headaches and ringing ears, grieving his father, and sending a stream of letters to Augsburg: bracing, rebuking, and tender by turns.

John, Elector of Saxony (1468–1532), called the Steadfast. Frederick the Wise's younger brother and successor. He signed first and refused every pressure the emperor brought to bear.

Gregor Brück (about 1483–1557). The Elector's chancellor, who advised answering the summons with a confession, wrote much of the preface, and gave the confessors' final answer to the recess.

Charles V (1500–1558). Emperor, King of Spain, and ruler of the Netherlands and much of Italy. He was thirty in 1530, deeply devout, and more patient with the German Protestants than many of his advisers wanted, largely because he needed them.

Lorenzo Campeggio (1474–1539). Cardinal and papal legate, an experienced canon lawyer and diplomat. His instructions from Pope Clement VII were above all to prevent a general council.

Philip of Hesse (1504–1567). The most energetic of the Protestant princes, eager for a broad alliance that would include the southern cities and the Swiss. His secret departure on 6 August frightened everyone. He was also the son-in-law of Duke George of Saxony, one of the confessors' fiercest opponents.

George of Brandenburg-Ansbach (1484–1543), called the Pious. A thorough reformer of his own lands and the author of the summer's most famous declaration.

Johann Eck (1486–1543). Professor at Ingolstadt, Luther's opponent since the Leipzig debate of 1519, author of the 404 Articles, a principal author of the Confutation, and a skilled negotiator in the committees.

Alfonso de Valdés (about 1490–1532). The emperor's Latin secretary, an admirer of Erasmus, who held private talks with Melanchthon before the confession was read.

Martin Bucer (1491–1551). The Strasbourg reformer, who spent his life trying to reconcile Wittenberg and the Swiss. His visit to the Coburg in September 1530 began the road to the Wittenberg Concord.

Argula von Grumbach (born about 1492). A Bavarian noblewoman who had published letters defending the Reformation since 1523, and one of the visitors Luther received at the Coburg that summer.

Veit Dietrich (1506–1549). Luther's secretary at the Coburg, who wrote home to reassure Wittenberg and was among the first to write down what Luther said at table.

Record and legend

Much of the summer is well attested through letters, official records, and eyewitness accounts. These include the gentle summons and the suspicion it met; Luther's letters from the Coburg, with their jackdaws holding a diet in the trees, the letter to his four-year-old son about a heavenly garden, and his grief at his father's death; Dietrich's report that Luther prayed aloud for three hours a day; Margrave George's declaration on the night of 15 June; the Elector bearing the sword at the opening Mass; the silencing of the pulpits; the reading of 25 June and the loss of both originals; the refusal of a copy of the Confutation; Philip's secret departure; the committees' near-agreements; and Bucer's and Argula von Grumbach's visits to the Coburg.

Some details come down as tradition: likely true in substance, but known in later tellings. The emperor is said to have answered the margrave in broken German, "Not head off, dear prince, not head off." The evangelical princes are remembered as standing unbowed when the legate blessed the emperor's entry. Luther is said to have chalked on his wall at the Coburg a verse from Psalm 118, "I shall not die, but live," and he certainly called it his own psalm. Brück is said to have told the emperor, handing over the confession, that it would prevail against the gates of hell.

Other stories are legend. That the emperor dozed through the reading is a later anecdote. That Duke William of Bavaria asked Eck whether the confession could be refuted, and was told it could be refuted from the Fathers but not from Scripture, was a story the confessors' side told everywhere within months. And Luther's hymn Ein feste Burg was not composed at the Coburg, though it was certainly sung that year.

What the game invents

The three player characters and their households are invented, as are the Coburg's castellan and garrison, the landladies, clerks, and gate-sergeants, and the inns and tollhouses along the courier road. So are the answers to what history leaves unknown or can only guess at: who leaked drafts of the confession to the printers, who was informing on whom, and what was really in the minds of the emperor and the landgrave. The game also lets a player try to change parts of the summer's outcome, which history did not allow. Everything else aims to stay within the record.

Words you'll meet

Saying the names

German ch after a, o, or u is the throaty sound of Scottish "loch," softer after e or i. Ei rhymes with "eye," eu is "oy," w is English v, and st or sp at the start of a word is sht or shp. Melanchthon is meh-LAHNKH-tohn in German, though English speakers usually say meh-LANK-thon. Brück has the rounded ü of French tu. Jörg is roughly YURK. Coburg is KOH-boork, Torgau TOR-gow, Grimma GRIM-ah, and Feuchtwangen FOYKHT-vahng-en. Schmalkalden is SHMAHL-kahl-den, Abschied AHP-sheet, and Ausschuss OWS-shoos. Veit is FITE and Cyriakus tsee-REE-ah-koos. Campeggio is kahm-PED-joh, Valdés vahl-DAYS, and Granvelle grahn-VEL.