This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
On 31 October 1999, at St. Anne's Church in Augsburg, Germany, representatives of the Roman Catholic Church's Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and the Lutheran World Federation signed the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, Cardinal Edward Idris Cassidy for the Catholic Church and Bishop Christian Krause for the Lutheran World Federation.
The date was chosen deliberately, the anniversary of Martin Luther's 1517 posting of the Ninety Five Theses in Wittenberg, the act that opened the division the declaration was signed to address.
The declaration states that a consensus exists between the two traditions on the basic truths of the doctrine of justification, that believers are accepted by God by grace alone through faith in Christ and not because of their own merit, and that the doctrinal condemnations each side issued against the other in the sixteenth century no longer apply to the teaching on justification as the declaration presents it.
Other bodies joined the same declaration in the years after Augsburg. The World Methodist Council joined in 2006, the Anglican Consultative Council affirmed it in 2016, and the World Communion of Reformed Churches signed it in 2017, extending a bilateral Catholic and Lutheran agreement into a document four traditions now share.
What the 1999 Augsburg signing changed for the Reformation's divided churches was placing a shared consensus statement on the doctrine at the center of the sixteenth century split, then watching three more traditions add their own signatures across the following eighteen years.