The Book of Concord Unifies Lutheran Doctrine

On 25 June 1580, the fiftieth anniversary of the Augsburg Confession's presentation to Emperor Charles V, the German editions of the Book of Concord were published at Dresden and Leipzig, more than four decades after Lutheranism was established in Denmark-Norway in 1536, already recorded here. The volumes bound together the three ecumenical creeds, the 1530 Augsburg Confession, its Apology, Martin Luther's Smalcald Articles and Large Catechism, the Treatise on the Authority and Primacy of the Pope, and the Formula of Concord, the confessional statement that Jacob Andreae, Martin Chemnitz, David Chytraeus, Andrew Musculus, Christopher Cornerus and Nicholas Selnecker had signed on 28 May 1577 after years of drafting meant to end the doctrinal quarrels that had split Luther's theological heirs since his death. Roughly eight thousand pastors, theologians and lay teachers across the Lutheran territories ultimately added their own signatures to the finished Book of Concord, pledging to hold to its confession without departing from its substance. That collection remains the doctrinal standard that Lutheran church bodies still recognize as authoritative, aside from the Scriptures the single most important volume in Lutheran history and theology, more than a century and a half before the Archbishop of Salzburg expelled his Protestant subjects in 1731, already recorded here.