A Candid Inquiry into the Controversies among Evangelicals

1Preface — Peaceful and Apologetic. In the name of the Lord.

Preface to the Kind Reader.

With what sighs Gregory Nazianzen — most eloquent of the Greek Fathers after Chrysostom — once panted for Peace, pouring out these words in the tenth of his Orations (which is the third On Peace): O dear Peace, you who are a good praised by all, yet kept by few! Why, I ask, have you deserted us for so long already? When will you return to us?

By the same vows and complaints — or ones like them — the Ecclesiastical Peace of the Evangelicals, long and deeply desired by all who profess the Truth in Charity, comes to be pursued by me as well in this present season, and with even greater right. For a huge throng that boasts rashly enough of the Gospel of Peace we daily find not only despising and utterly neglecting that peace (a charge that, to our heavy grief, fits even some among the Reformed), but moreover harassing certain Lutherans — who with proud and dictatorial brow claim plain Universal Orthodoxy for themselves alone and their like — with futile and sometimes infamous scenes and with the scrapings of scurrilous satires and infamous pamphlets, and ignominiously spitting even on the bare name of this Peace, as if the sound itself struck fear, with quips and sarcasms.

So much so that if ever, now especially — though many nonetheless are wiser — all who love God in Christ, the supreme Prince of Christian Peace, must set themselves with steadfast mind to the promotion and defense of that Peace, and must repeat again and again, and commend again and again to each and every Evangelical of both parties, that apostolic charge: If therefore there is any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any affection and compassion, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from rivalry or from empty glory, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others (Philippians 2:1-4).

2As for me: as soon as, by divine providence and by the grace of the Great Frederick William of most blessed and immortal memory — the Brandenburg hero and, if anyone ever was, while he lived the most sincere esteemer and unwearied assertor and promoter of the Evangelicals' ecclesiastical peace — I obtained my lot among the cultivators of the heavenly vineyard in this most celebrated University in the year 1679, and had surveyed more than enough the weight of the Protestant controversies, I held nothing more important than this:

not to serve the base itch of certain theologians of one party or the other for quarreling and somehow defending their own cause, but to hang and weigh everything on the balance and scale of the Holy Codex alone — which reveals and first establishes not only theological truths, but also the widely varied degrees of their value and necessity, and which diligently and continually praises Christian love, gentleness, mildness, moderation, and tolerance.

According to the measure of theological knowledge and prudence, and according to the public office granted me by God — dedicated not only to the Frankfurt church through preaching labors, but also to the Christian church at large through professorial labors — I would strive conscientiously everywhere to consult for that one Protestant Peace which is of all things most necessary and most useful.

3§ II. — Thus it came about that, after nearly two lustra — that is, in the year of the last century eighty-seven — almost by lot, a little Tract on Ecclesiastical Peace appeared, set forth by me in the form of a Preface to the Themes of the blessed Cornelius Bergius, once my predecessor in this chair, re-edited for the sake of our theology students; soon to be transferred into the vernacular by order of my superiors; adorned also in Batavia with a most friendly preface by a certain most learned man, and reprinted there in the year 1689; and having met with the varied fortune that men's — and especially theologians' — diverse pursuits produce,

I judged that for a time I ought to refrain from offering further that pearl of Ecclesiastical Peace — not indeed cast by me before swine, or prostituted to dogs — and turned my mind to other sacred labors: exegetical and didactic, and elenctic upon many controversies after the pattern of Spanheim's Elenchus, and practical as well, both privately upon the Holy Decalogue of God and outwardly (so-called by abuse) upon the Methodology of adorning the preacher.

From that last occasion there went forth into public light, a few years ago, my Critica Concionatoria, interspersed here and there with certain strictures and pacific persuasions, and received kindly enough even by many Lutheran brethren (as the Acta Eruditorum of Leipzig for the year 1700 testify) — especially by the late Daniel Severinus Scultetus, theologian of Hamburg, not undistinguished among the learned of our time for excellent and pacific booklets.

To him, therefore — since he had supplied me so convenient and the more welcome an occasion the more unexpected it was — I could not in good conscience fail to publish a most gentle Irenic Epistle, devoted solely to fostering his so pious zeal for Peace. The excellent man replied with a special Tract titled On the Universal Diffusion of the Reformed, courteously inscribed to my name; and at that time I thought I ought to rest content with it, lest I irritate in any way a well-disposed mind by being forced to answer something of that more prolix kind of writing (not immune to rather frequent repetitions), which would more easily have dragged us both away from the Counsels of Peace into litigation — especially when he was lending his labor more to the theological truths themselves (about which for two centuries already men had disputed in vain with the greatest contention of mind) than to the weight and moment of those truths.

4And the more willingly did I prescribe this quiet acquiescence to myself, because, stirred by this same man, I was meditating other Pacific Writings, from which it would be easy for him and for other theologians of the Lutheran party to judge that the Protestant controversies had hitherto been at least unduly multiplied and exaggerated (not to say anything heavier) by certain doctors of a quarrelsome temper especially, since on the Foundation of the Faith both parties entirely agree — of which I was already then most fully convinced in conscience, and afterward more and more fully confirmed; and my whole reply to be rendered to the most distinguished Scultetus would have aimed solely at proving that very point.

Exactly according to the counsel just set out, there came forth in the year 1703 a twofold Pacific Writing: one of them, exposing Dogmatically the Consensus of Lutherans and Reformed in the Foundations of the Faith; the other, Paradigmatically, through the example of the Consensus of Sandomierz, recommending Protestant Union; and a little later a Third supervened, On the Nature and Character of the Union to Be Kept, with an annexed most gentle Response — as was fitting — to the judgment of a certain most upright Lutheran doctor concerning the first of those three little tracts of mine, a doctor who at last in this very year has publicly professed his most celebrated name.

And although all these Three Writings of mine were also approved by the ballot of other most excellent Lutheran doctors besides the most learned Leipzig reviewers of March 1705 (as the most distinguished Cap. Calvor, known even among foreigners, most recently reports in the latest and most praised Consultation he has written On Entering into Ecclesiastical Peace among Protestants, p. 439, himself also voting for the same, both in what immediately precedes and elsewhere, especially pp. 30 and 31 of his Appendix — I pass over in silence for now Johann Fabricius, distinguished alike in theological knowledge and prudence, both in his most clear-sighted Consideration of his Controversies and in his most modest Defense of that Consideration);

yet there have not been wanting others also — especially after those three writings, all pertaining to the Fundamental Consensus of Protestants, had been followed by certain most gentle Hexads of mine, published in Academic fashion and submitted to public inquiry, merely setting out the Protestant Dissensus Beyond-the-Fundamentals — who, though never injured by me with so much as a word, either directly or indirectly through others' sides, were nonetheless so stirred with passion and stung by the gadfly of anger and envy that they rushed upon me and upon all my writings indiscriminately, not once or twice but in almost countless turns and ways, without measure or end, so that they must seem to have abstained from no manner of injury whatever.

5But now I must return from the digression into the road; and those thicker clouds of the gravest accusations which my bitterest Adversaries pour out — not yet to be named by me, and without even designating the places and writings that fill and infect them, lest even so I should be said to have done them injury and, by uncovering their nakedness, to have exacted revenge (their words meanwhile being recited, and by them easily recognized) — now come to be calmly discussed, the rest vanishing into air by their own lightness. They are three in number:

FIRST, they charge me in a strange way with this: that I dared to assert that a Fundamental Consensus in the Doctrine of the Holy Supper really obtains between Lutherans and Reformed; and that, using Beza's words, I said the Body of Christ is as far from the Sacred Supper as Heaven is from Earth.

SECOND, with a great imprecation they accuse me of having imputed to their Forum the dogma of the Oral Manducation of Christ's Body and the Drinking of His Blood as Anthropophagy and Theophagy.

THIRD, they paint me as crueler than Nero himself, chiefly on this ground: that I have praised the Sandomierz Consensus of the Evangelicals, whose patrons they boast behaved cruelly toward Lutherans.

6The Principal Controversies with the Theologians of the Augsburg Confession, as they are called.

A Historical and Catallactic Protheory.

Although most unwillingly we also reckon these theologians among those with whom there is serious religious dissent, we do so for no other end than that beginners may not be ignorant what those Heads are by which the unhappy divorce of minds, of studies, and of churches is fostered.

While for both sides: 1. There is the same Rule, the same Principle — namely Holy Scripture — human and Papal traditions and the Tridentine Decrees being rejected by equal suffrage; 2. For both, the same Fundamental Doctrine, so often acknowledged and set out in the Harmony of Confessions — namely as to the Causes of our salvation, whether Efficient or Meritorious; as to the Person of Christ the Lord, the Truth and Union of the Natures, His Office and Benefits; and finally as to the gratuitous mode of Justification, far from merits or the causality of Works; 3. For both, the same Worship of the one true and Triune God, and of Christ the God-man, far from all Idolatry and Superstition or adoration of the Creature; and the same duties of the Christian man toward God and neighbor required for Sanctification; 4. For both, the same Protestation against Papal Errors even in the Head of the Holy Eucharist, against all Papal Idolatry, foul Superstitions, the Roman Hierarchy, savage Tyranny, impure Celibacy, and idle Monasticism; 5. For both, the same duties of forbearing love handed down (Ephesians 4:2) in those things which are built upon the foundation — taught indeed in diverse ways by them, yet with this foundation itself unmoved and unshaken; 6. Finally for both, the same interest, the same cause, the same motives for restoring Evangelical peace, and if not entire Concord, at least mutual and fraternal Tolerance, to be ratified forever.

From which there would certainly flow a happier propagation of the Gospel; the triumph of Evangelical Truth; a stronger assault upon Antichrist, and at last his fall; the repression of Tyranny daily waxing strong; the frustration of Jesuit schemes; the assertion of Protestant Liberty, today tottering; the removal of the heaviest Scandal from their midst; a new daily increase of Church and Commonwealth; the exultation at last of all the pious; the conversion of Schismatics; and even an easier drawing of the Greek Churches to the Unity of Faith and Spirit, which the Bohemian Churches had long ago attempted.

7This business of Evangelical Consociation or Tolerance was usefully attempted at times, and is certainly to be attempted as a duty: first in the Marburg Colloquy, A.D. 1529, between Luther and Zwingli and those of another opinion — the Most Serene Landgrave of Hesse promoting pious Concord as far as in him lay, Melanchthon, Oecolampadius, Bucer, Jonas, A. Osiander, and others also being present — with little happy success, Luther with his own pressing too hard that Christ is corporally present in the Eucharist. Afterward the business was resumed in the Wittenberg Convention, A.D. 1536, Bucer and Capito then promoting it; a peace not destined to last while Luther lived, resting on Bucer's rather ambiguous Confession, Melanchthon writing the Formula. The same matter was acted, and more happily, in the Convention of Sandomierz, A.D. 1570, confirming a covenant among the associates of the Augsburg, Bohemian, and Helvetic Confessions.

Worthy of due praises in my judgment is the Cassel Convention, under the auspices of Wilhelm VI, Landgrave of Hesse, between the Marburg and Rinteln theologians, in the year 1661. There both sides agreed, in best faith, afterward repeated and confirmed, both in general concerning Consensus in the Essentials and the manner of preserving it, and in particular concerning the several Articles still in controversy.

And in general those venerable men pronounced on both sides: 1. That the Evangelicals agree on the Foundation of Faith and Salvation; that the controversial questions do not at all touch that Foundation, much less remove or overturn it; and that neither party thereafter, because of some difference, should cut the other off from fellowship or condemn them, and so on. 2. That for promoting that Consensus the remaining controversies ought either not to be treated in the churches from the pulpit, or certainly with the utmost modesty if necessity plainly required it — with no mention of dissenters, no harshness of words, no forced consequences, but only the declaration of truth from Scripture.

In particular, as to the Article of the Holy Supper, both Parties agreed that the Spiritual manducation of Christ's Body is altogether necessary to salvation and to the saving use of the Sacrament; and that otherwise the dissent between them as to the necessity of fraction and as to the oral manducation of Christ's Body, even by the mouth of an Unbeliever, is not such as would overturn the foundation of Salvation or shake the substance of the Sacrament. As to the Articles of Predestination, Grace, and Free Choice, they agreed: that after man's fall there are no residual powers left in him for spiritual good; that the whole business of human salvation depends on the Divine will, good pleasure, and grace; and that damnation is decreed to be inflicted on no one except because of sins. Controversies remained, but to be placed outside the census of fundamentals.

8IV.

Thus far I have brought forward the three most atrocious Accusations forged against me by the council of my Adversaries, collected from three Lutheran Doctors (those Orthodox ones, of course, who cannot err), framed in their own words. Not, to be sure, with a mind either to litigate with them about these things and proceed to empty or impious quarrels, or even to try to excuse myself before those most rigid Judges of mine after the sentence already passed against me by them (for that would be nothing else than imprudently and incautiously to provoke a heavier sentence against myself); but partly so that it may become known to a benevolent Reader, free from prejudices and passions, how hostilely they have invaded me, and with what atrocity — never having been injured by me — two of them, not even known to me by name before, have tried to tear the fame of a most innocent neighbor and to divert onto me the just indignation of the whole Lutheran Church (which, as holding directly and entirely the Foundation of the whole Christian Faith, I have always held ought to be pursued with fraternal charity), if what they said were true; partly so that I might show that I did not snatch at an occasion, but that the hardest necessity of snatching it was imposed on me — once only, and never hereafter — of alleging my Deeds and Words and of laying them before everyone's eyes, from which my adversaries have blushed at no one in sucking so much venom against me.

9So then, as to the PRIOR PART of the FIRST CRIMINATION: Ah! how grave and hard a matter is here brought forward — namely, that I labored to this end: that it should be established that a Fundamental Consensus in the Doctrine of the Holy Supper really obtains between Lutherans and Reformed. I confess freely that I most earnestly gave myself to that work; but what crime is there in this, when, fully convinced in Conscience in this cause, I so acted, and may be understood to have so acted?

For when from the Confessions of the Reformed in part — the Anglican, Gallican, Brandenburg (Marchica), and Torun — and in part from the most evident expositions of many doctors of the Reformed Church, both older (Calvin, Bucer, and Zwingli himself) and more recent (Forbes, Trelcatius, Cosin, and others), brought forward everywhere in my writings and in those of the Lutherans themselves, it can be doubtful to no one (except to him who, against Christian Charity that hopes all things, calls into doubt all their faith and sincerity) that the Reformed sincerely believe and confess a real and substantial Presence of Christ's Body itself — not of the bare Virtue and Efficacy of that Body — and that Presence as preceded even by the Faith of the Communicants themselves, and accordingly a like Manducation, yet both Spiritual and Supernatural, not Corporal and Dimensional and Oral: what more can be wanting or desired, so that they may be understood to conspire Fundamentally with the Lutherans in the Doctrine of the Lord's Supper?

Does it belong to the Foundation of the Christian Faith to believe that Christ's Body is present in the Holy Supper also Corporaliter — that is, in a corporal and dimensional mode — and likewise manducated Oraliter, in a Corporal and Oral mode? But such a Presence and Manducation of Christ's Body many among the Lutherans themselves, at least the Scriptural ones, deny to be real — much less that they believe them, or require them to be believed, concerning the faith and the foundation of the Christian faith. Indeed all those Lutherans who, with Luther, teach that Christ's Body is present in the Holy Supper neither by Inclusion in the bread, nor by Descent from heaven and Ascent into the same, nor by Ubiquity (which slipped from Luther only once, and from which he afterward judged he should abstain — as the Helmstadt theologians note everywhere, adding that the Ubiquity dogma damns the novelty itself and all the remaining inhabitants of East and West for error) — inculcating only the Coexistence of Christ's Body with the Eucharistic bread, and indeed not so much with the bread as with the Communicants — a Coexistence admitted also by all those Reformed who contend that the Sacramental Signs are not nude-significant, but exhibiting of the things they signify, even Substantial ones. And this, as far as I know, all the Reformed to a man do; and by this very thing they interpret Christ's definitive Eucharistic proposition, "This is my body" (however you take its Subject as the Complex of bread and body), as remaining improper and synecdochic, through this of theirs: "This bread signifies — that is, exhibitively — my Body"; or: "This bread is the exhibiting Sign of my Body" — most evidently declaring the Eucharistic Complex from a heavenly and an earthly thing (what Thomas Pierce, the Reformed theologian, in his Pacificatorio Orthodoxo, called the AGGREGATE, and what is to be held as the prow and stern of the truly Lutheran sentence in this place).

10J. VI.

The POSTERIOR PART of the FIRST CRIMINATION — by which the accuser said I had written that Christ's Body is farther distant from the Holy Supper and from the blessed bread of the Holy Supper than the heaven of heavens is from the terraqueous globe — is convicted of the most open falsehood by the mere repetition of my own words by which I am judged to have so written. For thus the words of my Letter written to Scultetus run:

I for my part take it upon myself in turn to require and solicit you, most distinguished Scultetus — you who have solicited me about many things and obtained my assent — that both you and the venerable Calixtus may judge the sincere and clear mind of the Reformed in this cause to be that which one of you adduced from blessed Calvin's Institutes, Book IV, chapter 17, section 9, in these words: Whatever can serve to express the true and Substantial Communication of the Lord's Body and Blood, which is exhibited to the Faithful by the Sacred Symbols of the Supper, I gladly receive — and that in such a way that they are understood to perceive it not with imagination alone or the intelligence of the mind, but to enjoy it in very deed as food of eternal life. Reconcile the harder voice of Calvin commonly Beza, thrust out precipitately in the Consensus with the Zurichers as Doctor Calixtus says — that the Body and Blood of our Savior are at that time, when the Sacred Eucharist is administered, distant from us by as great an interval of places as heaven is situated from earth — with the immediately recited words of the same Calvin, so that there he may be held to have spoken of the Crucified Body of Christ, and here of the Glorious. The Glorious, or Glorified, Body of Christ, according to the Sentence of Calvin and the Reformed, is in the heavens, sitting there at the right hand of the Father, to return thence to judge the living and the dead; but the Crucified Body of Christ is most present in the Eucharist. For this is the sincere and clear Sentence of the Reformed concerning the Lord's Supper which I dare to weigh in the name of them all: that All Believers who receive and manducate the blessed Bread receive and manducate the Crucified Body of Christ; and that the same account holds of the consecrated Wine; but that the Mode by which it comes about that Christ's crucified Body and His shed Blood are really present to Believers in the Sacred Supper and are in very deed received, eaten, and drunk by them, we do not know, and that that Mode is Hyperphysical.

Did I then truly assert that Christ's Body is farther distant from the Holy Supper and the blessed bread of the Holy Supper than the heaven of heavens is from the terraqueous globe? When, namely, I asserted: (1) that the Crucified Body of Christ is most present in the Supper; (2) that this is the sincere and clear Sentence of the Reformed concerning the Lord's Supper — that All Believers who receive and manducate the blessed bread receive and manducate Christ's crucified Body, and that the same account holds of the consecrated wine; (3) that the Mode alone by which it comes about that Christ's crucified Body and His shed Blood are really present to Believers in the Holy Supper, and are in very deed received, eaten, and drunk by them, we do not know; and that that Mode is Hyperphysical.

Let it be permitted to add now: even if perhaps the Lutheran Doctors universally all hold which nevertheless I would somewhat doubt that Christ's Body which is now present in the Supper is Christ's glorified Body, and therefore, as to qualities, other than that which was present to the disciples in the first Supper — that is, humbled and near to Crucifixion, or about to be crucified — called by Christ Himself given didomenon (Luke 22:19), and by Paul broken klomenon (1 Corinthians 11:24) — contrary to what I hold, who have asserted that Christ's Body, as crucified more than as glorified, is present in the Holy Supper Substantialiter nevertheless, though Spiritualiter; by that very fact, because I most clearly maintained in one and the same place that Christ's crucified Body, as crucified, is present in its Substance Spiritually, that is, and therefore Sacramentally in every Holy Supper — by what face, I ask, can I be said to have opined that Christ's Body is farther distant from the blessed bread of the Holy Supper than the heaven of heavens from the terraqueous globe? Nor does it obstruct that I meanwhile believe, led by the Apostles' Creed, that Christ's Body ascended into heaven, sits there at the right hand of God the Father, and will someday return thence to judge the living and the dead. For I believe all this, with very many Lutherans, concerning the Corporal, Local, and Dimensional Presence of Christ's Body in Heaven, having never denied the Spiritual and therefore Sacramental Presence of the same Body of Christ in the Holy Supper, but most sincerely, with God granting, ready to confess it to the last breath of life.

11J. VII.

There follows the SECOND CRIMINATION impacted on me by the Adversaries, by which I am said to have agitated the Eucharistic Doctrine of the Lutherans as Anthropophagy and Haematoposia — abominable to God and to men — in my Disputation on the Lord's Supper, and to have traduced it impiously and profanely, as Architect of a sly Union; which very thing is judged fit to be vindicated by no goose-quill style, but by a Tartarean spear. Even this imputation itself — to be held utterly foreheaded, and scarcely to be expected in that manner from a barbaric Tartarus — I will nevertheless never vindicate by any injurious word against the Author; I must dissolve it by the allegation of my own most innocent words, which run thus:

A third kind of arguments to be opposed, namely, to the CORPORAL AND ORAL Manducation of Christ's Body, which, the Lutherans themselves confessing, is not Scriptural flows from the nature of the Manducation itself to be instituted in the Holy Supper: which, if it is stated as a CORPORAL AND ORAL Manducation of Christ's Body, is found to be of such a kind that it could not have been instituted by Christ, because it induces Anthropophagy and Haematoposia, abominable to God and to men (Leviticus 7:26; 17:14).

From these words it is conspicuous: (1) that I carefully guarded not only lest anyone attribute Anthropophagy and Haematoposia to the Lutherans, but also lest I call the Lutherans' Eucharistic Doctrine — even concerning the Corporal and Oral Manducation of Christ's Body and Drinking of His Blood — a saving Anthropophagy and Haematoposia, and that for this sole cause, that they deny it to be such; while nevertheless holding that this Doctrine of the Lutherans concerning the Corporal and Oral Manducation of Christ's Body and the corporal and oral Drinking of His Blood contains Anthropophagy and Haematoposia, provided that, on the one side, the Body and Blood of Christ are the body and blood of a true man, and on the other side, Corporal and Oral Manducation and Drinking complete a true and proper Manducation and Drinking. (2) that I said only this: that the Manducation of Christ's Body if it be held Corporal and Oral is found to be of such a kind that it could not have been instituted by Christ.

12From these words it is conspicuous — completing what was begun above under (2) — that the Manducation of Christ's Body, if it be held Corporal and Oral, is found to be of such a kind that it could not have been instituted by Christ, because it would induce Anthropophagy and Haematoposia; and that every Anthropophagy and Haematoposia without distinction, without any limitation anywhere made in the Holy Scriptures, is held abominable to God and to man (Leviticus 7:26; 17:14).

So then it would scarcely be lawful for a Reformed man to draw any consequences — even those contained in the most evident manner in explicit propositions — if those consequences should happen to press upon the Lutheran Doctrine; nor indeed without adding the imputation of consequences not acknowledged by the Lutherans, which imputation I have warned again and again in what precedes to be otherwise less lawful. And therefore I have also judged that not even a Partial Capernaism, likewise contained in the Corporal and Oral Manducation of Christ's Body, ought to be attributed to them.

Conversely it will be free for the Lutherans to elicit anything from anything, and to transcribe upon the Reformed with impunity whatever blasphemies they please — and among them all the greatest, that God is the Author of sin (a charge the Reformed hold abominable, detest in the highest degree, and never cease to execrate) — blasphemies never to be vindicated from them even by a goose-quill style, much less by a Tartarean spear (from which kind of revenge all the Reformed justly abhor)?

13§. VIII.

But we hasten on to the THIRD and greatest of all the CRIMINATIONS — belonging almost solely to my first and most vehement Accuser — who, alas!, indulges too much his envy and his unjust and tumultuous zeal, by which he is rather often carried off into various things less becoming a Christian man, especially a theologian, so that not seldom he appears to have laid down his shield even in the most manifest distortions. He takes it ill that I set forth and recommended the Sandomierz Consensus as an Example of the Ecclesiastical Union of Evangelicals — than which none more excellent is given, and by which the Polish Evangelicals once coalesced so closely that they all but held every sacred thing in common, and neither Reformed living among Lutherans nor Lutherans living among Reformed feared, when occasion was given, to use and enjoy one another's sacred Sermons and Administrations of the Sacraments, while for the rest they proposed to one another, where need was, the most modest discriminations of beyond-fundamental Doctrines, without any party detractions, through charitable informations and conferences — persisting most amicably in such Consociation for more than half a century (as we proved by a just computation of the time from when the Consensus began to when it was afterward disrupted by certain well-known Firebrands, in the Preface vindicating the Consensus and prefixed to its repeated Edition).

Accordingly, that he might hurt me, the Adversary arraigns both the Sandomierz Consensus and me its Herald as guilty of utterly monstrous Cruelty and Tyranny, on this sole ground: that when a certain Contradictor interposed against this Consensus — and after the Synod had dealt with him both publicly and privately, as one reclaiming against the Consensus and unwilling to foster Concord with the other Churches — a certain tumult arose (as Hartknoch reports), and he experienced the threats of a certain Polish Politician, made with the scimitar after the manner of the Nation.

Yet even without my reminding him, anyone sufficiently understands that nothing can fall away from or be detracted from the Consensus of so many Evangelical Churches, unanimously entered, and from its just praises, merely because one sole Pastor reclaimed against it; nor can the whole Synod, otherwise peaceably agreeing, justly be charged with cruelty because, when a large enough handle had been given by the obstinate contradiction of one man shouting against all, some one of the Nobles — especially of the Poles, among whom liberty sometimes degenerates into Polish license — threatened him with the scimitar beyond the mind and will of the Synod.

14Nevertheless (that, for Conscience before God Most High who searches hearts and kidneys, I may here defend even my innocence in the face of the whole Protestant Church) this must be said by me in this place:

(1.) That concerning that threatening accident which happened in the Sandomierz Synod, I knew nothing before I was preparing an Edition of that Consensus and prefacing it; nor had I read Hartknoch's History so attentively as to take account of that threatening deed — and that because, in vindicating the Sandomierz Consensus, I had to dispute not against Hartknoch, a mere Historian, but against Hornbeck's Lutheran theological Opponent, who in particular neither mentions those threats nor alleges Hartknoch or his Ecclesiastical History in a single word. Nor, if I had read and observed the fact, could I have stood safely enough on the man's credit (since more than once he has been caught by others writing from mere affections and disordered love of his Sect); nor, even if I had been free to rest securely on that Man's relations, would I have needed to attend to that accidental deed in this place, since — that very thing being left intact, posited, and even conceded — it would still remain open to me for the rest to honor the Sandomierz Consensus with due praises for many other excellent things. Just as it is also praiseworthy on this account: that by the unanimous votes of both Evangelical Parties it brought it about that Gericius, the importunate Disturber of the Consensus, was suspended from his office — Peace no less than Truth commanding him — and was also to be coerced by other Ecclesiastical penalties. So Hartknoch (p. 905): Gericius remained of his opinion, and because he would not let himself be moved either by entreaty or by threatening words, he was, with the consent of all present (Lutherans equally with Reformed), suspended from office, and it was resolved that he should be taken into custody and excommunicated. That this itself was decreed by the suffrages of all present — Lutherans as well as Reformed, Clergy as well as Politicians — apart from that Man's grave insolence having merited such a censure, can seem probable to no one.

(2.) That I celebrated and raised with due praises the Sandomierz Consensus under no other name than that of the Consensus itself and of the various circumstances and qualities of this Consensus, set out in express words in my Preface — not under the name of certain intervening threats of one Noble, and he perhaps a Lutheran (since the Lutherans present in the Synod urged that Consensus no less than the Reformed). Those threats meanwhile, if they happened (let the credit rest with Hartknoch), I grieve from the heart; so far am I from approving them, much less from judging that any praise can accrue to the Synod from their having arisen.

(3.) All who know me know that I so abhor every violence and truculent mode of proceeding — even by the very nature and temperament of my body — that there is nothing I detest and turn from with my whole breast more. Especially in Christian Ecclesiastical business, which I have sufficiently understood to rest on the authority and revelation of God alone, and so not to be thrust upon an unwilling man's Conscience; and most of all in the Dissensus of Lutherans with Reformed, which I (unlike the adversary, who for that reason rushes upon all else and sacrifices me together with all Calvinists even to Satan's most cruel violence and Tyranny) hold by fully convinced conscience to be beyond-Fundamental, and toward which not merely common but fraternal love is to be kept. Hence I may Christianly boast that, having lived among Lutherans for the greater part of my life, I never had to be reconciled with any of them, but have conversed hitherto most amicably with many, both Doctors and Hearers, and as fellow-members with me of one Christian Religion may by their own right, from Christ's own law, demand of me. I invoke as witnesses both the present Inhabitants of this whole City and, by name (one who has since migrated elsewhere), the celebrated and never-suspected-by-anyone of even the least neglect of Lutheran Orthodoxy Most Rev. Dr. Wegner, most deserving Professor of Theology at Königsberg, after he already nearly three years ago wished his testimony of this kind concerning me to be copied out even in public types, through express letters written to me — to be read in the Acts of the Jubilees of our University, Part 3, pp. 79–80.

So that from all these things, with best conscience, it is open to me, with truth itself voting, to weave the following argument to oppose to the Reviler's argument: Whoever of the Reformed detests with his whole breast every violence in any Christian Ecclesiastical matter — most of all that which touches the Evangelicals' Dissensus held by him only as beyond-Fundamental — never fell out with any Lutheran, but has lived most amicably with all who became known to him, the Lutherans themselves being witnesses, and for these causes set forth and praised with many praises the Sandomierz Consensus insofar as this Consensus was most amicable, not insofar as one Man contradicted it and one Polish nobleman's threats (whether he was Reformed or Lutheran is uncertain) — that man, so far, sought the Protestants' Ecclesiastical Union by no violent Counsels, nor had it in mind to seek it so. But Strimesius etc. Therefore.

15As for what remains: I humbly beseech God that He would deign to pour into this adversary of mine (than whom no one ever experienced a more hostile man — irritated by not so much as a little letter, nor even by mention of his name anywhere) the Spirit of proving himself, by which he may understand and attain how great the sins with which he loads himself by the most petulant tearing of the fame both of me and of so many other excellent and pious Men devoted to the Lutheran Society — whether through most imprudent zeal, or through a hunt for his own fame, truly quite infamous, sought from men like himself — and may timely unload himself of them by serious repentance, lest Satan — not indeed a Calvinistic one (whom the Sacred page utterly ignores), but the infernal and first author of calumnies and contumelies — be able any longer to harm him and his soul, redeemed by the precious Blood of Christ, and be forever severed from the Evangelicals' Union, otherwise still most hateful to him.

Meanwhile let him note the following Rule spoken by someone to unjust Disputers: Not by reviling, but by entreating; not by fulminating, but by demonstrating; not by condemning, but by confirming; not by execrating, but by praying; not by striking, but by admonishing; not by dooming with dire imprecations, but by interceding with pious vows; not by attacking with curses, but by earning favor with good deeds; not by hateful windbags of words, but by unmoved testimonies of Holy Scripture; not by truculence, but by tolerance; not by agitation of minds, but by moderation of affections; not by force, but by gentleness; not by inhumanity, but by mildness; not by desire of revenge, but by will to gain the erring; not by clamor, but by love of the right — emerging from every Fanatics' Sophistry and fraud as from dense darkness, conquering Truth at last triumphs as victor, and will triumph forever, altogether to triumph at last. In Otto Cassmann, Schol. Tentat. I, p. 374.

And also the Admonition of Meldenius, a Lutheran Theologian, addressing all such Dictator-Theologians in these words: You have constituted yourselves not only Adversaries but Judges; you rashly condemn other Churches dissenting from You; you arrogate to Yourselves censure over any Theologians whatsoever, however well deserving of the Church, and over their pious labors; without blush you publicly arraign them as guilty of the foulest heresies; and thus most manifestly you affect a certain dominion over the Lord's inheritance, so that your πολυπραγμοσύνη (meddlesome busyness) becomes conspicuous to the whole World, and to all good men is rendered hateful and intolerable. Who designated You Judges of nearly all Controversies? who Censor of all books? who Aristarchuses even of all Theological phrases? as if you alone were wise, and all the rest wandered about like shadows? as if You, ignorant of every error, had been destined by God and the Universal Church to that office, that you should examine all others' sayings and writings most rigidly and with Lyncean acumen! Who finally permitted You more Right over others than others over You? why did you publicly provoke those by whom you had never been injured? If you had kept silence, you would not have betrayed yourselves like the hamster, and would have consulted best for your fame. And indeed you urge these Controversies with such bitterness of words, hauling wagons of insults from both sides and from every side, that no Apostolic gentleness can be found in you. Nay — what is far graver and least to be borne — you often violently twist even things spoken aptly, piously, and rightly into an alien and perverse sense, and thence boldly snatch occasion for shameless calumny, and fasten upon the innocent monsters of opinions of which they had never dreamed. If this license of cavilling should obtain, who at last will be innocent, who at last will be orthodox under these fault-findings? Christian Charity always hopes better things; your suspicion always thinks worse. Votive Exhortation for the peace of the Church, p. 34.

16III. As to the Article concerning the Person of Christ, both sides agreed (pp. 13–16): 1. That the Divine and Human Nature are truly and personally united, so that Christ is God and Man in the unity of Person; and that that Union was made ἀσυγχύτως, ἀτρέπτως, ἀδιαιρέτως, ἀχωρίστως — without confusion, without change, indivisibly, and inseparably. 2. That the Names of the Natures are truly predicated of each other, and in the proper signification of the words: God is Man, Man is God; and that the Properties also of each united Nature are truly and really predicated of the whole Person in the concrete, but according to that Nature to which those Properties or Attributes truly belong — which the Theologians have been pleased to call the Communication of Properties (Communicatio Idiomatum). 3. That the Human Nature is not intrinsically omnipotent, nor omniscient; thus in the Union the united Natures remained distinct, and the essential Properties of each safe; that the Principle which acts is the Person, the Principle by which, each Nature, and so on. 4. That the Human Nature has truly been raised to the highest glory, sitting also itself at the Right Hand of God. 5. That on both sides the Heresies of Nestorius, Eutyches, Marcion, Arius, Photinus, Paul of Samosata, Socinus (they place them in this order), and the like, are rejected.

There remained a dissent, and one not acknowledged as essential by those Men: 1. Whether to the Human Nature in the abstract there was communicated the divine Majesty, or All power, which it would exercise through the Omnipotence everywhere present and hypostatically joined to it? 2. Whether of the same Human Nature, in the abstract, there could be predicated the divine Properties that are fitted for operating — Omnipotence, and so on.

IV. As to the Article concerning Holy Baptism, both sides consented to this (pp. 17–18): That Infants are to be baptized; that the end of Baptism is that they be grafted into Christ and spiritually regenerated; that Baptism is necessary, yet not absolutely, so that only contempt of Baptism damns; that Infants are capable of regenerating grace: and both Parties established that these things belong to the essentials of that Sacrament. Controversies remained, yet acknowledged on both sides as not essential: 1. Whether Infants are at last grafted into Christ and regenerated through Baptism by the necessity of a means — namely an ordinary means? 2. Whether, because of the danger from neglect of Baptism, in a case of necessity, even a Layman may administer Baptism if a Minister's supply is denied?

V. As to Ceremonies — for example Exorcism in the Baptismal formula — there was consent on both sides: 1. That it is not to be thought the infant is corporally possessed by Satan. 2. That that rite can be employed no otherwise than to signify the habitual inherence of Original Sin. 3. That those formulas of Exorcism can be omitted and changed into express Prayers.

And according to the norm of this Agreement, the said Theologians judged that the Academies and Churches of Germany — especially (as nearer) the Brandenburg and Brunswick ones — ought to be invited into the same fellowship. And that truly Christian Mars of Germany, Assertor of Liberty as well as of Religion, FREDERICK WILLIAM, Elector of the Holy Roman Empire, most Invincible alike in mind and in arms — as Europe is witness, and as we too once were, and not long before his death, admitted into so great a Prince's sanctuary and conversation — had for many years wholly devoted himself to this most praiseworthy zeal, according to those fires of piety and charity with which he was kindled.

17They went as far as they could! It belongs to pious Theologians of every sort to lend a helping hand — not by words or writings only, but also by deeds; that is, with hearts and tongues and pens kindled by true charity, and with domestic discords composed among the partners of the same Faith and of the same Token. That latter point, as concerns all or most, is more to be wished than hoped for, so long as there is still room for human affections and infirmities.

There are already in the rank of Protestant Men those who turn any Error into Heresy, or any Dissent into something Fundamental or Essential, as their passion wills! Nevertheless that dissent has very often been merely verbal, and has turned on phrasing or on the manner of stating a thing — for example in the words realiter, oraliter, sufficienter, efficaciter, and so on. Often it has turned on the mode of the thing — for instance the manner of presence or of being-present in the Eucharist. Or on the circumstances of the thing — for instance the Breadth of Redemption, whether also for the reprobate, while the thing itself and its substance remain unmoved. Often too the dissent is not in what was truly handed down, but in things fastened on by consequences not born in the teaching but brought in from outside — and certainly rejected; for example, that the Reformed deny God's Omnipotence, that they make God the author of Sin, that they assert a Stoic necessity, and so on. Finally, the private quarrel of Theologians more than the public quarrel of Confessions has pulled Brethren apart in more than one question: as in the Supralapsarian question, now nearly laid to sleep, and in very many others of that kind.

18I will add also that dispute concerning the Power of Majesty about Sacred things — more restricted by some, turned by others into an Architectonic power; or even concerning the limits of Royal Power and of passive obedience. On that argument a recent Theologian of Copenhagen has, with little modesty, branded the whole Reformed Church — twisting certain sayings or assertions of a few into whatever sense he wished — as adverse and hostile to the rights of Kings and Princes, and even to their divine origin, and indeed to their security: and with no other design than that he might shut out the French Exiles, fled into the bosom of the Most Powerful King, if not from a roof, at least from the Temple and from the liberty of Sacred things. Far be all your fury from my House! So there are sometimes brother Men who, with little Christian spirit, most eagerly snatch sayings — often spoken in the heat of disputation, often hesitatingly or as opinion, often sound in sense but awkward in wording, such as fell in countless numbers from the Writers and Fathers of the early Church — into matter for contention and for battles about words (λογομαχίαι)! There are those who abound in certain private thoughts of their own, or in their own sense, to the prejudice of Ecclesiastical tranquillity and against the laws of Christian prudence! There are those who transform the blemishes of private men into public marks of the Churches: thus taking certain sayings, for example of Zwingli, Calvin, Martyr, Beza, and others, as the judgment of the Reformed Church, and understood in a harsher sense!

19There are those who of themselves order things indifferent (ἀδιάφορα) to become necessary, or order what belongs to the pattern of external discipline or of order — variable of course with the variety of Places, Nations, and Customs — to pass over into the very substance of Christianity, and as it were its soul! There are those who, theoretically immune from fundamental error (as we are ready to judge gently, ἐπιεικῶς), yet distinguish themselves practically by something far heavier: namely by a defect of charity (Matthew 5:23-24; 1 Corinthians 13:1, and so on)! It is already certain that all these things are done when our Savior's mandate, example, character, and last words are set aside (John 14:27), and when the rules and warnings of the holy Apostle of the Gentiles are despised (Ephesians 4:2-3; Philippians 3:16; 1 Timothy 6:4, and so on). The dignity and Office of their own Order are neglected as well; the pious efforts of the Greatest Princes, the most ardent vows of Theologians of either Party, and the groans and sighs of all the Good are tossed up and down as of no account; and no attention is paid to the weight of restoring Evangelical Peace.

We for our part do not cease either to lament in spirit and to grow sick at heart over the most unjust affections of men — with so great a loss to Evangelical truth, harm to the Church, joy to Enemies, offense to the Pious, and increase of Antichristian tyranny — or also to join right hands with those for whom the Divine Majesty has shaped the heart of better clay, who think more fairly and moderately of us and of our Churches, and who understand the fundamental consensus. Such men there are, by God's kindness, here and there through nearly all Germany and the Northern world; especially in these most mournful times, when the Church is already oppressed by the common Enemy and will be oppressed still further unless, with forces and minds joined under the auspices of the highest Powers, she has repressed that fury. And already we hear with joy that in the ample Dominions of the Most Powerful Brandenburg Elector studies are gradually coalescing, hatreds are departing, eristic strife is being barred, common counsel is being taken, and there are being recalled to minds formerly more stirred what men of proven piety, moderation, and prudence urged in this matter in the last century and in ours — Capito, Bucer, Melanchthon, Strigelius, Peucer, Pierius, Himmel, Palladius, Donauer, Chytraeus, Pelargus, Osiander, Calixtus, Meyfart, Matthias, Dilher, Dreier, Conring, Musaeus, Heinich, the Helmstedt men, and others.

20And would that men went back to the first Origins of the dissensions, understood at length from the History of the Diffidence — first the Sacramentarian schism, born in the year 1524 between Luther and Carolostadius, otherwise Bodenstein of Carlstadt, with Huldrych Zwingli soon about to move into a middle opinion: namely, Carolostadius referring the This (τοῦτο) in the words of Institution not to the Bread but to the Body of Christ, and so removing every presence of the Body in the Eucharistic Bread; Luther on the contrary asserting a corporal presence, by the letter of the text (τοῦ ῥητοῦ); but Zwingli and Oecolampadius a Sacramental presence, under the figure of Bread and Wine. The origin of the discords is to be understood especially from the temperaments of those who were a great part of these contests. Luther, to be sure, was fervid, and did not easily bear an equal in doctrine or authority; Carolostadius was less prudent, led by impulse more than by doctrine and judgment; Zwingli was constant in his opinion and yielded neither to Luther's commands nor to his name; Oecolampadius was unmoved, by the authority of Augustine and of the whole early Antiquity; Melanchthon, of the gentlest temper, would so assert the proper sense of the words of Institution that he departed from Luther, not acknowledging a local coexistence or inclusion of the Body, nor an oral manducation of it. But soon there came after them the sons of Bellona — bitter and eristic tempers — that would enlarge the suits and the Controversies:

21Such were Johann Brenz, father of the Ubiquitarians; Jakob Andreae, from the carpenter's craft called Schmidlin, who would add much to the Brentians; Tilemann Heshusius, fire and flame of so many tumults; Johann Marbach, marked by new portents and calumnies against Pezel, Zanchi, Tossanus, and others; Samuel Huber and Aegidius Hunnius, restless tempers, swollen with new births even concerning Predestination: and above all Flacius Illyricus with his party, the most unjust persecutor of Philip and of the Augsburg Confession as Melanchthon had emended it — though Luther himself had encouraged that work — from whom the Flaccians, and the Flaccio-Brentians, are most noted for their furies: and at last the Authors of the Book of Concord, or Bergen Formula, with Jakob Andreae, Selnecker, Chytraeus, Chemnitz, and others as chief captains. Concerning its Authors, Writing, Scope, Articles, Reprobation, Approbation, Apology, Sequels, and so on, Hospinian treats at length in his work Concordia Discors, and the Palatines in the Neustadt Admonition; also Heinrich Alting in his manuscript History of the Palatine Reformation, and others.

From these things it will easily be plain that a Schism of this kind was born among Evangelicals, to which rivalry between Luther and Carolostadius first gave occasion, and soon rivalry between Luther and Zwingli — men equal in learning and in zeal for reform, yet discordant in one point, the mode of Eucharistic presence. Hence first arose the unhappy Schism, a dissent about the Holy Supper lighter in its beginnings; lighter, I say, both from the Marburg Colloquy, in which Luther had enjoined silence, and from comparing Article X of the Augsburg Confession with the Elucidation Melanchthon afterward added, in which the disapproval of those who teach otherwise was omitted. But soon the sharp anger (ὀξυχολία) and vehemence of certain men fostered the divorce of minds and opinions — such as men's tempers were — and not last in that order Jakob Andreae, truly a Schmidlin or smith of contentions; Tilemann Heshusius, who somehow could not bear the fortune of General Superintendent of the whole Palatinate at the age of thirty-two; then the notorious Johann Marbach, Flacius Illyricus, and others. Soon the dogma of Ubiquity was brought to birth — asserted indeed at first on the occasion of the Eucharistic Controversy, but afterward left silent by Luther and dropped altogether, as also in the Augsburg Confession. Yet it broke out again after Luther's death, poured out by Brenz, but interpolated and promoted by Jakob Andreae, the Flaccians, the Bergen men, and others. Hence came their divorce from the Augsburg Confession as Melanchthon had reviewed and emended it, especially at Article X, and the distinction they produced between the Confession as varied and as unvaried. Hatreds, fury, force, and exacerbation followed on every side.

22through Germany — so far that they rose even against the best and most pious Princes: as when a fierce tempest was stirred against Frederick III of the Palatinate, with Jakob Andreae, Heshusius, and Bidenbach as chief firebrands, that they might shut pious Frederick out of the Peace of Religion and the Society of the Augsburg Confession — though they would fail at the Augsburg Diet of 1566. At last the Formula of Concord finished the work — first the Torgau Formula, afterward the Bergen — of which we have just spoken: in truth a Formula of Discord, and the complement of a lasting Schism. Elector Ludwig of the Palatinate protested at once, though most devoted to the Lutherans, and other Princes with him, and also the weightiest Theologians — Hospinian, Alting, and the rest already praised at length. But the unhappy Controversy concerning Predestination and its annexed Heads, born chiefly through Samuel Huber and then through Aegidius Hunnius of Wittenberg around the year 1580 — or so Georg Calixtus testifies below on the Confession of Thorn, p. 14 — drew the ulcer wider and rendered it incurable.

And at last they have hardened that Evangelical dissent down to this very day: Satan's malign craft (κακοτεχνία); the hidden arts of the many-scheming Jesuits (τῶν πολυμηχάνων); the calculations of Politicians who serve Rome or their own advantage; and among Theologians for the most part a spiteful rivalry (κακοζηλία), pride, hatreds, calumnies, prejudices, eristic and virulent writings, and private ambitions in very many cases — as it happens — and it will have no end until, by the authority of the Most Serene Princes and by a greater force if one ever intervenes, they are coerced.

23But in the matter of mutual Tolerance and of fraternal Concord sought among the Churches of Protestants, the cause of those called Lutherans must not be confused — as some would wish — with that of today's Remonstrants, concerning whose Schism the Reformed judgment was not the same, and whose Dogmas were reviewed at length above. Still less is the cause of the Augsburg Brethren, in the irenic business, to be set beside that of the Pontiffs, though today's Roman Methodists may try to compose both. Hence both parties — Remonstrants and Pontiffs alike — have long solicited us toward Syncretism in Religion, with an eye to the communion offered to the brethren of the Augsburg Confession. And the Pontiffs have done so in that Method they call Richelian, which the Gallican Clergy lately revived, as Method 1: leading us by their Missionaries into Communion with the Roman Church. In particular the same Bishop of Condom, now of Meaux, pressed it in Chapter II of his Catholic or Tridentine Exposition.

24The pretense was, first, that the Lutherans defend the so-called real Presence of Christ's Body in the Eucharist, from which would follow the Adoration of the Body present in the Eucharist — which we so greatly flee. Second, that they defend the dogma of Ubiquity, from which would follow altogether the destruction of Christ's Humanity: and yet the Reformed are ready to offer them their communion, because they deny that consequence of a destroyed Humanity — why then not also to Pontiffs who equally refuse the Consequences drawn from Tridentine Doctrine? But we went openly and at length against this vainest Method in our Strictures against the then Bishop of Condom, published in 1681.

There we treat at length: (1) of the reason of tolerance and of the communion offered to the brethren of the Augsburg Confession — with a retort upon Pontiffs who know nothing of tolerance, indeed of humanity, while they still deny that dissent from the Roman Church is Fundamental; (2) of the dogma of Ubiquity, how far it is held to overthrow the foundation or not — compared with the contested dogmas of the Pontiffs and with their practice, which destroy the essence of Christianity by a far other reason; (3) of real Presence in the Lutheran sense, and of the adoration they approve in the Eucharist — narrating in a long series the difference from the dogma of Transubstantiation, from the Mass Sacrifice, and from Latria of the Host shown even outside the use of the Sacrament, besides other idolatrous and intensely superstitious acts in the Pontiffs' Mass rites; (4) finally of the Consequences which the Bishop of Meaux charges the Reformed with eliciting from Tridentine doctrine not without the stain of calumny — treated by us at length in those Strictures.

25Nor indeed is the Remonstrant cause and the Lutheran on equal footing, even in the business of Predestination and its annexed Heads. The points above already teach as much, where the Rinteln Theologians explained their own mind and their party's, afterward defended by them in their Apology. And in this cause we appeal to the Leipzig men, to Gerhard, to Calixtus, even to Calov in his Consideration of Arminianism, and others — but before all to Luther himself. For there was no controversy with Luther concerning Predestination, or the total Impotence of the bound Will, or God's Providence about evil actions: he strongly asserted Augustine's doctrine — which is also Paul's — in the Book on the Bondage of the Will, issued against Erasmus toward the end of 1525. For in it there occur even more dreadful things concerning the Divine Decrees and the necessity of sinning than in Calvin himself — as all candid men confess, whatever escapes Luther's grandsons may have tried to seize.

26And afterward Luther confirmed it in a lucid Preface to the Epistle to the Romans and in other writings, even German ones. Nor was any Controversy on this argument moved against the Reformed — neither in the Torgau Formula or Book of Concord of 1577, nor in the Montbeliard Colloquy published in 1587. On the contrary, Synergists were marked in the Formula of Concord: namely those who set a certain synergy (συνεργία) of Free Will, and held the Causes of Conversion to be the Holy Spirit, the Word, and Man's Will — which error was imputed to Melanchthon. So when contention arose at Strasbourg in 1562 between Johann Marbach and Jerome Zanchi, and Zanchi's doctrine was most bitterly harassed, there was no serious remonstrance on the Predestination argument. In that doctrine the Arbiters — among them Schmidlin summoned from Tubingen — judged there was no great diversity.

Nor, Calixtus himself warns in his Animadversions on the Thorn Confession, was a sentence different from that received Augustinian view — to which the Theologians of the Unaltered Augsburg Confession had clung — brought back into Churches and Schools before Aegidius Hunnius, then teaching at Wittenberg in 1580, and Georg Mylius of Jena.

27Therefore even now today the Theologians named from Luther confess: (1) that certain persons are elected from eternity, not because of foreseen faith, but elected in faith, or through faith in Christ; (2) that Election has no impulsive cause in us, but the whole business of salvation hangs upon God; (3) that faith is foreseen in some, yet as from the grace of the Holy Spirit, as God's gift, as to its beginning, progress, and perseverance; (4) that we are dead in sins, and that there are no residual powers in fallen man toward spiritual good, toward the supernatural acts of Conversion; (5) that God's Grace truly precedes every operation of man, and that in him there are no powers toward Conversion except those prevented, excited, and moved by Grace — so that toward the first reception of Grace they have themselves only passively, as Calixtus expressly says;

(6) that that grace is not given except from a decree of giving efficacious Grace for believing; nor does God foresee anything except dependently on Himself as first cause, still less foresee spiritual good in us; (7) that Faith is trust in divine grace, or in the remission of sins, through and on account of Christ, already contradistinguished from works in the business of Justification; and that a subjective certainty of salvation is given; (8) that the Election of certain Persons is eternal and immutable, and so the Elect according to foreknowledge (κατὰ πρόγνωσιν) cannot finally fall away, on the hypothesis of divine Foreknowledge, which is infallible; (9) as to Reprobation, although they want no other than according to foresight of final Impenitence, yet they do not deny that in this way it is eternal — that the distinction of elect from reprobate is eternal, that the cause of this comparative distinction is God's good pleasure, and that Foreknowledge of the reprobate also is infallible; (10) finally that they condemn every Pelagianism and Semi-Pelagianism. So genuine grandsons of Luther appear to have stood far from the aim and mind of the Remonstrants.

28From which things it is plain how no necessity binds together the Theologians of the Augsburg Confession with the Remonstrants, and how the men of Dordrecht had nothing to do with brethren of that sort, while these latter barred recocted Pelagianism together with us. It is also plain how ready it would be for Lutherans in the common sense to conspire fraternally with the Reformed, if from the pulpit — dropping quarrels, and dropping also unjust delations before Princes and Magistrates — those men would keep within bounds. Add that dissent in the cause of Predestination gave no cause to the Schism, nor was there contention with Luther on that matter, from what has just been said. And above all, the Brethren of the Augsburg Society have no commerce with the Socinians, as today's Remonstrants do from the history above, from page 242.

So likewise among those called Lutherans there is no palliation of Fundamental errors, nor excuse, nor diminution, in the Heads concerning the Holy Trinity, the eternal Divinity and Generation of the Son, the adoration of the Holy Spirit, Original Sin, the Satisfaction of Christ, Justification by faith alone, and so on.

29So that if any consensus of the Brethren with the Quinquarticularian Theologians remains, the dissent from the men of Dordrecht consists chiefly in these: (1) In phrase, where Lutherans speak of election or reprobation (yet not from Luther) as from foresight of faith, or from foresight of unbelief — although the Formula of Concord did not distinguish πρόγνωσις from προορισμός, as Peucer long ago observed in the Confession set out by Hospinian. (2) In reviewing the order of the Decrees; namely with a conditional Decree set first — concerning the salvation of all, redemption, calling to faith, and so on — provided they are not wanting to it. (3) In the object of Christ's Death, which is all and every human being, elect as well as reprobate. (4) In asserting the mode of the operation of Grace, which with respect to all is even internal, and efficacious from God's side, yet which men resist and against which they set an obstacle — although elsewhere they confess the impotence of Free Will for the work of Conversion.

(5) In the asserted possible apostasy of the saints, which the Reformed also do not deny if the saints are considered in themselves: yet the same Brethren deny it if they are considered elect according to God's infallible foresight. (6) Finally in the Reformed sentence now and then twisted or taken in a sinister sense, and in the Predestinarian Heresy affixed to them — such as was once affixed to Augustine, to Gottschalk, and to those of like mind (ὁμοδόξοις). But once that inequity of judgments and suspicions is hereafter ordered to be of no force, in the remaining things that leave a difference either in phrase, or in the method of conceiving the Decrees, or in the mode of the matter, or its extent, or its circumstances — the substance being safe on both sides (for example Christ's Death, or preventing and confirming Grace, or justifying Faith, or Holy Baptism), overturned by the common Adversaries of Protestants — easy association will follow. Nor will anything be wanting to the complement of either party's vows, except the longed-for peace, that God the perfecter of all may complete it — who daily also fills even what is beyond oath and beyond hope, as I may speak with the Lyric poet.

30Of the Controversies with the Theologians of the Augsburg Confession, two various Classes are to be set up. For some are with the genuine Disciples of Luther, and with those who profess the Augsburg Confession even as Melanchthon recognized it after the Wittenberg Concord, and as it was often explained, especially as to Article X. And now almost the only contested head remaining is the Lord's Supper — Melanchthon expressing the presence of Christ's Body in these words in the later Confession, which others call the Variata by Philip's private authority: That with the bread and wine the Body and Blood of Christ are truly exhibited to those who eat in the Lord's Supper. The prior edition, of the year 1530, had: That the Body and Blood of Christ are truly present, and are distributed to those who eat in the Lord's Supper, with the disapproval of those who think otherwise added. That one thing was, while Luther lived, an apple of discord (μῆλον ἔριδος) — first with Carolostadius, from what was said before, and then also with the Swiss, Zwingli, Oecolampadius, and those who joined them in the order of the Reformers.

Others intervene with the disciples of Johann Brenz, Jakob Andreae, Matthias Flacius Illyricus, Aegidius Hunnius, and others, and as many as subscribed the Torgau Articles, first written in the year 1576 — Jakob Andreae, the Tübingen Theologian, being their chief architect — soon to be referred (with few changes) into the Book of Concord, or Bergen Formula, of 1577, published in 1580 after the subscriptions had arisen. And in this the dogma of Ubiquity, or the Majesty of Christ's Human Nature, is already set in the citadel; and only the prior Augsburg Confession of the year 1530 is admitted, which they call the Unaltered! But other definitive sentences also are expressed in that Book concerning Controversies then agitated among the Lutherans themselves — for example Flaccians, Wittenbergers, Osiandrists, and so on — and likewise with those they call Calvinists. Among which is that concerning Predestination, yet explained there so that the sole cause of salvation, and therefore also of election, is placed in God, not in us.

31It is confessed that Electors, Princes, and very many Theologians throughout Lutheran Germany protested against this temerity — and the King of the Danes himself — especially Elector Ludwig of the Palatinate, as was lately noted. And Heinrich Alting notes him in the manuscript Palatine History as having reprehended five things in that Bergen Formula: (1) That it had restricted the Augsburg Confession to the first Exemplar offered to the Emperor in 1530, excluding Editions in which some change or variation had entered for the sake of greater evidence. (2) That after introducing the names of Flaccians, Osiandrists, and Antinomians, they had left other names — such as that of the Synergists — with Melanchthon's sentence less candidly explained. (3) That to the doctrine of the Lord's Supper and of Christ's Presence in that same Supper they had subjected the doctrine of Ubiquity, which Luther had neither approved nor thought fit to be employed in this Controversy concerning the Supper. (4) That they had brought into that Formula many phrases and abstract terms outside and beyond Scripture, and not serving the edification of the Church. (5) That they condemned Zwinglians and Calvinists — not without the appearance of Pontifical tyranny — using this hard voice, even those not heard, and still less convicted of error.

Yet at length the facility of the Princes on that side, and the industry employed by those Theologians on this, won out — by which, with a Prefation written by Schmidlin and Chemnitz, consisting of tragic buskins and captious turns (so it was judged), they induced those men to subscribe. And not long afterward they composed an Apology of this Book at Erfurt, with Martin Chemnitz as standard-bearer, to be censured through the Academies and Churches, and to be published in 1583. Meanwhile among the Palatines Zacharias Ursinus was ordered by Johann Casimir, brother of Elector Ludwig, to give a refutation of the Book, which is among the Neustadt Acts — and than which, the praised Alting says in that manuscript History which we were once permitted to use at Heidelberg, nothing fuller, nothing more accurate, nothing more learned was ever written and published against these Lutherans.

32From that time there have been Controversies with the Flaccians, and with the Bergen men, and with their grandsons, in nearly a threefold difference — besides that prior one concerning the Lord's Supper, or the mode of receiving Christ's Body in the Eucharist. I. Other Controversies not born from the doctrine of the Reformers, but from extortions of it — not from things handed down, but from things affixed — which are therefore not questions of right, but of fact. For example: Whether the Reformed make natural Reason the Judge of sentences of faith; or Philosophy the principle of Theological conclusions? Whether they assert an absolute necessity of human actions, a Stoic fate, a Manichaean or Predestinarian Heresy? Whether they so make God the author or cause — physical or moral — of Sin? Whether they deny God's Omnipotence, in the Chapter of Corporal presence, or His Mercy, in the other Chapter of Universal Grace? Likewise whether they divide the Natures of Christ, or think with Nestorius, because they distinguish the Natures in the unity of the Person? Whether they take away the force and efficacy of Christ's Death? Whether the Sacraments are to them bare signs, bare tokens? Whether they deny and assail every presence of Christ in the Eucharist? Whether they deny all grace to Infants, or the seed of faith, of grace, of regeneration, and so on? And these Controversies, as they are calumnious, so in the matter itself they are null — about which nevertheless Eckhard, Meisner, Musaeus, Gerhard, Hutter, Mentzer, Calov, Dorsch, Danhauer, Schlüsselburg, and others are laborious and almost wholly occupied.

II. Certain others are less principal or weighty — for example, concerning certain Adiaphorous Rites and Ceremonies around Baptism, the Eucharist, Confession, kneeling at the name of Jesus, or the adornment of Temples, the use of Images, of Feasts, and so on. Which Rites it is agreed are not equally employed by all Lutherans, having arisen partly from Luther's temper against Carolostadius in the cause of Images, and so on. III. Finally other Controversies are more real, or principal, concerning Heads of Doctrine that arose after Luther: for example concerning the Person of Christ, and the Omnipresence of the Human Nature; concerning Predestination and its annexed heads; and at last concerning Baptism. And these we chiefly attend to in this place, as also the Eucharistic Controversy, so that the State of the Controversy may be clear to our Hearers. They are to be seen more fully in Ursinus, Polanus, Zanchi, Sadeel, Beza, Danaeus, Pareus, Wendelin, Alting, Masson, Johann Crocius, Maresius, Hoornbeek, Hottinger, Arnold, Heidegger, and others.

33THE LORD’S SUPPER — Where the schism took its start.

1. Should the words of Eucharistic institution — "This is my Body," and so on; "This is my Blood" — because they are serious, entirely true, and the words of Christ’s Testament, be taken properly and literally, plainly according to the letter? Or should they rather be taken in a metonymic and sacramental sense — the sense Holy Scripture already uses in sacramental speech and even outside the Sacraments (Genesis 17:10; 41:26; Exodus 12:11; 31:13, 16) — so that the names of the things signified (Body and Blood) are given to the signs and seals themselves (bread and wine)?

Or does the sense run this way instead: what I give you is truly and substantially my Body, that natural Body delivered for you; or else, in, with, and under this bread my Body is present without spatial distance, essentially or bodily there — so that bread is called Christ’s Body neither by Transsubstantiation nor by signification or sealing alone, but by a kind of Consubstantiation, a real and hidden inclusion?

Lutherans say yes; the Reformed say no.

34Our brethren’s hypotheses — enough to list them here; theologians have weighed them at length — include claims such as these: a figurative sense destroys the truth of the words; "is Body" must mean something real and substantial; Christ was bodily present at the first Supper, and therefore also in the bread and wine even while he stood outside the bread, and therefore remains bodily present after the ascension into the heavens; Christ’s Body is eaten in the Supper and so must be present without spatial distance, since a body cannot be present in a spiritual mode; sacramental eating means more than spiritual eating and therefore means oral eating of the true and natural Body; clinging to the literal sense is safer, and the Reformed leave it rashly; what these words institute is a Testament or Covenant and therefore must use proper words alone, as if clarity belonged only to proper speech — as though no sign of the Covenant or Testament were instituted, which is how we read Matthew 26:28 and Luke 22:20.

In that way they beg the question under judgment. They treat the Institution words ("This is my Body") as self-explanatory in a literal, native, proper, and clear sense, yet they paraphrase them as: in or under this — namely the composed complex of bread and Body — my Body is contained, this very Body present to you, yet illocal, and so forth.

35Yet the Lutherans deny (1) that the Bread is itself Christ's Body. Which is what the literal sense sounds. (2) likewise that This refers to the Bread, to what Christ was showing. Which is what the letter wants. (3) for them the word is becomes is in, is under, is contained, and so on. Against the letter. (4) they take Body as invisible and illocal. Again against the letter's will. (5) they shift the subject into the place of the predicate, for example My Body is in or under this bread, and so on. (6) they confess the way of speaking is synecdochic, by synecdoche of the contained or of the whole, and so on. Yet a figure which (they say) loses the name of figure; others call it an unusual locution, and so on. (7) they have parted far from one another in rendering these words: some take this of the bread; others complexly of bread and Body; others adverbially, Behold my Body; others actively, this whole action, and so on.

36What remains of the dispute is not the thing itself — whether Christ’s Body is present in the Holy Supper, or whether it is eaten — but the mode of both.

Some devised an inclusion of Christ’s Body that leaves the substance of the bread intact and treats the Body as present without spatial distance. That teaching goes by Consubstantiation, also Coexistence, and formerly Impanation. It arose in Berengarian times, or was drawn from Lombard’s Sentences, Book IV, Distinction 11, Chapter 4, and Peter of Ailly, Cardinal of Cambrai, approved it. Luther preferred it to Transsubstantiation, though his own explanations varied — Hospinian’s History of the Sacraments, Part II, from page 7 onward, treats the shifts at length.

How much better if Luther had held to what he himself said in 1519, before the Sacramentarian contest, in the German sermon On the Sacrament of the True Body of Christ (Jena, Volume I, folio 201–202 and following): three things in the Sacrament of Christ’s Body ought to be known. First, the sacrament or sign, external and visible, under the form of bread and wine. Second, the signification of that sacrament, which ought to be internal and spiritual. Third, faith, which ought to join both in the sacrament’s use. He then explains Paul’s κοινωνία in 1 Corinthians 10, of which we receive a sure sign in the Sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood.

Add Article XII of the Augsburg Confession: the Sacraments were instituted as signs and testimonies of God’s will toward us, set forth to awaken and confirm faith — faith that should believe the promises the Sacraments exhibit and show.

37II. Next: in the use of the Sacrament, when Christ so commands in the Institution of the Holy Supper, is the true and substantial Body of Christ taken together with the Bread, and the Blood together with the Wine, truly received and eaten by the bodily mouth of every communicant — the faithful and the unfaithful alike — because they are joined physically, without spatial distance, and by co-presence, and therefore must be taken by that same instrument of the mouth?

Or is it rather this way: the Symbols themselves, called Christ's Body and Blood by metonymy and figure (as the cup is called the New Testament in Luke 22:20), are eaten orally and in the proper sense; yet the reality those Symbols signify — the true Body and Blood of Christ — is eaten only spiritually and in an improper sense, namely by the mouth of faith awakened through the Sacrament and Memorial, and is perceived and laid hold of by the truly faithful alone?

Still, in those who eat rightly, the two eatings must go together: the sacramental eating of the Sacrament itself (of the symbols of Christ's Body), and the Spiritual eating of the true Body laid hold of by faith. So while they eat with the mouth the Bread of the Lord — something Unbelievers also do — they at the same moment, by a true act of faith and with the life-giving power of the Holy Spirit (John 6:63), eat the Bread who is the Lord, or become spiritual sharers (κοινωνοί) in Christ's Body crucified for us and in every Benefit that flows from it (1 Corinthians 10:16). Lutherans affirm the first alternative; the Reformed affirm the second.

38For that first claim, precarious supporting premises have been advanced. First: that this oral mode of eating — even by Unbelievers — was set down in the Augsburg Confession, and even in the so-called Invariata, which Philip first wrote and the Princes and Theologians recognized at Wittenberg in 1531. In fact Article X speaks only indefinitely: That Christ's Body and Blood are truly present, and with Bread and Wine are distributed to those eating in the Lord's Supper. It does not express the mode of eating, nor name Unbelievers as the eaters. Underneath, rather, it is fairly plain that Christ's Body and Blood are exhibited to those who eat in the due mode and in faith.

Second: that Christ's Body is present in the Eucharist in a local way, without spatial distance. Neither the Confession, nor Luther, nor Melanchthon said that — and Melanchthon here stands farthest from any dogma of the Omnipresence or Ubiquity of Christ's Body. Third: that, for Christ's essential Body, no mode of eating can be conceived except oral eating with the bodily mouth — which cuts against what the State of the Controversy has already shown. Christ in the Institution did not say, Eat this Body with the mouth — the Body that was present and speaking. He spoke of eating the bread that way. He did not say, Drink this my Blood with the mouth — Blood not yet poured out, still to be poured out, and so not then drawn by the mouth; the Cup, rather. Spiritual eating is no less true for being figurative. Christ proves that one eating in John 6:55 and 63, and draws an argument from His ascension in verse 62. Related to the object of faith, eating can mean nothing but the act of believing — also spoken of as seeing, putting on, coming, and the like. Christ could not be food that goes into the belly (Matthew 15:17), any more than He could eat Himself at that first Supper. Spiritual eating is no harder to conceive than the other birth (John 3:3, 5), Abraham's seeing (John 8:56), the rending of the heart (Joel 2:13), putting on Christ (Romans 13:14), and union with Christ (John 6:56), and so on.

Fourth: the Lutherans likewise assume a union of Body and Bread by coexistence, as wine sits in a cup or water in a vessel. That is unwritten, and against what is written — Christ's Body then being separate from the Bread. Fifth: they assume the earthly thing and the heavenly thing are eaten by one and the same instrument — Bread and Body, sign and thing signed — as though there were no mouth of faith beside the mouth of the body.

39CONTROVERSIES BORN AFTER LUTHER. On God's Providence, Predestination, and the heads annexed to them.

III. First: whether the Reformed make God the author of Sin — namely (1) from the will of εὐδοκία, that is of permissive good-pleasure, which Luther asserted so clearly that his own candid sons do not deny it; (2) from a hypothetical necessity, or necessity of futurition and of the event, flowing from infallible foreknowledge (πρόγνωσις), and also from that necessity of immutability which Luther pressed hardest, drawn from God's immutable and unsearchable good-pleasure, counsel, will, and disposition — even in the hardening of Pharaoh, the betrayal of Judas, and the like; (3) from the mode of that same Providence, least idle or ineffective (they call it Concurrence) around actions infected by sin, as actions, which again Luther himself treats as necessary, though not by a necessity of compulsion — On the Bondage of the Will, pages 67–68, and so on.

40What comes back is not so much any true Controversy as an unhappy Calumny of a few — already shared by these men with the Papal party and with the Remonstrants. See the first falsehoods (πρῶτα ψεύδη) treated at length above in the Controversy with the Remonstrants, heads VII, XV, XVIII, XIX, and XXII.

41Men took offense at certain phrases drawn from the writings of Zwingli, Martyr, Calvin, Beza, Zanchi, Rennecher, Piscator, and others. By those phrases the Theologians meant, with Holy Scripture, three things.

First: God's efficacious Providence around evils and around the wicked — spoken of in the biblical phrases of hardening, of blinding, of sending a lying spirit, of handing over into a reprobate mind (Romans 1:28), of drawing a callus over, of sending the ἐνέργεια — the working — of error (2 Thessalonians 2:11), and the like.

Second: a motion, or impulse, of sinning causes — not a merely moral one, but a physical one — seeing that in God we all are moved: as when He sent Joseph (Genesis 45:7; 50:20), drove Shimei to curse (2 Samuel 16:10), and drove Ahab's prophets to deceive and to lie (1 Kings 22:22–23), and so on.

Third: God's acts in this whole Providence around the wicked are judicial and penal — either as penalty for one's own crime, as in Pharaoh, in the unbelieving Jews, in Judas the traitor, and the like; or as penalty for another's crime, such as Absalom's incest, Jeroboam's schism, and the lying spirit that was to lead Ahab on, and so on.

42But there is this comfort: beside express Scripture in so many places and examples, the phrases of our Theologians can be set beside Luther's — in On the Bondage of the Will, in his work on the Epistle to the Romans, and elsewhere — or beside Philip Melanchthon's in the Common Places and on Romans, and so on.

If Lutheran brethren charge an invidious reading of those phrases, and then soften Luther's own words — as Sebastian Schmid of Strasbourg did, for example, in his Notes on the Bondage of the Will in 1664 — why should the right they claim for themselves not be allowed to us as well, when we render the phrases and explain the mind of Zwingli, Calvin, Martyr, Beza, and the rest?

That work has been done, besides Masson's German Anatomy, Parts I and II, by Pareus in the Irenicum, page 249; by Wendelin in the Theological Exercises, Exercise XXVI and following; by Hottinger in the Church History, Volume VIII, from page 640 onward; and so on. Even among the Lutherans themselves the recent Rinteln Theologians — already mentioned above — do it in their Apologetic Letter to the Wittenberg Doctors. There they excuse Calvin, because Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon, by their own harsh words on Romans chapter 8, equally made God the author of sin, and so on.

43II. Is there in God a general will, or an antecedent will, to save all human beings and each one — and that not what is called the will of the sign, by which His word promiscuously marks the way of salvation for any, inviting any without distinction to the knowledge of the truth (1 Timothy 2:4), but God's will properly so called, the will of His good-pleasure: that eternal, serious, efficacious will — yet not absolute or immutable, but ordered and conditioned, under the conditions of faith and of perseverance that human beings are to perform?

44Under that will, then, two claims are put: first, that He gave His only-begotten Son so that by His death the Son would merit righteousness and life for every person, through a universal Redemption; second, that He also offers His grace to every person, excluding none, through a universal vocation, and stands ready to confer that grace on all by the ordinary means — calling all through the Word of the Gospel, and converting, regenerating, justifying, adopting, and glorifying all — if only human beings do not place an obstacle in the way.

Lutherans affirm this; the Orthodox deny it.

45Unjust accusations against the Reformed. As for the Reformers' dissent on universal grace, redemption, and vocation: the Saxons at the Leipzig Colloquy of 1631 did not press it. The Rinteln theologians at the Cassel Colloquy (as already seen above) confessed that the foundation of divine grace stands unshaken among the Reformed, and that both sides agree (1) in equally condemning Pelagian and Semi-Pelagian dogmas, and (2) in pressing the practical rules that suspend justification on antecedent faith, and salvation also on perseverance.

And it was certainly laid on the Reformed as if they had asserted some illusory will in God toward the reprobate — whereas that will is always serious: as to the exacting of duty in the Word; as to the proposing of the one way to salvation, through faith in Christ; and as to the truth of that individual bond between faith and salvation. On these the perpetual truth of the saying rests: whoever believes will be saved, and so on.

On this see the Controversy with the early Arminians, IV, and afterward Controv. XXXI; and our own Biblical Vindication at Matthew 11:28.

46It was also supposed that the Reformed deny either the sufficiency of Christ's redemption, or even its extension to all — or to the whole world. That we freely grant, but in Holy Scripture's sense: as to all who are to be brought into glory, even any at all, throughout the whole world, with no distinction under the New Testament economy.

So the Reformed do not deny the vocation that comes through the ministers of the Gospel — general, promiscuous, no one excluded. But they do deny an eternal will of God to save and redeem even the reprobate (whom the Lutherans themselves acknowledge as such according to foreknowledge) without the Holy Spirit's special and efficacious operation — which, from their own concessions, they have already granted is impossible.

Who then, unless that harsh fellow-servant, would damn forever those who deny these things in this sense?

47But the hypotheses on which this universality of grace rests — though the Lutherans' reason and aim differ from the Remonstrants' — have already been pointed out in part above, under the articles controversed with the Arminians, I, II, III, IV, and so on. They are also clear from what follows.

In particular, God's commands and the promises in the Word, which gospel ministers are to set out indiscriminately, are confused with a will or good-pleasure in God to save all and each. So the universality of believers — of those who are to be saved — is confused with the universality of human beings: all humans taken collectively from Adam onward, and any humans taken distributively, as is shown at length elsewhere.

Likewise vocation through nature, by which God is manifested, and His common goodness; or vocation given at times in the greater ones; or that former Hebrew vocation, well known among some few neighboring nations; or the vocation the Apostles were to carry out every way, generally and promiscuously, and so on (Matthew 18; Mark 16). These vocations, I say, are precariously dragged into a universal vocation of all human beings and each one, and into a sufficient offering of the means of salvation, and so on.

But of that common and universal vocation even before Christ was exhibited, see at length above, Controv. with the Remonstrants XXXI.

48III. Has the decree of divine election — or of the predestination of certain human beings to salvation — been made according to a theoretical foresight of faith and perseverance, as of an impulsive cause, or rather of an antecedent condition? And is this the sense of the phrases that we are elect in Christ, in faith, through faith, not without faith — or that without faith no one pleases God (Hebrews 11:6)? Yet that very faith, foreseen, is wholly from grace and is God's gift, which they confess; but it is destined for those whom God foresaw with most certain foresight as going to use well the means granted them, and going to do what lies in them, and not going to spurn grace by themselves or in their greater ones — through whose contempt grace comes to be denied to later generations. So that this election, made thus according to foreknowledge, is nonetheless eternal, certain, and immutable? The Lutherans affirm the earlier points; the Reformed deny.

49Many things are assumed which neither Luther, nor Melanchthon, nor their disciples taught before Aegidius Hunnius of Wittenberg and, with him, Georg Mylius of Jena. Hence Georg Calixtus, already cited, in his Animadversions on the Thorun Confession published in 1654, p. 14: "Our fathers, adhering to the Unaltered Augsburg Confession, retained Augustine's doctrine and taught it everywhere up to the year 1580. Aegidius Hunnius, unless I am mistaken, was the first — or certainly among the first the chief — who recalled the ancient opinion (as he calls it), received in the primitive Church before Augustine," and so on. Yet not without difficulty, contradiction, and the charge of Pelagianism. From then on it prevailed among our people.

50The first falsehood of the Hunnians was this: as if those who follow Augustine's doctrine want an election absolute from the means — apart from any regard to faith and perseverance, which are fitting means on our side. In fact these do not deny an election founded on Christ's merit as the means of execution — that is, made with a view to Christ's merit as the meritorious cause of life and salvation. But for Hunnius and his party, faith was treated as a prerequisite condition in those to be elect, as an antecedent cause, as a quality of those to be chosen. For Augustine and those who vote with him, it is a required condition in the elect, decreed for them together with salvation, as a means to salvation and a necessary quality of those who are to be saved — whence they are said to be saved and justified through faith, in Christ, that is, through Christ.

51So it is supposed that faith can be foreknown in these and those before the decree to give the grace of faith — on which see the Controversy on Middle Knowledge, with the Pontificals IX and with the Remonstrants XII.

So they suppose that God wills to work in everyone this grace which is most special to the elect, to believers; and that the same grace is destined, as to its kind, to those whom God foresees will use the means granted them and will not spurn grace, by themselves or through their greater ones, and so on.

From this it seems to follow that a human being discerns himself — against Paul — and that in the human being there is a dispositive cause toward grace, or prior dispositions toward faith — against Luther's steady teaching in On the Bondage of the Will, On the Origin of Faith, and the Preface to the Epistle to the Romans, and elsewhere.

52Add this: God is not cleared of the appearance of injustice or cruelty if, because the greater ones spurned the faith, He cheats their whole posterity of the means necessary for faith and salvation, and yet is said seriously to will the salvation of all of them.

And how stands it with the Americans, the innumerable island peoples, the southerners formerly out of reach — did their greater ones spurn the faith, or was the Gospel never preached to them at all?

Add what we have already said the Lutherans concede on this argument, in the Protheoria, pages 350 and 351.

53VI. Is there a decree of reprobation — or of passing certain people by as to grace and glory — and of divine predamnation, absolute from the first, independent of any cause outside God and His good pleasure?

In that decree God (who by most free right could have saved everyone, passed no one by, and shown only the glory of mercy, power being enough in God and in Christ's satisfaction as ransom) decided, in His eternal counsel about all that would be done or permitted outside Himself (Proverbs 16:4; Lamentations 3:37; Matthew 25:34; Acts 2:23; 15:18) — and that counsel is immutable (Romans 9:11; 2 Timothy 2:19; Hebrews 6:17) — by an act of most free good pleasure according to the good pleasure of His will (Matthew 20:15; Romans 9:15, 20–21, and the like), to leave certain people (Romans 9:13, 15, 17), and comparatively many (Matthew 7:13; 20:16), who stood level with the rest (Romans 5:12; 9:11, 21; Ephesians 2:3), in sin and misery: not electing them, not pitying them for salvation (Matthew 7:13; 24:40; John 13:18; Romans 8:29; 9:13, 15, and the like).

So He withholds grace from them — not every grace, lest they have a pretext (John 15:22; Romans 1:20) (invitation, urging to duty, kindness, forbearance, preaching of the Word — Matthew 23:37; Romans 2:4, and the like) — yet He does withhold saving grace, the grace of reconciliation through Christ (John 10:15, 26; 17:9), and with it effectual calling, faith, and justification (Matthew 11:26; 13:11; Romans 8:28–29; Ephesians 2:8, and the like).

And by the same decree, acting as a most severe Judge (Romans 1:18, 32; 9:22), has He adjudged those same people — evil and miserable by their own fault, under original misery (Romans 5:12; Ephesians 2:3) and misery gained by actual, voluntary sins against the Law (Romans 2:12) or the Gospel (Mark 16:16; John 3:18; 12:40), finally impenitent and in many ways despisers of God (Romans 2:4; 11:7; Matthew 10:15, and the like), each convicted by his own judgment and conscious of willing rebellion (Matthew 27:4; Luke 16:24, 28; Romans 2:15) — to eternal death, condemned for their own sins (Proverbs 16:4; Hosea 13:9; Matthew 25:41–42; Jude 4, and the like)?

All of it displays His liberty, power, wrath, and justice that avenges sins (Proverbs 16:4; Matthew 20:15; Romans 9:17–18, 20, 22, and the like).

54Or is there no reprobation at all except according to foresight of final impenitence and unbelief, treated as the one cause of reprobation inside the decree — while those so foreseen have all been granted means enough for faith and repentance, and for salvation too?

The Lutherans deny the first account and affirm this second one. The Reformed stand against that.

55Again with Luther and those who vote with him, the fight is not over a vacant reprobation, but over God's eternal ordination — His disposal of everything, even the damnation of the reprobate, Pharaoh's hardening, Judas's betrayal, and the rest.

See the passages from Luther and Melanchthon in the Rinteln Apology, or in Calixtus's Consultation on Tolerating the Reformed, around pages 12–14 — not to mention our own writers.

Melanchthon, for example: Judas's betrayal is no less God's work than Paul's conversion; everything falls out by divine predestination, by which the Lord has worked all things for Himself, even the wicked for the day of evil.

Luther, for his part: by His will God necessarily makes us damnable, so that He seems to take pleasure in the torments of the miserable; God does not will the sinner's death by the Word, yet He does will it by an unsearchable will; whatever is said to clear God is said in vain — lest He Himself be made the author and the blame of our hardening; if God foresaw that Judas would betray, Judas necessarily became a traitor.

Still more of this is drawn from the single book On the Bondage of the Will, volume II, first Wittenberg edition.

56Most of the first falsehoods of the newer Lutherans are pinned-on charges and Reformers' words wrenched out of shape — though those Reformers speak with Scripture at every turn, as we have just shown in the State of the Controversy.

They fasten on us Stoic fate, Manichaean heresy, and the so-called Predestinarian heresy — and with them an absolute reprobation after the fact, with no eye to sins or unbelief.

In the same way they confuse God's permission of sin as a means that pleases Him with His sending sin in, with efficient causation, and the like.

They also argue badly: if sin and unbelief are the cause of damnation, then they must also be the cause of the decree to damn — as if God's willing, which has properly no cause outside God, worked by the same account as the things He wills, which come about through means.

So likewise with the good pleasure of grace and mercy in Christ (Ephesians 1:5, 9, and the like).

57Besides this, both sides concede the following.

1. Nothing takes place in time except from God's ordination, and that eternal.

2. In comparative predestination — these rather than those — the cause is God's highest good pleasure.

3. Foresight of the reprobate is infallible, and from it comes at least an infallible necessity of the event.

4. Regard to sins, unbelief, and final impenitence enters the reprobation decree; and no one is damned except for sins as the cause of his own ruin — so the State of the Controversy.

5. God is in no way the cause of sins, neither physical nor moral; no force from the decree is applied to sinners; and in the reprobate there is no necessity of sinning that destroys what is voluntary, free, and of deliberate choice — as we have argued at length above.

6. No one can know himself reprobate, unless perhaps by sinning against the Holy Spirit. So there is always room for repentance, for forgiveness of sins, and for salvation; and God by singular mercy has often worked conversion in the most lost — even in the last agony, in the final hour, in hell's very jaws — when every hope of pardon is finally cut off only after death.

7. God grants the reprobate many kinds of grace: divine forbearance, kindness, and outward invitation, from what we have said, and even inward light.

58VII. On Christ's death as universal for all and each — elect and reprobate alike — as to obtaining forgiveness of sins, righteousness, and eternal life, provided they themselves do not put an obstacle in the way: the question returns to Controversy IV.

See also the Articles with the Arminians, II, on the breadth, object, and efficacy of Christ's death, and the first falsehoods there (pp. 250–252).

59Yet the Lutherans' case is not the Remonstrants' case.

They do not make the application of Christ's death and its fruit hang on the powers of free choice — powers that are none, once original sin is granted.

Nor do they allow that anyone can be saved by the force of a universal redemption without knowing Christ.

60VIII. Next comes the controversy on converting grace through the Word of the Gospel: an operation that can be resisted or overcome, and whether that grace is effective or ineffective, as a person by the Gospel's power can obey it or by inborn malice can resist it.

At first glance this looks like the Arminian Controversy, Article IV — of which more at p. 254 and following.

61Still, the Lutherans differ from the Arminians on more than one point.

1. The Augustan brethren suppose no powers of free choice in corrupted man; nor do they want that will's synergy with grace in a Pelagian or Semi-Pelagian sense — which the Book of Concord itself condemns.

2. They acknowledge prevenient grace, which goes before every human doing in conversion — as above at p. 350.

3. They profess with us that in the first moments of conversion a person stands merely passive and receptive toward first, converting grace.

4. They also hold that the elect according to foreknowledge never finally resist effectual grace in the event itself, and so are converted infallibly — otherwise contradiction follows.

5. Nor do they define grace's efficacy by outward moral persuasion alone, with the Remonstrants, or as what only gives a power to believe while the act hangs on the human will.

But they do acknowledge in the elect a peculiar inward work of the Holy Spirit: it produces the act of faith and conquers the will, which with full willingness has embraced Christ and is then most ready, after rebellion, to obey.

62So whatever is left of the controversy on whether grace can be resisted or not — and whether it is effective or ineffective — rests mostly on a false reading of the Reformed view, which was Luther's view too, from what we noted before.

They therefore assume on a shaky basis, and these are the first falsehoods:

1. That by insurmountable grace we want a forced, violent motion, like a log or a stone.

2. That we deny grace can be resisted as to corrupted nature and flesh hostile to God — which for its part resists all too much; or as to outward calling grace, or prevenient grace through the Gospel Word, which we also grant is resisted (and daily), with many examples even in Holy Scripture; or that we refuse to admit an early resistance of reluctant nature even toward inward effectual grace — we who only want nature finally overcome by grace, and flesh by the Spirit, in the elect.

3. That they would clear the reprobate — to whom this effectual grace is denied, without which they cannot be converted — of willing rebellion, stubbornness, and broad guilt on the Reformers' view; or, against us, put the cause of that stubbornness in God, not in the reprobate's malice, fault, and will.

The Confessions, the theologians, and the preachers all speak the other way — and so do we at Remonstrant Articles III and IV, and in the Controversy with R. Pajon, at his Hypothesis, sections VI and VII.

63IX. Next comes perseverance of the truly just — regenerate people once justified by faith and already set in grace — treated as if that standing were neither sure nor necessary, and as if the same people could leave grace and faith altogether and for good, and so lose salvation.

At that point the Arminian dispute, Article V (pages 257–258), seems to reappear.

Compare also the Socinian controversy, LXI (pages 219–220).

Even so, we refuse to lump the Lutheran brethren in with those camps.

64Once more the gap from the Remonstrants is not a single point.

1. Lutherans grant that those elect according to God's foreknowledge cannot make a final exit from faith and grace, because that foreknowledge in God is, by hypothesis, infallible.

2. They likewise grant every believer an inward, infallible assurance that his sins are forgiven and that he will be saved. That assurance rises from what faith is — trust in God's mercy in Christ — while the Holy Spirit testifies with our spirit (Romans 8:16).

Such trust braces the soul more firmly than anything else. It is a pledge like Rahab's cord of twice-dyed thread (Joshua 2:18), buried deep in the heart; an anchor that holds us to God through the waves so that even the last crisis does not make us panic.

It is also real fuel for godliness and a spur to love God. The closer the harbor comes into view, the harder we gasp for it — with sighs and groans no speech can render.

And because this trust is born only of the regenerating Spirit, it in turn sets the spirit on fire; we treat that more fully elsewhere.

65Whatever quarrel with the Reformed is left turns chiefly on a wrenching of their meaning.

Our side, as already shown against the Remonstrants, concedes this:

1. Take a person by himself and in his own strength — that is, in his frailty — and he can all too easily leave the faith, yes, leave it wholly.

Left to himself he is clay pottery, a soft infant, a defenseless lamb, nothing but flesh and blood, a bruised reed, loose sand, always apt to slide unless God holds him — vanity itself, sheer nothing.

662. Faith that lasts only for a time (πρὸς καιρὸν) often wears almost the same face as faith that has root (ῥίζαν ἔχει) — the faith that truly justifies. Outward profession alone rarely shows who is unregenerate and who is regenerate.

The festive wedding garment (γαμική) required in Matthew 22:11, taken in the saying's closing turn, is not cloth on the body. It is the inward dress of faith, love, and repentance, when a person puts on Christ (Romans 13:14).

Still, sure marks do separate the two faiths and the two states — unregenerate from regenerate: Matthew 13; Romans 7; Galatians 5; and the rest.

673. Believers also often slip in act for a season, when either enemies and temptations press from outside or the flesh's slickness works from inside (Revelation 2:4-5 and similar places). Then divine grace is not felt, and faith is not exercised — as if both were gone — the way it was with David and others.

Even then the power of that incorruptible seed (ἀφθάρτου) may be checked, yet the seed never dies or is smothered outright. The spring of grace may be dammed, yet not put out for good (1 Thessalonians 5:19). The light of grace may dim under something like earth's blocking — the world, a cloud of sins, and the like — yet it is not wholly removed and lost, as in an eclipse; or as in a sharp fever life hangs by a thread when the pulse is nearly gone, yet life itself is not thereby extinguished.

Theologians therefore say the fruit and felt sense of justification can pause; the justified state itself is not broken up or finally ruined.

Sins remain, in themselves and by the act, most serious, and by what they deserve most fit for eternal death and for grace's desertion; yet by accident they stop standing as that for God's people. He does not treat his own by bare strict right, as slaves, but with a father's gentleness (ἐπιεικείᾳ), as sons — often with Joseph's hard look toward his brothers, yet with a kinder look ready to return — because God's firm foundation stands, and so on (2 Timothy 2:19).

68On the person of Christ the God-man (Θεάνθρωπος).

X. First question: by the force of the natures' hypostatic union in Christ's person as God-man — which both sides confess was made without confusion, without change, without division, and without separation (ἀσυγχύτως, ἀτρέπτως, ἀδιαιρέτως, ἀχωρίστως) — or also by the exaltation that followed and by the session at God's right hand, were the essential properties of the divine nature, together with God's infinite majesty, really and properly handed over to the human nature in the abstract, through the natures' pairing (συνδύασις) or union (ἕνωσις), so as to share possession, naming, and working with the Word (Λόγος)?

That is what they call communication of majesty in the abstract — nature to nature inside the union. Take it either as the use (χρῆσις) of those properties — their employment, exercise, and energy (ἐνέργεια) given to the human nature even while it was on earth — or, with the Swabians, as acquisition (κτῆσις) and shared possession.

Ask it more narrowly still: were the operative properties (ἐνεργητικαί) that work by a second act — omnipotence and life-giving power — so communicated, yet without alteration (ἀλλοποίησις), falling away (ἔκπτωσις), transfer (μετέκβασις), confusion (σύγχυσις), or inherence (ἐνύπαρξις), and without multiplying, transfusing, or confusing the natures or either nature's properties, or lodging those properties by themselves in the human nature subjectively, formally, habitually, as the same writers keep saying? The Ubiquitarians say yes — not all by one route. The Reformed say no.

69We already saw in the Protheoria (p. 319) a kinder reading of this dogma from the Rinteln theologians, and their agreement with the Cassel men at the root of the matter.

Put with other matching declarations, the sum is this: 1. Christ's human nature as God-man is not itself — and is not called — omniscient, omnipotent, or omnipresent, whether subjectively or inwardly by inherence (ἐνύπαρξις), or essentially by an essential property, or naturally by an act of that nature, or originally from itself, or by conversion, mixture, or confusion with the divine nature.

2. Yet it is called — and is — such personally, in the Word (Λόγος), because of the personal union with him. By an act of the person the human nature becomes sharer and partaker (κοινωνὸς καὶ μέτοχος) of every working proper to the divinity, and the like.

What is then said of that nature is said by an outward naming, through a communication as real as the hypostatic union of the two natures itself.

70So it is plain how tangled others have made the state of this quarrel, and how Lutherans have not always posed it one way.

The Swabians — Brenz, Schmidlin, and the rest who led first — wanted the divine properties poured into the human nature by the union's force, already in the womb.

The Saxons wanted communion of the divine properties of omnipotence, omnipresence, and the like in the assumed flesh, by the exaltation and the session at the right hand.

The Hessians looked more careful than the others in their Judgment on the Book of Concord (1576). Hospinian, Ursinus Wendelinus, Massonius (Anat. Germ. Part II), and others treat this at length.

71After much debate among themselves, and mazes of words and distinctions, even inside the Book of Concord, the first falsehoods of the harsher brethren against us finally show up in this controversy.

They talk as if the Reformed deny — which they never did — the personal union and the natures' undivided bond; or the natures' communion in the person of the God-man (Θεάνθρωπος); or common possession of the properties, yet as belonging to the person as the subject-which (subjectum quod), in their phrase; or the majesty of Christ the man, and the power of the mediatorial office that is his as well (Matthew 28:18).

72Or even what they call the communication of properties — that is, of either nature's properties and workings in the one person where the natures are united, and that as a two-way exchange (κατὰ τρόπον ἀντιδόσεως).

By it the names, properties, and operations of either nature — say the divine — are truly and really said of the whole person, and that person is sometimes named from the humanity (John 3:13), and the other way round, as in Acts 20:28 and 1 Corinthians 2:8, examples ready in Holy Scripture.

That communication, on the account just given, is as real as the natures' union is real; though the speaking leans toward synecdoche, where what belongs to the part is given to the whole according to that part.

The theologians already named have set this out at length.

73The first falsehood of them all was asserting a bodily presence in the Holy Supper.

From that they finally fled to this sacred anchor: that omnipresence — or ubiquity — and omnipotence too, and the rest, had been really communicated to the human nature, whether by outpouring, as the Swabians say, or by a kind of περιχώρησις / emmeation, as Chemnitz the Brunswick theologian and others say.

The wiser Hessians, Helmstedt men, Anhaltines, and the rest wanted to ground bodily presence not in the personal union or in ubiquity, but in the institution words: This is my body.

Add the places the Swabians and Saxons twist — Matthew 28:18; Philippians 2:9; Colossians 2:3, 9, and so on — and the rest of what the Palatine, Anhaltine, and Cassel theologians have defended at length.

74Controv. XI. On the ubiquity of Christ's flesh.

II. Was majestic omnipresence — or ubiquity — specially communicated to Christ's flesh or body, whether by the union with the Word (λόγος) in the Virgin's womb, or by the exaltation to God's right hand, or at least by the truth of the institution words, so that that flesh is omnipresent, but by a personal act, as they put it?

On that account it would be no wonder if he were bodily present in the Holy Eucharist, once his omnipotence had taken away the body's locality, and with it its tangibility and visibility in the first act.

Then Christ's ascension would not have been a true local going up, but rather a vanishing of the body; and the heaven he entered would not be a created, finite, bodily place above the visible heavens, but some uncreated, boundless, bodiless heaven — God himself, or God's own majesty, and incomprehensible glory and power.

The Ubiquitarians say yes. The Reformed say no.

75Melanchthon, Peucer, Heshusius, Hofmann himself, Chemnitz, Chytraeus, Selnecker, Major, and others joined the Reformed in denying the Suevic ubiquity of Christ's flesh.

So did the Danes, Holsteiners, Brunswickers, Helmstedt men, Anhaltines, Hessians, the Lower-Saxon theologians, and the Nurembergers, long since.

Chemnitz led the way: instead of ubiquity — or πανταχεσία — they put a multivolitional presence.

That means a real κοινωνία or μετοχή of the divine operations in the human nature, so that it is wherever and whenever it wills to be, or can be wherever it wishes — the Hessian reading in their Judgment on the Torgau Formula (1567).

76Those theologians commonly called Ubiquitarians had many first falsehoods. The harsher among them — and their chiefs — were the Swabians.

One sample: they say the hypostatic union of the natures dissolves unless the human nature is stretched to match the divine — equally infinite, equally omnipresent, and so on.

Turn the charge around and it is ready: the marvel of ubiquity is what cancels that personal union.

On that path they collapsed two phrases into one: "the whole Christ," said of the person and of the subject-which (subjectum quod), and "the whole of Christ," said of the united natures or the subject-by-which (subjectum quo).

77Again: that the sitting at the right hand is about place and ubiety, and is said of the flesh in the abstract; or that this flesh sits at God's right hand everywhere, not in the heaven he entered — on that inference see our Vindication of Mark 16:19.

Likewise they take "Christ is with us" (Matthew 18:20; 28:20) as a local presence of the body, and make "I am with you" mean "my flesh is with you without interval (ἀδιαστάτως)," against Matthew 26:11 and John 17:11.

We hold the truer reading: Christ is, and always will be, with his own — that is, with his Church — by the presence of the divinity, which is common to all, and likewise by another, special providence of power, grace, assistance, and ἐνέργεια through the Spirit's influx, and the like.

We have treated that at length in the Biblical Vindications, Book III, on Matthew 18:20.

78They read "he fills all things" (Ephesians 4:10) as if Christ's flesh itself fills every place.

Paul's point there is different: the flesh was raised by the ascension above the visible heavens, so that it is not that flesh which fills all things, but the exalted Christ who fills his whole Church with his gifts, Spirit, grace, and the rest.

Other abused proofs for the ubiquity, illocality, or invisibility of Christ's flesh — Matthew 14:25, 29; Luke 20:36; John 20:19, 26; Luke 24:31; Acts 7:55; 1 Corinthians 15:8; Revelation 1:13, and so on — we set aside; Wendelin and our side have already defended them at length.

For the inference from Matthew 14:25, 29, see our Biblical Vindications, Book II, Place XXIII.

Sharper eyes saw where that πανταχεσία of the flesh leads: Christ no less present in every place — in stones and wood, as Joachim Westphal of Hamburg put it — than in the bread, and no less before consecration than after it.

That is why Brentius fell back to this remark: the body is in the consecrated bread alone, by dispensation.

79Controv. XII. On Baptism. Is holy Baptism so effective that every infant washed with water is by that very act inwardly regenerated by the Holy Spirit — and so must have actual faith, since baptism profits nothing without faith?

Is baptism's washing only an outward means God ordained, a sacrament or symbol and seal of our regeneration (Titus 3:5; Acts 16:22), and a moral instrument of it, under the condition of faith — faith already present in adults (Mark 16:16), or faith still to come in infants who will live — and so necessary only hypothetically, as a divine command?

Or is it also a physical means and an inward efficiency without which regeneration does not ordinarily happen, and by which that regeneration is altogether worked — and so absolutely necessary, a means without which it cannot be?

On that reading, mere lack of baptism in infants, if it does not damn them outright, at least puts them in danger of damnation; and Christ's words about being born of water and Spirit are pressed that way (John 3:5).

From this they ask whether, in necessity, private persons ordinarily called laypeople — and even women — may baptize, though they may not preach (1 Corinthians 14:34–35).

The Lutherans say yes; the Reformed say no.

80On what is essential to this sacrament, the Lutherans and the Reformed already agree; we saw that above from the confessed points (p. 340).

What is left of the quarrel, weighed fairly, will hardly seem worth so much.

81The leftover controversy runs like this. First, about infants' actual faith. The Reformed take them as able to receive faith in its principle, seed, root, and habit — poured in by God in a way we cannot grasp — and so able to receive some grace, even inward grace: federal grace, as children taken with their parents into the covenant and sharers of the promise (Acts 2:39).

So they are capable of sacramental sanctification, as by circumcision (Romans 4:11), so by baptism (1 Corinthians 7:14; Colossians 2:14); and finally capable of the remission of original sin and of justifying grace.

Second, about how far holy baptism is necessary. On their side, bare lack of it — with no willful neglect — already works either loss of salvation, or at least danger of that loss.

Third, about the mode of efficacy: that regenerating grace is bound to the baptismal ceremony, or (in their phrase) the baptism of the Spirit is bound to the baptism of water as its effect — ordinarily, they add — yet not by the Papists' opus operatum, but by the Holy Spirit's own working.

82Fourth and last: controversy about a layperson administering baptism in a case of necessity. On that point antiquity was not so scrupulous, as Tertullian shows, and Grotius, Salmasius, and others agree (above, pp. 311–312).

Women, however, are constantly shut out from administering it — and not in one Tertullian passage only: On Baptism, On the Veiling of Virgins, and On the Prescription of Heretics, as G. J. Vossius cites them in Disputation XI.

So also in the African canons, Council of Carthage IV, canon c (Councils, tom. II): A woman must not presume to baptize — which some absurdly restrict to times when priests are present.

83The precarious supporting claims are these. First: that the Reformed do not count neglect of baptism as harmful. They do count it harmful — harmful to those who neglect it against Christ's command.

Second: that we deny baptism the full virtue Christ gives it (Mark 16:16) or Paul gives it (Titus 3:5), as if Christ binds salvation to holy baptism and Paul binds regeneration to it.

But Christ says nothing there about infants being regenerated by baptism. He speaks of prior faith — and so of prior regenerating grace — in adults the apostles were to baptize. Salvation hangs not on baptism but on the believer's act: whoever has not believed will be condemned.

For Paul too baptism is the washing of regeneration, set against Jewish washings — which neither seal regeneration nor serve as a moral means, under the New Testament, for beginning that regeneration in infants and carrying it on in adults.

84Third: they assume that faith and baptism are equally necessary for salvation. But Christ nowhere said — it is plain — that whoever has not been baptized will be damned.

Faith can stand without baptism: the converted thief, the Ethiopian eunuch, Saul, Cornelius, all before they were baptized. Baptism can also stand without faith: Simon Magus, for example — an outward washing without the inward (1 Peter 3:21), as fleshly circumcision without circumcision of the heart (Romans 2:28–29).

Fourth precarious claim: that John 3:5 is about baptism in bodily, outward water properly so called — a rite not yet instituted then, but only later (Matthew 28).

More truly it concerns the necessity of the thing signified: washing by the Holy Spirit, of which alone Christ speaks in the words that follow — and which alone Nicodemus needed, already circumcised long before, and now to be raised into a new life.

Add this: even if the text were about baptism, Christ's words could aim only at adults who could use this instrument of regeneration and refused to.

85Controv. XIII. On certain rites among the Lutherans that are not plainly indifferent.

First: may sacred images stand in churches not only as a civil or political decoration for temple splendor and ornament, but as a sacred and religious use — for historical remembrance through pictures of Christ, the saints, and the martyrs, for the less learned; for moral instruction (what they call image-teaching, and books for the unlettered); and at last for greater reverence of the place, and to mark Christian temples off from Jewish and Muslim ones?

Is that use only lawful and permitted, as something indifferent in itself, nowhere forbidden under the New Testament once the old ground of the ban has ceased among Christians — the danger of idolatry that once hung over the Jewish nation (Exodus 20:4)?

Or is it even primeval, already from the first ages of the Christian church — say from Tertullian's day — and usefully, even necessarily, to be kept?

Some Lutherans affirm both; the Reformed deny.

86No quarrel worth the name has been raised by the Leipzigers, the Rinteln men, or other more sober Lutherans over the images the Reformed have taken down. In most of those churches none appear either.

Luther himself long ago judged it more useful that none stand on altars or in temples — whatever he blamed in the hotheaded iconoclasts first led on by Karlstadt without the magistrate's authority.

"Otherwise," he says, "I do not greatly love images, and I would rather they were not set up in the temple" (Annotations on Deuteronomy, Jena Latin, vol. III, fol. 99).

Wittenberg and Giessen theologians, Nic. Palladius of Copenhagen, David Chytraeus, Martin Chemnitz, and others felt the same. Massonius gathers the testimonies against Matth. Hoe (Universal Anatomy of Germany, Part III, from p. 404).

87Theologians have long sifted precarious supporting claims here.

One: that the Second Commandment's ban on images concerns something indifferent in itself, and so Christian liberty has lifted it.

Another: early Christian practice — though Chemnitz and others admit that before Jerome's day no images stood in temples.

Another: that images are books for the unlearned. Chemnitz, answering Trent (Part IV), cuts that pretext down, and points to Christ and the apostles, who neither taught by images or statues nor ever used them, content to set the handed-down doctrine in the Scriptures.

On the practice of the earlier ages, and on Elvira canon 36, see our History of Images, Section I.

88Second question under the rites head: the ceremony of exorcism in baptism.

The minister about to baptize an infant (1) asks whether the child believes, whether he renounces the world, and the like; (2) commands Satan to leave the infant — possessed by the demon not bodily, but spiritually — and give place to the Holy Spirit; (3) using the sign of the cross and a fixed form of words.

Is that rite usefully kept in the Christian church — or even necessary, and to be kept without fail? Some Lutherans affirm one or the other; most of them, with the Reformed, deny.

See the Cassel consensus on exorcism (above, p. 340). Saxons and the rest also grant that the rite is not essential to baptism, not commanded by Christ or the apostles, not a spiritual power in itself — only a sign that infants are born children of wrath and stand under Satan's power outside Christ.

89Its true origin is threefold.

First: the old rite around adults about to be baptized. For a time baptism was preceded by putting off clothes or shoes, solemn renunciation, turning east, anointing the whole body, and a human breath with divine power driving the demon out — φύσημα / ἐμφύσησις — as Cyprian first notes at the saving water of baptism (Epistle 76 to Magnus). The baptized person himself also blew out or spat as if casting the demon — that is, wicked affections — from his own breast.

Second: the old catechetical rite, in which catechumens were breathed upon to drive off the demon of ignorance and malice (Balsamon and others on Laodicea canon 26). So exorcists and catechists were the same office, as we show more fully in the Church History — and catechizing passed over into the baptismal rite.

Third: the exorcism of energumens, the demon-possessed, which alone stood in the first and second ages outside baptism, and by force of the promise (Mark 16:17). Later every person outside Christ was treated as somehow demon-possessed.

90Third: the breaking of ordinary table bread in the Holy Supper.

However they first broke it — by fingers or knife, by the consecrators themselves or left after consecration for others to break and tear into portions — and however the broken bread is put into communicants' hands for sacramental eating: is that rite only pious or useful, as they grant, or also necessary by Christ's institution, when He told us to do what He Himself did?

Not as if breaking belonged to the bare essence of the sacrament, yet as belonging to its integrity — which is why the supper was called, preeminently, the breaking of bread.

Or is the rite simply indifferent, freely dropped — so that little hosts or round wafers, placed by the minister in the communicants' mouths, may rightly replace ordinary bread?

Lutherans deny the first and affirm the second — yet not all of them, and not from Luther. The Reformed take the other side.

91After the Rinteln declaration (above, p. 336), the Cassel men grant that this dissent is not fundamental.

Yet the brethren lean on precarious props. First: that in the words of institution "he broke" means only "he distributed," as Hebrew words for breaking can also mean distributing — as if Christ had used those Hebrew words; as if a double act were not recorded, "he broke and he gave" (ἔκλασε καὶ ἐδίδου), even in the Syriac; as if "to break" of bread meant anything else in the plain New Testament places.

Second: that breaking is unnecessary because we may not know how Christ broke — which would also make blessing and giving thanks unnecessary, since the manner is not spelled out, though the act itself is stated as plainly as can be.

Third: that "Do this" carries no command to do what He did — though Luther himself tied those words to the breaking of bread (Jena Works II.25; Massonius Anatomy IV.253; Wendelin against Gerhard, Exercises I.XVII).

See also Chemnitz, Mentzer, and the Giessen consensus in Massonius at the same place. Here Controv. XIII on rites closes before the mutual-tolerance head and before the Hexades.

92Controv. XV. On mutual tolerance among Evangelicals.

By the rule of charity, should the Reformed — though they differ from the Lutherans on the chapters above — be ready to bear with them as brethren, sharers of the same faith and salvation, and members of the true church, in a holy bond of hearts and studies?

The graver consequences of those chapters need not block the way: the Lutherans neither own those consequences nor accept them. Other heads weigh less once the real state of the quarrel is set out fairly — as in the chapter on the Holy Supper. And both sides still keep the common Protestant principle and foundation of the faith, having rejected idolatry and papal doctrine.

93And should the Lutherans, for their part, count the Reformed as brethren — even as partners of the Augsburg Confession in Melanchthon's revised form — as to the substance of what must be believed and done?

Should they keep peace and mutual correspondence with us, and join mutual leagues against the Roman Antichrist?

Not with the old rashness of damning, as in the Book of Concord and what followed; not with the appetite for baiting and tearing that brands men Nestorians, Manichaeans, Predestinarians, Sacramentarians, and the rest — in pulpits and in print.

All the more so because the Reformed themselves, with their whole heart, abhor the ugly consequences painted onto them: an unmerciful God, God as author of sin, and the like.

94We affirm both.

Yet most Ubiquitarians have refused the second half — that Lutherans ought to receive the Reformed as brethren and partners — as sorrowful experience shows.

The exceptions are those we have already praised in the Catallactic Protheoria (pp. 334–335, 343–344, and following).

95And yet these are only wishes — wishes, nothing more — and so have been all the study, speech, and labor spent on that end till now.

Sad experience has shown that the work carries empty wind up to the airy clouds, and dies badly — like the old saying about three kinds of water: the stream that runs into the sea, the water mixed into wine, and the water poured on a Jew for Christian baptism.

96The history of the last age shows what Rome's curia, the Imperial court, Spain, and the French clergy under Catherine de' Medici feared most: a sacred confederation of Protestants.

How fierce, then, were the passions of the Heshusians, Brentians, Flacians, Formula men of Bergen, and Hunnians? What hatred boiled against gentle Melanchthon — not to name our own — and then against Peucer, his son-in-law, wasted by ten years in prison, against Strigel, and the rest?

They skimmed off waves of rage almost everywhere, even against the best and most moderate princes; and in our own century against the Bishop of Strängnäs, the Calixtines, Dreier's men, the Rinteln theologians, and every brother formed of better clay who would not make the schism everlasting.

To rehearse that here would be needless.

97Nor may they cast our quarrels — or the contentious nicknames we suffer against our will and do not freely borrow from masters as if those men were demigods — more bitterly in our teeth.

Let them mind the knapsack on their own back. Let them remember the party names among themselves, and the writings that truly brand men in public, in the fights over the Lord's Supper after the Confession was amended, over predestination, ubiquity, the Formula of Concord, the communication of properties, that mode of conversion or justification, the necessity of works, the adiaphora, and the Interim — and the rest.

Hence the names common among them, so often run through with shafts or struck by anathema: Philippists, Synergists, Flacians, Brentio-Flacians, Heshusians, Formulists, Hoffmannians, Osiandrists, Majorists, Adiaphorists, Hessian-Calvinists or Zwinglians, adherents of the Variata or of the Invariata Confession, and so on.

Here Controv. XV on mutual tolerance closes before the Hexades Annotationum on Spanheim's Protheoria.

98HEXAS OF ANNOTATIONS on the blessed Spanheim's historical and reconciling Protheoria of the chief controversies with the theologians of the Augsburg Confession, as they are called.

Prooemium. H. I.

We judge it nearly an open question whether the middle stretch of the second millennium — from Christ's birth to the end of all ages — that learned men who follow some Jewish Elijah more commonly expect (the stretch to which both the Elenchus-writer's Protheoria and our own historical-reconciling Protheoria belong) is better remembered, through every age still to come, by Christianity's Reformation itself, or by the necessity of Reformation.

99The necessity of reforming the Christian Church in her head (so named, though by a striking abuse) as well as in her members was something every Christian estate of that age — spiritual and temporal, Germans and French above all — both saw clearly and mourned with heavy grief.

They pressed for amendment by humble prayers everywhere, and partly by sharper threats, against the utterly wrecked teaching and life of Popes Julius, Alexander, and Leo — after those men and their like had dodged, crushed, and even trampled the most wholesome councils (Basel, Constance, and at last Pisa, continued at Milan and finished at Lyons in France) by a thousand frauds and foul arts, and after opposite councils that barked mordantly enough — the Lateran ones above all, and other brickish assemblies they claimed as their own.

So too the most famous men of our own age, sharers in that excellent Reformation won by God's grace, have laid the same necessity out at length: among those specially called Reformed, the great Hottinger (ὁ πάνυ), in Ecclesiastical History Parts V–VI and in the Historico-Theological Analecta, Dissertation I, pages 1–82; among other Evangelicals, after Chytraeus and Celestine in the openings of their Augsburg-Confession histories, the illustrious Seckendorf in Lutheranism defended against Maimbourg, Baclerus in the Memorial of sixteenth-century affairs (p. 263 ff.), and most recently the celebrated Ulm divine Elias Viel in a special treatise.

100Yet the Reformation itself had already been growing in secret for many ages — Flacius's Catalog of Witnesses of the Truth and James Ussher of Armagh in his golden booklet on church succession have said much about that hidden work.

Under God's lead it broke into the open in upper and lower Germany through Ulrich Zwingli and Martin Luther.

Zwingli led first by public teaching and by thundering against papal doctrine; Luther led first by striking the same targets with public writings and deeds of many kinds.

What chiefly dragged both men into the fight was the shameless papal indulgence-market, midwifed in one place by a certain Samsonius and in the other by infamous Tetzel (Gerhard Theodor Mejer, History of Religion, ch. V, §29, pp. 253–254).

101§. II. Tetzel grew wilder still in our own Viadrina, selling under Conrad Wimpina's shield — Wimpina being the Academy's first Rector.

He hawked his wares and praised them once laid out: pay even ten shillings and receive absolution from any crime; drop a coin in the chest and souls leave Purgatory at once; buy pardon even if, by impossibles, you had violated God's Mother (Luther's Letter to Archbishop Albert of Brandenburg of Mainz, Jena Latin Tom. I, fol. 2).

That fury only hardened Luther's counterblow: at Wittenberg he had his Theses against the foul trade nailed to the church doors.

102Pope Leo answered Luther's several most humble apologies and protests (Jena Latin Tom. I, fol. 69 end; fol. 192 and 210 end; finally fol. 435) with still harsher injustice and with teeth worthy of his name.

When that leonine message came, Luther burned the condemning Bull and lodged his appeal with Emperor Charles V (Wittenberg Latin Tom. II, fol. 44–45).

103§. III. That clash brought imperial summons: in 1521 Charles V called Luther to Worms under safe-conduct and demanded a retractation.

Luther would not recant without first hearing his errors proved from Holy Scripture — and he held that line without wavering.

Meanwhile Frederick the Wise, Duke and Elector of Saxony, together with some other Romano-German estates, had drawn nearer to Luther's teaching. The same Emperor then set the Augsburg Diet for July 1530; Luther waited out the danger at Coburg, as Sleidan tells in Book VII.

From that Diet the blessed Spanheim, in his Elenchus, takes the title for certain chief Controversies with the so-called Augsburg-Confession theologians — the very Controversies we are to treat here.

Here the Hexades Prooemium ends; Annotatio I on the Augsburg Confession and its theologians follows.

104ANNOTATION I. On the Augsburg Confession and its theologians and associates — keyed to these words of the Author's rubric:

Chief Controversies with the theologians of the Augsburg Confession, as they are called.

§. I. That rubric of our celebrated Author, by which he titles the Protestant Controversies, bids us press three inquiries, or settle them more sharply:

[I.] What the Augsburg Confession is, and of what kind.

[II.] Who count as its theologians, and who as its confessors or associates at large?

[III.] In what sense some men, ahead of others, are called Augsburg-Confession theologians — or rather have grown used, not without spleen, to calling themselves so, and still do.

105§. II. If we give no play to party feeling, we must say this: the Augsburg Confession is a complex of the Christian faith in its chief heads.

Luther sketched it; Melanchthon dressed it and ordered it into the verbal and real form it now enjoys.

It was gathered and signed in the name of the chief estates of the Romano-German Empire in Lower Germany by the leading theologians of that region, then exhibited at Augsburg to Emperor Charles V in 1530 as a stand chiefly against papal heterodoxy.

It was not read in a full assembly of all the estates, but it was read publicly in the Emperor's palace. Charles rejected it by solemn decree; those estates nonetheless defended and confirmed it together; and in 1531 it was first issued into public light at Wittenberg by public authority.

106§. III. Christians of every party, and anyone who knows the history of the Augsburg Confession, will own this description as true.

The Confession itself says it is a complex of the chief articles of Christian faith — through the twenty-one articles of its first part, set beside Holy Scripture, the adequate principle of faith.

No less clearly, through the seven heads of Abuses in its second part, it shows that this complex stands chiefly against the papal side, once those heads are compared with papal confessions and catechisms.

Luther first sketched that complex more roughly in seventeen articles; Melanchthon then worked it out more carefully and signed it more distinctly. Even in that shape Luther approved it, as did Brenz, Jonas, Schnepf, and Spalatin among other theologians.

In the name of those estates, at the place, time, and manner remembered — after their hands had signed it — it was shown to the Emperor, blasted by his public decree, yet defended and confirmed by them, and the next year published in both the Latin and the German in which it had been exhibited.

So say with one mouth, and with pens agreed from every side, all who have set out to write the Confession's history and narrate these facts — a company Baclerus begins to number, though the list is not yet full, in his Memorial of sixteenth-century affairs, pages 405–406.

107§. IV. From this most true description of the Augsburg Confession, admitted on all sides, these points stand out at the very threshold, clearer than noon:

[1.] Even where its substance and articles of faith agree with Holy Scripture, one may call it a universal or θεόπνευσος confession only in a weakened sense — the same way any single person's confession (for example that of blessed John Sigismund, once Elector of Brandenburg) can be called universal insofar as it matches Scripture received by Christians everywhere, and any writing exactly congruent with Scripture can be called θεόπνευσον, yet not without catachresis.

But as to its form — the coherence of its words and articles — as to its authors, subscribers, and approvers, and as to its use, it must be heard as a particular confession, not a universal one, unlike every confession of the ecumenical councils.

Those council confessions, though they too have their own accidental forms, belong as ecumenical to orthodox authors of the churches universal in East and West alike, and they are received by the whole Christian Church wherever it reaches — not by Germany alone, or even by a German part. Hence they are universal.

The Augsburg Confession can no more be called universal than the Anglican, Dutch, Helvetic, or any other confession meant for one region or nation and received there.

Mentzer agrees (Exegesis of the Augsburg Confession, Prolegomena n. 11, p. 9; n. 15 at the end of p. 13), already correcting in advance Calov's Criticum, then still unborn, on its self-contradictory little pages 17–18.

108[2.] It is a human writing, not a divine one. Formal, proper θεοπνευσία belongs only to that confession and writing which, in matter, in words, and in the order and coherence of both, flowed from the immediate inspiration of the Holy Spirit (Matt. 16:17; 2 Pet. 1:21 with 2 Tim. 3:16).

Calov agrees; and he softens the θεοπνευσία Hutter had ascribed in his Explanation of the Formula of Concord, page 1 — which Hutter himself was soon to soften in the same place.

From this two things follow. First: even if one does not assent to the Augsburg Confession in every point, the brand of heresy is not at once to be burned onto him — as it rightly is onto those who strip faith from the ecumenical confessions (see Hospinian, Concordia Discors, ch. 18, p. 163, gathering the many solid reasons of the Neustadt theologians' corollary, ch. 40, p. 352 at the end).

Second: the Augsburg Confession is not infallible with original, properly so-called infallibility — though one may call it infallible in an improper, derived sense, the sense in which anything absolutely true (even bare philosophy) or anything drawn from Holy Scripture is called infallible.

Yet because fallible human work came between, it enjoys only a diminished infallibility, and must be weighed against the absolutely infallible Word of God. It gains that lesser infallibility only insofar as, and because, it agrees with that Word.

109II. Philip Melanchthon's authority — no less than Luther's — in framing and writing the Augsburg Confession, and in explaining and interpreting it, is to be held with reverence.

Luther's reading can claim no more public right or force in the church of Lower Germany than Melanchthon's, except insofar as those German estates in whose name the Confession was made, offered, and defended prefer one reading to the other.

That matters all the more because the Apology of the Augsburg Confession — matching it part for part and article for article — was also composed in the name of the Empire's Protestant estates not by Luther but by Melanchthon. Chytraeus praises it at length in the place cited (p. 326).

Yet Chytraeus distinguishes Melanchthon's shorter earlier Apology of 1530 from the later, fuller one finished in 1531. The first was dressed with the estates' consent; the second was not — for in Article X it cites certain things from Bulgarus (or Vulgarius) that lean too far toward papal transubstantiation (see Johannes Museus, Lectures on the Formula of Concord, p. 34; Sohnius in the same place, p. 6 near the end).

110III. That the Confession was read to the Emperor in the palace wins it no authority beyond another confession of the same age written in Upper Germany and commonly called the Tetrapolitan — likewise shown to Charles, though not read aloud to him.

Both were struck down and cast out by one and the same imperial decree, as Chytraeus narrates (History of the Augsburg Confession, Frankfurt edition 1578, pp. 389 and 393, with p. 379; and Celestine, Tom. III p. 137 and Tom. IV p. 120).

IV. Meanwhile its authority on the chief dogmas of faith is great and outstanding — even much outweighing the authority of many particular confessions and of the Formula of Concord. The celebrated Wittenberg divine Philipp Ludwig Hanneken owns as much in his Theological Declaration on the true estimation of the Augsburg Confession (preliminary qq. 8–9, pp. 28 and 32), if I rightly catch a mind set out a little darkly.

I say, first: as to the chief Christian dogmas. The Confession does not reach to everything; so Hutter is wrong to claim it as the most ready and powerful antidote against every heresy whatever (Explanation of the Formula of Concord, p. 22).

I say, second: a comparatively great and outstanding authority belongs to it, yet not an absolute one. Under that name the Neustadt theologians hint very soberly that they do not (at least principally) rest the confirmation of their doctrine on its consent or patronage, as if under that cover they might sell or force it on others.

By God's gift their faith and confession stand on better ground than to need men's testimonies or props, still less a borrowed agreement with them. So they need not fret whether the Augsburg Confession stands with them or not, provided they are sure the confession of the Prophets and Apostles does — and if they agree with that, they are free to dissent from Augsburg and from every human confession (ch. 5, p. 154).

They had already protested in the preceding fourth chapter (p. 116) that they did not mean to reject or tear apart the Augsburg Confession, but rather to keep for it a fitting authority — lest, like its immoderate heralds, by giving it an unjust authority they strip away even the just one.

Here Annotatio I §.IV closes before §.V on the varied editions and the fights over autograph, apograph, and print.

111§. V. What the Augsburg Confession is, we have already set out in a clear description.

Of what kind it is — that inquiry is forced on us by its many and altered editions, and by the huge quarrels and pitched fights that have grown up around them.

Either it is an αὐτόγραφον, or ἀρχέτυπον: the very copy shown to the Emperor.

Chytraeus remembers that copy as Latin only, and therefore unique (History of the Augsburg Confession, p. 81).

Celestine rather describes both a Latin and a German together — a pair (Tom. II, pp. 151 and 169).

After the Saxon chancellor Christian Pontanus had read the German aloud, Charles took both copies into his own hand.

He gave the German to his secretary Alexander Schweiß to offer to the Elector of Mainz; it later went into the Mainz archive (Celestine, Tom. I p. 141 and Tom. III p. 190).

He kept the Latin himself and at last lodged it in the Brussels archive.

Both lay hidden for many years in those archives, as Bellarmine notes (Judgment on the Book of Concord, Tom. II, Controversies, p. 485).

Dorsche adds that soon afterward one of them — I guess the German — was cut out of the volume of public acts gathered at the Augsburg Diet (Dissertation on Divine Providence concerning the Augsburg Confession, Rostock 1555).

So a genuine exemplar of the unvaried Confession no longer survives — Bacler rightly draws that conclusion (Memorial cited above, p. 406 at the end).

[Note: Justus Jonas writes Luther, in Chytraeus p. 74 mid-page, that the Emperor had the Confession put into Italian and French for himself; I take that to mean translated into those tongues.]

112Or it is an ἀπόγραφον — an ἔκτυπον: a fair pen copy, word for word from the original.

I would not easily deny that such copies stood ready at the Augsburg Diet.

It is hardly likely that neither the theologians — Melanchthon chief among the framers — nor the imperial Estates in whose name the Confession was dressed, kept an exact copy of what was shown to Charles, and even several copies procured estate by estate, held back against every sort of chance.

Had they done otherwise, they would one and all stand convicted — if not of lazy neglect, then of a stupid want of foresight.

Or last, a τυπόγραφον — an ἔκτυπον from the press: type set from a pen apograph.

That could be by private venture: the same year a vernacular quarto came out at Breslau from Adam Dyon types. Chytraeus says it was shaped to the original Confession kept in the Mainz archive (History, p. 47), and he himself often follows it (see the author of the Ausführliche Behauptung, p. 6 at the end).

Or it could be by public authority: the next year Wittenberg printed several, German and Latin, quarto and octavo.

Among them the Latin quarto took first place, and in its preface even branded the Breslau print a spurious one — as Calov notes (Critica Sacra, p. 82).

113Of all these first-two-years press copies it is certain: they often differ in wording both from one another and from the autograph.

The earlier verbal split shows not only when Wittenberg copies are set beside the Breslau one, but when Wittenberg copies are set beside each other — the Latin quarto against the German of the same size — above all on Article X, though both Wittenberg runs used the same printer, Georg Rhau (Calov, Critica, pp. 86–98).

The same is proved by the Latin and German exemplars Chytraeus and Celestine put into their histories, and by matching either author's Latin with his German.

Celestine's and Chytraeus's German both cast Article X thus: they teach of the Supper that Christ's true body and blood are truly present under the form of bread and wine, are distributed and received there, and that the contrary teaching is rejected (Tom. II, p. 53b).

But their Latin forms Article X so that the species of bread and wine are never named: they teach concerning the Lord's Supper that the body and blood of the Lord are truly present and are distributed to those who eat, and they reject those who teach otherwise (same Tom., p. 172b).

Like gaps turn up around Articles XIII and XVIII when Chytraeus's and Celestine's Latin copies are compared: Chytraeus has many additions Celestine lacks.

No wonder, then, that Papists and some Protestants have complained of discrepant copies.

Bellarmine is not far from the truth when he writes (in the place already cited) that almost every year new exemplars appeared which, though all wore the Augsburg title, differed much in words and sentences both among themselves and from the first Confession shown to Charles.

Johann Schmid, pressed by whatever truth sits in those words, answers that Bellarmine's yearly-change talk is hyperbole alone: we do not deny verbal change, but we deny change of the things and sentences; an early change we grant, yet by that pact nothing was added to or taken from the Confession's essence.

The Wittenberg edition of 1531, he says, did not dissent from the Augsburg-exhibited exemplar in substance or doctrine, though its added phrases and diction did not wholly match the prototype. For the causes of the various changes, see Calov, Critica, and p. 85.

Later, the many verbal differences among printed copies — above all the Formula of Concord insert set against the autograph — were carefully collated by the most illustrious prince Ernest Frederick, Margrave of Baden, in the Christian Reflections and Motives that kept His Princely Grace from subscribing the Formula (pp. 1–98, printed at Castle Staffort, 1599).

114§. VI. In the years that followed, many other printed copies of the Augsburg Confession came after the first.

Then in 1537 and 1538 — Luther and the other original exhibitors still alive — Melanchthon, seeing how the many copies varied, took counsel to issue a more polished and corrected edition, and carried it out with no one contradicting.

Many theologians at the Altenburg colloquy (p. 404) thus prove the very point Calov says no document establishes (Critica, p. 202). See also the author of the Ausführliche Behauptung, pp. 27–28.

Melanchthon undertook the same again in 1540 and 1542.

In 1551, by order of many Protestant Estates, he finished a third and somewhat longer repeat, to be read in his Body of Doctrine — a useful writing worth reading, says Johannes Museus, in which Augsburg doctrine is set out clearly and with elegance (Lectures on the Epitome of the Formula of Concord, p. 35).

The earlier two Melanchthon editions lacked a public approval beforehand; they still won approval afterward.

Other theologians owned them — Chytraeus, Selneccer, Brenz, the Altenburg men, among them Paul Eber, the Meissen and Greifswald faculties — and Luther himself (Jena German Tom. 7, fol. 447 with 448b).

So did the imperial Estates in the diets at Worms, Regensburg, Frankfurt, and Naumburg, declaring in these words:

Nor is it our mind, by this repetition and renewed subscription of the Confession first printed, to depart even in the least from that shown in the year 40.

For in some colloquies and disputations with adversaries that later text was explained more fully in certain articles, so that heavenly truth might shine the more, and trust in the merit of our Redeemer Jesus Christ might be kept pure and uncorrupted without human traditions and handed on to posterity.

We cannot desert that enriched Confession any more than the other — especially since the 1540 and 1542 print now sits in many hands and is largely in use in our churches and schools.

115Our own writers have chased all this out at more length — Hospinian, Georg Pauli, Sohn, Ursinus, and the rest.

Here I mark especially the author of the Ausführliche Behauptung (pp. 27 and 57; and the Anhang, pp. 25–36), and our own venerable Becmann under the name Orthuinus Gratius against Liebhard (ch. III §2, pp. 73–74 entire).

Becmann also brings forward causes for varying the Augsburg Confession that deserve a hearing (from p. 69), and he beats back hard the stock objections aimed at the Variata's later approval (pp. 73–81), following Crocius on Augsburg fellowship (chs. 54–56).

With Crocius he also drains and turns aside both the older Hutterian cavils (Concordia Concordi, pp. 344 and 418ff.; Anti-Peucer from p. 7) and the newer Calovian ones (Critica Sacra, pp. 203–228).

For us it is enough to note this: even Balthasar Mentzer, a sturdy enough foe of the Variata, candidly owns the later public approval for which we now argue.

In his Prolegomena to the Augsburg Confession (p. 21) he writes: those who admitted the changed Confession have publicly testified that they receive it thus far and no otherwise — insofar as in the things themselves it plainly agrees with the prototype, as the History of the Naumburg Convention shows (p. 61).

So Mentzer. How the imperial Estates themselves took that point, we saw a little earlier in their letter to Ferdinand I.

And even Mentzer's own words make plain that the Varied Augsburg Confession was held to agree with the prototype in the things themselves.

116§. VII. Those who cry that the Variata is corrupt and depraved — not the same as the original Augsburg Confession, but utterly another — do injury both to the Confession itself and to Melanchthon, its near-chief theological author, in his day the phoenix and easy prince of Germany's theologians and learned men.

For that variation is either essential, and is said to strike the foundation of faith — and then Philip, together with the changed Confession, is charged with heresy — or it is only accidental, and then it plainly agrees with the original in the things themselves, as Mentzer puts it, and is therefore the same confession.

Johann Schmid's answer to Bellarmine, which we already cited in §. V., fits here; and we add what he subjoins:

If change of words, diction, and phrases took away the Confession itself, the Apostles' Creed would long ago have been done for — the monuments show church doctors set it out in one wording and another (pp. 77 end and 88).

Above all, the imperial Estates themselves drew no line between the two Confessions, but counted both one and the same (Anhang of the Ausführliche Behauptung, pp. 43–52).

Inept, too, are those who deny the Variata the name Augsburg because it was not shown at Augsburg — Mentzer's corollary (Prolegomena n. 9, p. 8), with a crowd of followers: Schmid (p. 12), Calov (p. 8), and others.

As if nothing not exhibited at Augsburg could bear an Augustan name; or as if the Augsburg Confession pointed more to the city where it was made than to the matters and articles of which it consists.

(I say it does not mark the city MORE than the articles — without denying it could take its name from that city and should still do so hereafter, even if, as we most heavily grieve has begun, that imperial city should shrink toward the shape of a village.)

Or as if the Confession published at Wittenberg in 1531, and not a few other altered prints that everyone owns suffered various change, ceased to be Augsburg even for those who scorn Philip's Variata — merely because they were not shown at Augsburg.

117Finally these opponents are caught at odds with themselves — all but αὐτοκατάκριτοι.

(1.) They stretch the unvaried Augsburg Confession and its sense so wide that they even fold into it the Formula of Concord's household doctrines — oral manducation of Christ's body, ubiquity or omnipresence of Christ's body, and the like — of which the Augsburg Confession never so much as dreamed — yes, the whole Formula, they say, is packed inside it.

Yet they strike out the Philippica Confession where it varies in some points, so as to make room for Brentian readings and consequences while Melanchthon's are barred and shut out.

Where the finger of Johann Georg Dorsche points — otherwise among the most learned Lutheran divines, and a name I speak only with reverence — in his Secular Disputation on the more noted consequences of the Augsburg Confession, forming among others these conclusions:

Interpretation of the Augsburg Confession admits whatever is drawn from it by legitimate consequence.

Also: Augsburg religion is not to be so narrowed by interpreting that it must be said to be expressed wholly, and in all its articles, inside the Augsburg Confession itself (ch. 2, pp. 182 and 200).

In plain: whatever the Formulists have already spun, or will invent later, is to count as unvaried Augsburg doctrine — because deduced, as they see it, by legitimate consequence.

But whatever Philip added or changed in declaring the Confession he himself once framed — and he may well seem its best interpreter, as of his own words — and whatever Philippists (Pezel, Sohn, Crocius, Georg Pauli, Hoffmann, the Helmstedt men, and others) comment and draw by consequences that seem legitimate to them, that is to be held most alien from the unvaried Confession.

(2.) Or with the same Dorsche in the next, third chapter they mint canons which, if admitted as not far from the truth, show the Variata Philippica altogether genuine to anyone who weighs it with an even hand — and only odiously harassed, even by Dorsche.

Variation of the Augsburg Confession of whatever kind, says Dorsche, even substantial, ought not to have talked anyone into crossing to another religion (Canon 2).

Therefore he who holds to the Philippica, though Dorsche calls it substantially varied, still holds to the religion the unvaried Augsburg Confession professes; the Philippica does not urge a crossing to another religion, still less binds a man to one.

Again: variation that brings no change into the substance of truth set out in the Augsburg articles ought not to be odiously harassed or used to push anyone outside the peace of religion (Canon 3).

Also: variation that leaves the original exemplars their place does not block the sincerity of the Augsburg Confession (pp. 216–218).

I subsume for the Variata Philippica: it brings no change into the substance of truth — Mentzer is witness — and it leaves the original exemplars their place, if any still survive. Therefore.

118§. VIII. Here I may seem, even to the more modest Dorscheans, to beg the question — standing with Johann Museus, who will weigh the Philippica Confession like this:

Most of its articles, they grant, are drawn out more fully and declared more richly, and many useful things appear in that edition.

Yet some insertions later set Augsburg-Confession theologians quarreling among themselves — for example, whether the Gospel is a sermon of repentance.

Above all, they say, Article X on the Lord's Supper was corrupted to favor the Calvinists.

In Article X of the first edition the words run: Concerning the Lord's Supper they teach that the flesh and blood of Christ are truly present and are distributed to those who eat, and they reject those who teach otherwise.

In the other edition, Museus reports, the words are truly present and are distributed drop out, and this is put in their place: that the body and blood are truly exhibited, and so on.

The Calvinists, he adds, even conceded that formula of speech — yet said the exhibition is spiritual.

Then the clause And they reject those who teach otherwise is omitted in the Philippica edition; and from that, he says, the controversy over this Confession's authority arose.

So far Museus, Lectures on the Epitome of the Formula of Concord, page 32.

119To those more modest Dorscheans and Museans we answer:

First, we take what they have said honorably enough of Philip's Confession — and what presses hardest of all: it is not to be odiously harassed.

Second, the insertions later fought over among Augsburg-Confession theologians for example whether the Gospel is a sermon of repentance did not change the substance of the truth set out in the Augsburg articles. Had they done so, those same theologians would not have been fighting the points among themselves.

Third, we contend that Article X's twin mutation — the chief sweat in the attackers' eyes, as if Melanchthon had altered it for the Calvinists, though the article was framed solely to explode pontifical transubstantiation — neither introduces a substantial change, nor favors the so-called Calvinian sense in any part more than the unvaried Article X itself already does.

120The first point is plain once you set the two forms of Article X side by side.

In the 1531 Variata — commonly called the Invariata — it runs: Concerning the Lord's Supper they teach that the body and blood of Christ are truly present and are distributed to those who eat in the Lord's Supper, and they reject those who teach otherwise.

In the Variata commonly so named it sounds: Concerning the Lord's Supper they teach that the body and blood of Christ are truly exhibited to those who eat in the Lord's Supper.

I appeal to anyone's sense: do these two propositions differ in substance?

The later wording not only presupposes the earlier — for if Christ's body and blood are truly exhibited in the Supper, then by that very fact they must be said to be truly present there and distributed — but also says more.

Body and blood can truly be present in the Supper, and truly distributed by the minister, and yet not truly exhibited to the communicants — certainly not to all.

But whenever in the holy Supper the minister truly exhibits Christ's body and blood to the communicants, they must both be present and be distributed.

121As for the other change — or rather the omission in the Variata of And they reject those who teach otherwise — we admit those exact words are not read there.

Yet in every article of any confession the same sense, or something like it, must be understood: whoever positively confesses a point always denies and rejects what stands against it.

So the omission is only an avoidance of tautology; it can introduce no substantial mutation.

I pass over this further note on the prior change: in the prototype exemplar of the Invariata as the German plainly shows, and Dorsche does not deny it page 183, the article was expressed thus — Concerning the Lord's Supper they confess that the body and blood of Christ are truly present under the species of bread and wine — which at that time could easily smell of pontifical transubstantiation by itself.

Hence the historiographers of the Augsburg Confession report that the pontificals simply admitted this article in those words.

And as for the later omission, it is no secret that a similar — indeed much longer — rejection is missing in the Invariata exemplars of Chytraeus and Caelestinus when Article XIII and XVIII are compared; yet that omission never kept Invariata theologians from treating either exemplar as genuine then or now.

In many articles besides — 3, 4, 6, 7, 11, 14, 18, 19, 20, 21 — no rejection of contrary teaching was added even at the Confession's first framing, and yet it was still to be heard as implied.

122The second point we must prove — that the change, especially the prior one, favors the Calvinian sense no more than the unvaried article itself does — comes clear this way.

Calvin, counted among the Reformed doctors, and with him all the Reformed churches, admit a true presence and a true distribution of Christ's body and blood in the holy Supper, no less than a true exhibition.

And because of that exhibition, which they never fail to press, they confess the sacramental signs to be not bare signs only, but also exhibiting signs.

Fair enough. But the charge runs: under the Variata's words, where body and blood are said only to be exhibited, not to be present and distributed, Calvinists can more easily hide a merely spiritual exhibition — saying truly exhibited while teaching exhibited only spiritually.

123Answer. First, they can do the same with the Invariata's words: while it says Christ's body and blood are truly present and distributed, they may take that as only spiritual presence and distribution.

Second, even confessors of the Invariata alone do not deny spiritual presence and distribution any more than spiritual exhibition and eating — especially since they also insist that their own corporal presence, distribution, eating, and exhibition are nonetheless hyperphysical and supernatural.

Third, the Reformed do not teach a naked spiritual presence, distribution, and exhibition of Christ's body and blood, but a sacramental one as well — though not a corporal one, which neither Augsburg Confession teaches, earlier or later.

124§. IX. Dorsche's remaining canons hint that the Philippica Confession rested on private authority alone — not on later public authority — and was even condemned and rejected by public authority.

125Besides, the authors already cited do not own those canons — least of all John Crocius (Commentary, ch. 56, p. 746), and not even Mentzer the Lutheran.

126So Dorsche himself convicts them of falsehood: the letter already named — from the Imperial Estates to Emperor Ferdinand I — which he prints in full in our vernacular at page 20, runs as follows:

127Likewise we hereby also hold the Apology which our ancestors — and partly we ourselves — presented at that Augsburg Diet, though it was not accepted; afterward it was printed at Wittenberg, and at the Worms Colloquy in 1540 it was delivered beside the improved Confession already named — expressly repeated, and we have confessed ourselves to it.

128In the same way our mind is this: we do not reject or give up our other writings and repeated Confessions — those the Estates of our religion handed in at Imperial Diets and colloquies under His Majesty, partly published, to explain the standing, unrefuted truth and to drive out long-settled false teaching and abuse.

We mean to keep them in every way in the sense of holy Scripture and of the now-renewed Augsburg Confession and Apology.

And when our opponents twist some early, mild articles or words in that Confession and Apology — set gently, partly in German speech-habit, especially where the holy Sacrament, the Mass, and the Roman Church are named — as if we agreed with their idolatrous papal teachings and ceremonies (in which Christian changes later came anyway), and above all with the horror of transubstantiation, the papal Mass, and what hangs on it: we declare again that this is not our meaning at all.

129And afterward: on the contrary, it is not our mind or purpose to tolerate or defend in our lands, territories, churches, and schools any teaching other than what is grounded, as said above, in holy Scripture and fits the Augsburg Confession and Apology in their right sense.

We mean to confess the known truth alone, and to let nothing against it break in or be allowed.

Compare the History of the Naumburg Convention, reviewed again this very year in our vernacular by Dr. Hoennius, Ducal Saxon councillor and intimate secretary (pp. 103, 105, 106, 107).

130J. X. Anyone can see that what we have argued so far for the Variata or Philippica Augsburg Confession was not argued to favor the Reformed.

To them the Invariata is no less welcome than the Variata — clear enough from the Leipzig Colloquy alone in the last century among Saxon, Brandenburg, and Hessian theologians.

With John Museus, following Martin Chemnitz, they only add that in the later edition most articles are drawn out more fully and stated more richly, and that many useful things appear there.

131Meantime the case was argued partly for Philippica fame, which the Reformed cherish as they do Luther's.

They reckon that favor owed to every Reformer who broke with papal idol-madness: do not rashly sneer at their writings and deeds, nor bait them as heretics.

132Partly it was for the Augsburg Confession in either form: so the papal side — as they often have, and still do — cannot charge this kind of alteration, and then say Protestants deserve to lose the Religious Peace before the Emperor and the other papal Estates of the Empire.

133Partly it was for the Invariata in particular — and for those who hug that form alone while crushing and wiping out the Variata.

If they cling too superstitiously to the earlier wording, they can be pushed into the papal phrase about Christ's Body and Blood present in the Supper under the species of bread and wine, in the sense the Western Church alone then held when the Confession was issued.

The Imperial Estates at Naumburg in 1561 already flagged that danger in the preface they set before the Invariata and addressed to Emperor Ferdinand.

134Or when they leave that sense and take an obscurer one — one most papal doctors and Imperial Estates then did not know — Dorsche at the place cited (p. 183, end) still leaves them open to a charge of equivocation not unlike Jesuit practice.

Papal writers elsewhere often pin that charge on the Reformed, though quite wrongly.

135Besides, so Hoffmann of Helmstedt and other Lutheran theologians cannot rightly press that the Formula of Concord slipped in a spurious Augsburg Confession exemplar.

See Hoffmann's Apology to Dr. Olearius and Paul Nicander (p. 691), cited by the author of the Appendix to the Ausführliche Behauptung (pp. 29ff.).

136Finally — and most of all — it was for Truth and for Protestant peace.

Both Evangelical sides already agree in the matter and substance of the truth on the article of the Lord's Supper (that will be plain below).

They must not be torn apart by fights over words in either Augsburg Confession, and bite one another to pieces while Rome dances.

137§. XI. We close this defense of the Variata — that it is not to be attacked or thrown out — with the Chemnitz judgment already cited a little above.

It is the piece On the Controversies once stirred about certain Augsburg Confession articles, edited by Polycarp Leyser at Wittenberg in 1594 and again by Bajer at Jena in 1676, praised by both.

Most recently the Wittenberg theologian Hannekenius smoothed the same saying in his Theological Declaration on the true Estimation of the Augsburg Confession (Preliminary Question 4, near the end, p. 6).

Chemnitz's words are these:

138"I do not see how the edition of 1542 can rightly or usefully be rejected and condemned.

When the Hagenau colloquy was set for that year, it seemed useful to put forward the body and form of our churches' doctrine as the colloquy's matter.

So that year Wittenberg printed the edition, with a fuller declaration added in places."

139"That same year the edition was laid on the table at Worms under the name of the Augsburg Confession.

At the Regensburg colloquy they set the same edition against their adversaries as the form of our churches' doctrine.

And that was done by counsel — with Luther's approval and consent."

140"So from 1546 on, in every diet and religious proceeding, our side kept turning to this edition — and they called it the Augsburg Confession.

No one can show errors or corruptions in the declarations added in the 1542 edition, save the mutilation in Article X."

141"Indeed Cochlaeus at Worms in 1540, and Pighius at Regensburg in 1541, took it hard that a fuller declaration on many articles let in so much light.

They saw true opinions set out more clearly, and the shame of Babylon's Thais stripped plainer still.

They would rather have kept the 1531 edition alone — their own writings say so."

142"But the 1540 edition is in everyone's hands, while the first edition of 1531 is unknown to most and scarcely ever seen.

It contains nothing false — only some needed declarations.

I do not see how it can be thrown out altogether, or simply condemned, without disturbing the churches."

Thus far Chemnitz.

143§. XII. So far we have finished the first member of this first Annotation — the nature of the Augsburg Confession itself.

Next, under the second member, we treat briefly, as our plan requires, of that Confession's theologians and associates in the broad sense.

First we distinguish those so called loosely from those so called strictly.

144Under the looser class we put all who, even outside Germany, either (1) approve the whole Augsburg Confession and stand ready to subscribe — as Bucer and Calvin once did.

On Bucer see Chytraeus's History at pp. 651, 656, and 659; on Calvin, the Author of the ausführlicher Behauptung 20, in the special inquiry whether the late John Calvin was counted an Augsburg Confession kinsman in his day (pp. 72–90); add Pareus, Irenicum, p. 293.

145Or (2) they sincerely agree with most of the Confession, yet because of a harder phrasing in one article or another — above all the tenth — they have neither taken the whole Confession nor subscribed, whether by their own abstention or because others barred them.

Such were the so-called Tetrapolitans of Strasbourg, Memmingen, Constance, and Lindau, who once followed Zwingli on the Supper and therefore presented their own Confession at the Augsburg Diet, which the Emperor meant to reject together with the Augsburg.

Chytraeus, pp. 678–679. Our writers (Pareus, Georg Pauli, and others) show that they refused subscription; others, citing Chytraeus's History p. 130, hold that the Protestant Estates' judgment at least partly forced them not to subscribe.

146(3) Even those who, for local and temporal reasons, withdrew from subscription are not wholly unworthy of the wider name of Augsburg Confession theologians and associates.

They held the Confession congruent with God's word as to substance, yet feared it would become — at least by accident — a torch of many evils in this or that kingdom or principality.

Beza and Peter Martyr are said to have done this at the Colloquy of Poissy in France. See Pareus, Irenicum, pp. 294–295; Crocius on the Augsburg Confession, p. 144ff.

147Our reason is twofold.

Those who approve a confession are understood to have joined themselves to it in mind.

And by the very nature of a Christian confession and of Christians who confess, everyone who consents to it is customarily counted its associate.

148Under the stricter class fall, primarily and immediately — or rather first in time — all the Estates of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in whose name the Augsburg Confession was framed and exhibited, and who subscribed it with their own hands, together with the theologians who drafted it or helped in any way.

Secondarily and mediately come all successors of those Estates (and of others who followed their example), with their theologians to this day, who defend the Augsburg Confession — the Invariata alone, the Variata alone, or both as one and the same in the substance of truth — whether under the name Lutheran or Reformed.

They are set apart, under the common name of Protestants or Evangelicals and genuinely Catholic, from the papal party that owns the Pope as infallible head of the universal church with supreme temporal and spiritual power.

It does not matter whether they read Article X of a spiritual and sacramental presence and exhibition only of Christ's body and blood, or even of a corporal presence (which the Augsburg Confession nowhere states).

149That the Reformed no less than the Lutherans have always been held Augsburg Confession associates appears (1) from Frederick the Palatine at Naumburg in 1561 and at the Augsburg Diet in 1566.

See more fully the Author of the ausführlichen Behauptung, Appendix pp. 36–43; Pareus, Irenicum, pp. 292 and 297; Crocius's German Summarische Nachricht… (nos. 123–130; pp. 54–58), and his Comment on Augsburg Confession Society, Q.2, caps. XVIII and XXI; also our Becmann, loc. cit., p. 99ff.

(2) From Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, who steadily favored the Reformed side and with great zeal pressed the more rigid into it by speech and many letters — in Chytraeus's Acts with the Zwinglians from p. 633ff.; Calixtus, On Tolerance of the Reformed, n. 62 (Batavian) and n. 65 (newest Helmstedt); and the History of the A.C. by three theologians, written in German and Latinized by Chemnitz's son-in-law.

150Consequently the Brandenburg Margraves and Electors are likewise undoubted Augsburg Confession associates — from George (Margrave and AC subscriber) and Joachim II (Elector who brought the Confession into his lands) down to our day.

That holds even though blessed Johann Sigismund of glorious memory — great-grandfather of our most august King — with his successors forever after, by God's grace, did not attack Frederick the Palatine's reading of AC Art. X, nor did his theologians.

151For the rest, Johann Sigismund and his successors have bound themselves by various declarations, and their theologians through the Frankfurt theological faculty statutes, by solemn oath, to the Augsburg Confession shown to Charles V in 1530 and later more fully set out — as the chief symbolic book of the Brandenburg lands — and have devoted themselves to it with their whole heart.

See Crocius, Comment on A.C. Society, part 1 entire, pp. 1–30.

152Hence also Christian Walther — still a well-known Lutheran churchman, Assessor of the Holy Sambian Consistory at Königsberg in Prussia, and now fourth Ordinary Professor of Theology — once informed of our faculty oath (that after Holy Scripture we solemnly bind ourselves forever to the four ecumenical councils alone and to the Augsburg Confession as symbolic writings) did not hesitate two years ago to seek a doctorate of theology from our faculty.

After he took and signed the oath, by command of our most pious King the faculty decorated him through me (then Dean), as the 1702 printed Signification in the Viadrina theological faculty's name reports more fully.

It is not out of place here to add both our faculty oath and the royal mandate — most gracious, and warmly favoring the efforts of the Lutheran candidate and of the Reformed promoters alike. The oath runs in these words, &c.

153I, Master Christian Walther, swear that I will hand on and defend the sound doctrine of Christ's Gospel and of the Prophets' and Apostles' word — whose chief points are contained and explained in the three Symbols and in the Confession shown to Charles V at Augsburg — knowing it rightly and keeping it diligently and faithfully.

I will carefully and as far as I can refuse and attack all false and heretical dogmas that fight the clear word of God, whether of old or new Arians or of other fanatics.

154As to those admitted to theological degrees, I will judge strictly and speak with weight; I will not take this degree over again elsewhere; and with highest faithfulness and constant zeal I will do whatever seems to serve God's church, Christ's glory, and the help, honor, and growth of this faculty and school. So help me God through His holy Word.

I holy attest and promise that I will keep the oath written above, both by signing my name and by affixing my seal, 15 April 1702.

(L.S.) M. Christian Walther, Pastor of Sackheim, Assessor of the Sambian Consistory, and member of the Brandenburg Society of Sciences — in his own hand.

155The royal rescript runs thus: Frederick, by God's grace King of Prussia, Margrave of Brandenburg, Arch-Chamberlain of the Holy Roman Empire and Prince Elector, Duke of Magdeburg, Cleves, Julich, Berg, Stettin, Pomerania, and so on.

Reverend, most learned, beloved and faithful: Walther's uncommon learning, upright manners, and integrity of life — praised by you without ordinary compliments — were already clear to us, and we know his merits well enough that on that ground alone we would not leave him without the honors he seeks.

What moved us still more to grant his wish and your humble petitions is this rare case: a Lutheran theologian seeking a theological doctorate from Reformed doctors with as much confidence as they show readiness and mutual zeal in advancing his desire.

That can only please us, since every wholesome good for the commonwealth and the church may be hoped from it. We therefore not only consent but command you, Samuel Strimesius — dean of the theological faculty, ordinary doctor and professor, and primary pastor — to declare M. Christian Walther now Doctor of Sacred Theology in your faculty, and at the next public promotion to proclaim him such, and to admit him to all privileges and rights belonging to that highest title and to doctors of theology in the Holy Roman Empire — which may God favor. Farewell, secure of our royal grace. Given at Cologne on the Spree, 20 March 1702.

Frederick the King. Paul, Freiherr von Fuchs. To the Theological Faculty of the Viadrina University.

156§. XIII. With the distinction given in §.XII above, it is easy to settle — and to see whether the settlement was just or wicked — this pair of theological-historical questions:

Are the Reformed associates of the Augsburg Confession? And are they to be counted participants in the Religious Peace?

157On both questions — especially the second, which must presuppose and imply the first — the affirmative is true.

Joh. Crocius proved it at length in the German tract already cited and in his denser Commentary, question 2; so did the author of the Ausführliche Behauptung, pp. 90–111; Georgius Pauli in the Reformatus Augustanus; and the venerable Senior of our faculty against Liebhard in chapters 4 and 6 entire.

Among other proofs they lean chiefly on the Augsburg Diet of 1566 (treated most fully by Crocius, Comm. Cap. 18), Cap. 4 §.8 p. 102;

158Further, Cap. 6 §.8 cites the famous words of Article VII of the Peace Instrument — worth noting, and celebrated — by which the Reformed are expressly counted among Augsburg Confession associates.

With that one stroke fall the hostile schemes of certain harsh theologians who, in an un-Christian way, rashly riot as if thirsting for Christian blood.

The Peace Instrument's words run: By unanimous consent of the Imperial Majesty and of all Estates of the Empire it was resolved that whatever right or benefit the other constitutions of the Empire, the Religious Peace, and this public settlement (with its decision of grievances) grant to other Catholic and Augsburg-Confession states and subjects, that same must also belong to those among them called Reformed.

159Against truly pedantic critics, the newest author of the Gründliche Vorstellung (Which Is the One True Means for Uniting the Two Evangelical Religions in Germany) has finely defended these words at pp. 11 and 98.

We cited and praised that author elsewhere — namely in our Ingenua in Arminianismus Inquisitio, p. 302.

160Nor are the Reformed here their own enemies when, with the Neustadt theologians (Cap. IV from p. 143) on the Augsburg Confession, they note against those who nearly equate it with Holy Scripture — which Calovius unfairly, and only by insult, reads as "Calvinian insults" (Crit. Sacr. p. 68).

They note that it was written not many years after the Reformation began, when not everything could suddenly be seen through and explained, and so on.

161For it is one thing to tear the Augsburg Confession with insults, or somehow to lower its due authority — which no Reformer ever set out to do — and another to refuse to let a human writing, liable to error, stand in the same rank as God's infallible word.

Crocius works the whole question through in Comm. cap. 36 from p. 497.

As for Calvin's judgment on the Augsburg Confession: he was ready to subscribe it at other times, and in fact did subscribe it (see his 1557 letter to Martin Schalingius, pastor at Regensburg, in the Letters volume lately edited at Amsterdam with the Opera, p. 112).

When elsewhere he calls the Augsburg Confession a torch of Gallic fury, read that restored to its genuine sense — in Pareus (Fren. p. 294), in the Ausführliche Behauptung (p. 74ff.), and most fully in Crocius (Comm. pp. 514, 515, 518).

162§. XIV. One last member of this Annotation still needs clearing: in what sense do some men — more than others — want to be greeted as Augsburg Confession theologians, and greet themselves that way?

To put it in three words, as the saying goes, we will mark them by a few characteristic notes and set them out to be seen.

They are, then, as follows.

163[1.] Those who side with Luther against Carolstadt (innovating much at Wittenberg under authority that was not wholly private), against Zwingli (writing a little too spitefully and boastfully on Article XVII of his Articles' Explanation — "I began preaching the Gospel in A.D. 1516, when Luther's name had not even been heard in our regions"), and against the Zurichers (who sent Luther a Bible translation prepared under Leo Juda's lead and printed by Forschover, after Luther wanted his own published version received everywhere). On each of these see Calixtus, Judgment on Theological Controversies, nos. 48, 53, 72.

When those opponents, aiming to restore the Eucharist from papal abuses and superstitions to its old brightness, seemed to deny Christ's body and blood present in it, these men — "with all their heat, pressing adversaries on every side" (Calixtus, num. 47) — decide the bodily presence in the Supper must be pressed so hard that they push, too roughly, the new and awkward ubiquity opinion cut out for Luther in the heat of battle.

Nor will they bear at all those who follow the milder Luther, made surer by Bucer's Declarations and the Zurich Confession: that only a local, natural presence was denied in the Holy Supper, while sacramental and spiritual presence were both granted. Such people they will not treat as innocent and pure, easily freed by Christ; and they want tolerance from them too, though they themselves cannot come down into that milder view.

See the History of the Augsburg Confession by Kirchner, Selnecker, and Chemnitz, cited by Calixtus at num. 62 (end), with nums. 63–65, 69, 71, 75.

164(2.) Those who cling with the badly informed Philip Melanchthon — harsh on Bucer's and the Swiss view in the 1522 letter to Oecolampadius and in the 1530 Epilogue of Sentences from the Fathers — so tightly to the bare property of the Supper words that they deny any tropical speech in them, even though they themselves cannot avoid figurative speech on other grounds.

And they will not follow the same Philip after better information and second thoughts (δευτέρας φροντίδας): in the 1535 letter to Urbanus Rhegius, in letters to Veit Dietrich (especially 1543), elsewhere, and in the 1559 letter to Johannes Crato the year before Melanchthon's death — where he holds that the letter (τὸ ῥητόν) of the Supper words is to be taken sacramentally, admits that the ancients spoke far otherwise than recent ages, and even recalls that Nazianzen simply called them ἀντίτυπα of Christ's body.

See Pezel, Arguments & Theological Responses VIII, pp. 175–190, and Melanchthon's letter to Crato in Letters & Judgments II, pp. 384–385 (Pezel).

165(3.) Those who, with Johann Brenz, stir from the ashes the unhappy dogma of Christ's bodily ubiquity — first invented by Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples (Calixtus, booklet num. 38), asserted by Luther as second after Stapulensis (num. 40), then dropped by Luther with the warning that presence in the Holy Supper rests not on the ubiquity debate but on the truth of the institution (num. 44), and so put to sleep under long silence — or who inflame the ubiquity quarrel revived by Brenz and Jakob Andreae (Calixtus num. 45) and set in it the prow and stern of Christian truth, above all of their oral eating.

Yet they will not teach with the same Brenz in the Swabian Syngramma and the Exegesis on John: the Lord's body is eaten by faith and is present to faith. At John's words ("My flesh is truly food, and my blood truly drink") Brenz asks, "Whose?" and answers, "Faith's: for faith eats Christ's flesh and drinks his blood while it believes," etc. (Calixtus num. 53 mid).

Calixtus then adds (num. 56 open): these lines are such that Calvinists would scarcely explain their view in other words. Brenz is careful not to say Christ's body is chewed with the mouth; he refuses that claim; he teaches at least that it is offered to faith, received by faith, and therefore present to faith.

Calvinists press the same point, with perhaps this one difference: they hold that faith looks to and embraces the Lord's body present in heaven; Brenz teaches it is present and shown to faith here on earth.

166(4.) Those who side with restless Flacius Illyricus — called quarrelsome even by Elector Augustus of Saxony himself (German Formula of Concord, appendix p. 119 end, edition of the year just past) — and with that bitter, almost raving scourge of Philip. Many theologians complained of him: the Wittenbergers throughout the Altenburg Colloquy acts; the Ausführlicher Behauptung author, pp. 64–70; the Leipzigers with them in the whole German Endlicher Bericht (Wittenberg, Hans Lufft, 1570); and Melanchthon himself, speaking calmly enough of Flacius's storms — in the letter to Johann Mathesius (Counsels & Judgments II, p. 257) and in a hand-written letter to Ulrich Mordisius, lately printed as unpublished from Adam Christoph Jacobi's library by Christian Jüncker in the Life of Luther, p. 126 — including: "Gladly will I leave both the painted deeds of the Papists and Flacian sycophancy whenever God wills me to go, dying or in exile. Dying, I go to the Son of God's school and the heavenly churches; in exile, God helping, I will find lodging with better men than Flacius, who threatens to drive me from all Germany. I pray God to rule and cover you. Farewell, 4 November 1558."

From implacable (ἀσπόνδῳ) hatred of the Reformed — worse than snake or dog — they flee Philip's Variata Augsburg Confession, mainly because Article X was changed.

Yet they will not remember that, as to substance, it is the same as the Invariata: so judged the Naumburg estates already cited, and Mentzer does not deny it (Prolegomena to the Exegesis of the A.C., p. 21 mid) — that the Reformed neither seek nor can seek nor wish to seek any greater support for their view from one edition than from the other.

Nor does it become Christian theologians, for such sycophancies, to rip and tear Christ's seamless tunic — that is, his beloved church, most tenacious of Christian love by his command — into pieces.

167(5.) Those who with the Bergen Fathers rank the Formula of Concord — that most unhappy apple of strife (ἔριδος) and of all Protestant quarrel, notorious for bodily manducation and omnipresence of Christ's body — older than the Augsburg Confession itself, which knows nothing of those dogmas and is empty of them.

They care nothing that their own side has contradicted it with great zeal both formerly and now — churches and their most pious, learned doctors, and also princes and estates of the Romano-German Empire — and that some still contradict it today (Crocius, German tract from p. 99; Commentary on the Augsburg Confession passim, esp. p. 282).

Nor do they care that the Formula itself kept the changed Article X of the Augsburg Confession — which does not match the German of the prototype — the very change for which Formulists attack the Variata so bitterly — and that the Formula itself has suffered very frequent mutations and variations.

See the Anhang der ausführlichen Behauptung, pp. 26–36.

168(6.) Finally, those who by THESE UNIVERSALS imagine that they alone are orthodox, and that all their commentaries belong to the foundation of the faith — whether before it, with it, or after it — and who shut out and damn everyone who will not rise to the Formula of Concord (better called Discord), even when those others sincerely confess both the Invariata and the Variata Augsburg Confession in everything else.

They cut themselves off by a schism more carnal and more unhappy from syncretists and from the Reformed almost alike — worse than the cut Papists make from Protestants.

Yet from the very people they leave they are invited, and ought to be invited, as steadily as without tiring — however unwilling — not only to mutual tolerance but to a brotherly embrace and church union, through and for the sake of God and his Christ (once the fundamental consent of all Augsburg Confession associates is shown).

On that, more in the Annotations that follow next.

169Here is a short compendium of the preceding Annotation — which ran a little long — cast long ago into Ten Theses in our vernacular by the late excellent doctor and theology professor of this University, B. Gregorius Gregorii Francus, and printed as an appendix to one of his polemical tracts.

170I. Though the Augsburg Confession text first shown in 1530 was, in places, gradually enlarged and corrected through 1540, from that time the later corrected exemplar has not changed so much as a letter for a hundred years.

171II. Properly speaking, two exemplars have been acknowledged and presented by the Electors, Princes, and Imperial Estates, and they stand in Luther's and Melanchthon's writings and in the Imperial Acts.

The earlier was printed at Wittenberg in 1531; the later, enlarged in 1540 and 1541, was sent with the earlier one to Emperor Ferdinand I at Naumburg in 1561 — and to this day nothing has been added to it or taken from it.

172III. Those two exemplars are not two confessions, but one and the same: the later differs from the earlier not in the substance of the faith's articles, but only in wording and clearer explanation.

IV. The Augsburg Confession text slotted into the Formula of Concord does differ in some words from the 1531 Wittenberg printing in Luther's volumes; in substance, though, it fully matches that text.

173V. Anyone who receives either of these Confessions is an associate of the Augsburg Confession, and cannot lawfully be shut out of the Empire's Religious Peace.

VI. Electors, Princes, and Imperial Estates have publicly professed the enlarged Confession no less than the earlier one.

174VII. Neither Imperial Recesses nor Acts or Edicts ever mention a Variata or Invariata Augsburg Confession under those contested labels.

VIII. The recent teaching of certain Evangelicals bound to the Bergen Formula — oral eating and the ubiquity of Christ's body — is in neither the earlier nor the enlarged Confession, and still less in the Repetitio or in Philip's Corpus Doctrinae.

So the Reformed, as associates of the Augsburg Confession, cannot be shut out of the Imperial Peace for denying those two dogmas.

175IX. Ubiquitism and whatever hangs on it may be a huge error; still, no solemn act of a general or national synod has yet condemned it, and its defenders talk about it in such different ways that one can hardly tell what they actually hold.

So it should still be tolerated, and those who approve it should nonetheless be counted among the associates of the Augsburg Confession.

X. Luther and Melanchthon were associates of the Augsburg Confession, held as such by everyone, and stayed heart-devoted to it to the end of their course, even though they disagreed on how Christ's body is exhibited in the Holy Supper.

In the same way the Reformed, no less than the Lutherans, remain associates of the Augsburg Confession, even when they do not fully agree on that point and on certain other school questions.

Addendum and correction: p. 13, line 5 — for Christianum Pontanum read Christianum Bajerum, after the Most Serene Elector obtained by petition from Emperor Charles V that the Augsburg Confession should also be read aloud in German in Germany and in the city of Augsburg. See Clar. Pipping, Einleitung zu den Symbol. Schrifften Lutherischer Kirchen.

176ANNOTATION II. On the Augsburg Confession associates' fundamental consensus and their praeter-fundamental dissent — and on that dissent's origin, progress, and outcome. To the Author's pp. 332–333.

§. I. The associates' fundamental consensus looks to the foundation of the Christian religion — Christian doctrine, theoretical and practical — of which some doctrines are fundamentals and others are built on them (fundamentata).

The former, taken in the scriptural sense, are the doctrines concerning Christ, our only Saviour, God and Man: the highest, first foundation for everything else (1 Cor. 3:11: "For other foundation can no man lay," &c.).

Here "Christ" means chiefly the doctrine about Christ, not only his person — clear from what precedes and what follows. Paul as wise architect is said to have laid the foundation (Christ); what he laid was not Christ himself but the gospel-doctrine about Christ, the base on which other Christian doctrines are built.

What follows confirms it: others are to build on that foundation gold, silver, wood, stubble — many things founded on the fundamental doctrine of Christ, some precious and useful, some cheaper and futile.

Eph. 2:20 says the same in one verse: Apostles and Prophets (i.e. their chief doctrines, not their persons) are called foundation, and Christ the cornerstone — that is, the doctrine of Christ is named the principal and most fundamental.

177Or take fundamentals in the theological sense: doctrines wholly necessary both to constitute Christian religion or faith and to reach faith's end — the salvation of our souls.

Hence they are commonly called either fundamentals of faith (toward the object: the intrinsic, essential thing founded) or fundamentals of salvation (toward the end: the thing founded partly intrinsic/essential, partly extrinsic/extra-essential).

God alone in Holy Scripture fixes all that necessity — explicitly or implicitly, by a consequence open to anyone — and in an exclusive sense no less than a positive one: so God both names which doctrines are necessary and, by not naming others as necessary (explicitly or implicitly), exempts them from faith-and-salvation necessity, though not from usefulness of every degree.

It is neither likely nor admissible that God, sole author of all Scripture — where necessities for faith and salvation are mixed with lesser matters, and some necessities are at times marked openly — either failed to define all necessities at all (and so failed to distinguish them from the less necessary) or left that definition and distinction to human whim; especially since he handed down everything needed for salvation promiscuously, and as such. See this taught more fully in the Inquisition into the Arminians, Annotation XVII.

178§. II. Those finally are said to agree fundamentally in Christian religion and faith, in the theological sense, who agree in everything God has called necessary to faith and salvation — and who count as necessary neither other things, nor more, nor fewer, than God has commanded to be such in his word.

Those dissent fundamentally who either diverge from the necessaries of faith and salvation so named by God, denying all or some of them as to truth or as to necessity; or who, beyond the divine necessaries, forge and push other things as necessary apart from God's word.

Of these dissents the former is more a matter of right; the latter more of fact. Socinians dissent fundamentally from Protestants in the former way; Romanists in the latter.

Protestants, or Evangelicals, are understood to agree fundamentally among themselves in both ways — except those who still press as necessary certain house-dogmas of their own, founded neither in Scripture as to truth nor (still less) as to necessity, and who cut off and damn those who refuse them: thereby falling from the foundation, if not of faith strictly so called (Christian theory), then of charity or practice (the other part of the Christian religion, and of Christian faith in the wider sense).

179§. III. That Protestants agree fundamentally among themselves has already been shown a priori; the same can be confirmed a posteriori by running through the general necessary heads of Christian doctrine.

(1.) They agree on the first and only adequate principle for knowing all Christian dogmas — at least all the necessary ones — namely Holy Scripture: held by Protestants with one voice as a rule and norm, both sufficient and perfect and clear enough, for everything Christians must believe and must do.

Other so-called Christians (synonymously or only equivocally) differ here: they either set something beside Scripture as co-principle — Traditions, the unwritten word — or put Scripture under something else, native light (reason) or fictitious light (enthusiasm).

Protestants, by contrast, explode enthusiasm and the unwritten word as hostile to Scripture; and they treat reason, however illuminated, not as a principle of proof but as a bare instrument of apprehension.

(2.) They agree in an honest, unvarnished reception and profession of the elements of Christian religion in all their parts: the Apostles' Creed, the Decalogue, the Lord's Prayer, and only two sacraments — which not only signify their significates but also exhibit and seal them.

180(3.) They agree in sincere adhesion to the Augsburg Confession — and to it as Invariata — even on Article X, whether the German or the Latin is read here, provided the "species" of bread and wine in the German edition are taken not in the Roman sense (as accidents) but in the Lutheran sense (as symbols of Christ's body and blood).

Hence the Reformed colloquists at Leipzig testified they would always be ready to subscribe the Invariata Confession and cling to it with their whole heart — as we already said in Annotation I, and will quote their words below.

(4.) They agree in admitting the Formula of Concord strictly so called — both the Epitome of certain disputed articles and the Solid Declaration and Repetition of the same — as to substance and as to modes, except only two modes: one on the Holy Supper, the other on the Person of Christ.

Even that twofold modal diversity, we shall show in due place, does not touch the foundation of the Christian faith even from afar. See meanwhile our German tract on the Protestants' fundamental consensus, §§. 10–24.

181§. IV. So every dissent among Protestants is rightly called praeter-fundamental. Its origin, progress, and peak (akme) may be sketched here in brief.

That dissent begins in the controversy over interpreting the words of the Supper — which the three first Reformers, Carlstadt, Luther, and Zwingli, each framed differently as a counter to Roman abuses, and not equally handy in every respect (Calixtus, Judgment of Controversies §. 47).

Luther kept the line drawn from his former teacher Peter d'Ailly, Cardinal of Cambrai, and still held by the fewer and better Romanists: that Christ's body is predicated of the bread so that, the bread remaining, Christ's body is joined with the bread in the Supper's use (Wittenberg Latin Tom. II, fol. 70 B) — predicated of the bread as contained in the bread, by a proposition unusual yet proper, and empty of any rhetorical trope.

Carlstadt, pressing the Romans harder, invented an identical proposition: driving the bread of the Lord's Supper out by Christ's body (much as the more common Roman view), as if Christ had given his disciples only the received, blessed, broken bread, and while giving, pointing to his own body, had said of that — not of the bread — "This is my body."

Zwingli, midway between them, meant to keep both bread and Christ's body in the Supper — the bread corporally, the body spiritually — and taught that Christ's body is improperly predicated of the bread by the impropriety common to all sacramental propositions: by metonymy the significate is said of the sign, which signifies it and exhibits it spiritually.

182Carlstadt's middle reading — fabulous, and dragging in a little story forged outside Scripture, not unlike the Socinian fable stitched onto John 1:3 "And the word was with God" (by which Socinians hostile to Christ's deity press their case) — found very few backers and soon vanished.

The other two remained, taught with all the more heat — one in upper Germany, the other in Lower — the more they first seemed to clash.

The one: a corporeal or local presence of Christ's body in the bread. The other: at first glance seeming to admit no presence at all, not even a spiritual one.

The former called in aid the ubiquity of Christ's body, unheard of in past ages; the latter, that body's session at God's right hand in the heavens into which it had ascended.

183§. V. That same Protestant split — begun over how the Supper words are read and over the mode of Christ's bodily presence in the Holy Supper's use — then grew through the controversy on the ubiquity of Christ's body.

Luther himself, once and again in the heat of debate, had drawn it in, chiefly from two places in his Greater Confession — the ones Calixtus cites at loc. cit. nos. 41–42.

184He brought ubiquity in so he could defend a corporeal presence of Christ's body in the Holy Supper more easily — then later let it drop.

185Brentius and Jacob Andreae took it up again (as we noted in the preceding Annotation, §.14) — even though Tillemann Heshusius, who shared their Supper view, contradicted them (see Hospinian, Historia Sacramentaria, p. 40).

186Marbach the Elder then confirmed and defended it with further like — and even more absurd — propositions, daring to say Christ's human nature can rightly be called God Himself.

So Fechtius reports in his Supplement to Ecclesiastical History, p. 30 (cf. Hospinian, Concordia discordans, ch. 55).

187The Torgau assembly of 1574 rejected it again in Article 4.

188In the later Torgau meeting of 1576 it went silent — the year the Philippist Corpus Doctrinae was set aside and today's Formula of Concord body of Lutheran doctrine took its place.

At last the Bergen Fathers explained it as potential, in the Solid Declaration and Explanation of the Controverted Articles (my copy p. 754; 4to ed. 1580).

189§. VI. Not long after the Formula of Concord came into print — a story already more than familiar — the Dissensus hit its peak.

Aegidius Hunnius struck at the Predestination teaching that, from Augustine onward, had been all but the rule of the Western Church, and that the first Reformers on both Protestant sides had taken over: Luther and Zwingli, as pupils of Augustine and of Thomas Aquinas.

190He pressed for taking up the view held by the Fathers who came before Augustine.

191From then on the greater part of the Lutherans went with Hunnius, while most of the Reformed held fast to Augustinian teaching on this point.

192As the often-praised Calixtus puts it: many of our own once approved the Absolute Decree as well, then by degrees fell back to the teaching of the first four centuries — a decree framed according to foreknowledge — and Aegidius Hunnius did a great and distinguished work in that change:

193Still, it is hard to set out that teaching without seeming to shade toward Pelagianism — and Daniel Tossanus the Calvinist and Adam Tanner the Jesuit both charge Hunnius with Pelagianism (cited place, no. 22).

See also the same Calixtus, Consideration of Reformed Doctrine according to the Thorun Confession, on Grace, p. 62.

194And they still did not count this split — or any of the earlier ones — as Fundamental: see the earlier Tractate, nos. 23–35, no. 45, and nos. 76–82 inclusive.

195ANNOTATIO III. On the Attempts Made toward Consociation (pages 334–341).

§. I. The moment the Dissensus first broke out, Landgrave Philip of Hesse — a prince hard to praise enough — tried to choke it off in the bud.

196He wrote again and again to Luther, Melanchthon, and Brentius, pressing hard for Concord — both before the Augsburg Diet and while it sat — and for fraternity with the Zwinglians that would actually be kept.

Those letters are still in Chytraeus’s Acts with the Zwinglians; and the named theologians, for their part, were angry and would not admit that the Zwinglians shared with them a fundamental consensus of faith.

197So the Most Illustrious Prince argues for the Zwinglians in one letter (Chytraeus, History of the Augsburg Confession, p. 652): since they agree with you in the other articles, confess Christ as you do, grant that Christ is eaten in the Supper by faith — and that eating is needed for salvation — and do not strip God of omnipotence, but read the words by the analogy of faith according to Scripture as they take them; and since Christ’s glorified body cannot feed a stomach, so He can scarcely be eaten except by believers and through faith — your sentence and reply look harder than they need to be, and I hope God will bring you to a truer view.

For Luther’s answering letters, see the recent Buddeus Supplement, Epistle 122, pages 1024 and 102.

198By all of this the Landgrave at last got the theologians of both sides to come out to him at Marburg, and there in 1529, with him present, they entered a Universal Consensus — one article excepted: the Lord’s Supper.

199On that outcome Chytraeus writes: Zwingli and Oecolampadius gladly followed Luther’s teaching in everything else; only on the Sacrament they would not follow (p. 643).

Though they had not yet agreed whether Christ’s true body and blood are corporally present in the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper, each side would still show the other Christian love as far as conscience allowed, and both would pray God to confirm them by His Spirit in the true teaching (p. 646).

Buddeus, the noted Halle professor, adds in his Supplement Luther’s Epistle 98 to Johann Agricola, urging that harsh words and writings stop from then on (pp. 71–72).

Chytraeus himself, opening his History of the Acts with the Zwinglians, says he and all the pious wish the bitterness of these splits and hatreds softened and eased (p. 636).

200I would call this Marburg attempt the first of the more complete Consociation efforts — though still of the lowest grade.

More complete, because they agreed on every dogma but one; lowest grade, because Luther would not give the right hand of fraternity (Chytraeus, p. 647).

201Worse: Luther called the Zwinglians heretics — Epistle 103 in Buddeus’s Supplement, p. 105, to Jakob Probst, Licentiate of Theology: they were treated most unfairly in being denied the name of brothers and forced to leave as heretics, yet so that peace might hold for a time by mutual writings, if God should open their heart.

On that footing Luther became the first author of the Protestant schism — and the more out of season, the more carefully the other side had sought Concord, as Luther himself admits in Epistles 98 and 123 in Buddeus.

He records that Zwingli, weeping openly before the Landgrave and the Estates, begged and cried out: there are no people on earth with whom I would rather be one than with the Wittenbergers (p. 105).

And again: the Zwinglians had promised they would say with the Lutherans that Christ’s body is truly present in the Supper, but only spiritually — if only they might be called brothers. Same place.

202§. II. Next comes a more complete Consociation attempt — one owed to Martin Bucer, who could even vie with the gentlest Melanchthon for the palm of theological moderation and modesty.

Chytraeus tacks it onto the Marburg effort in these words: when the Landgrave’s intercession could not get the Saxons to receive the Zwinglians as brothers, Bucer still did not quit — even after our Confession had been shown — but kept pressing every path to conciliation and Concord (pp. 658 and 679).

203Still, a little later — before the diets closed, and with the Elector of Saxony and Bucer’s own magistrates knowing — Bucer went to Luther at Coburg to work out godly ways of settling the controversy.

For the same cause he soon went on to Oecolampadius and Zwingli.

One delay after another pushed the close of that business out to the sixth year; Concord was finally constituted at Wittenberg.

204On that account I rank this second Consociation attempt higher — the Wittenberg one — because of the Wittenberg Formula of Concord, which even spells out agreement on the doctrine of the Supper.

Eleven Reformed and six Lutheran theologians subscribed it; read it in Chytraeus, pp. 680–681.

Call it almost Interim-like if you like: those theologians (Chytraeus’s words) would not finish the Concord until they had also referred it to the other theologians and magistrates for their approval.

205From the Lutheran side, another mark of the Wittenberg Concord’s completeness is this: Luther himself spurred Bucer to seek it — letters to the Strasburgers, 1535 (Buddeus, Epistle 120, p. 248).

After the Formula was set, Luther pressed Strasbourg’s approval in 1536 (Epistle 223, p. 257), and the Swiss as well — 1 December 1537 (Epistle 231) and 1538 (Epistle 232).

206From the Reformed side: the Wittenberg Formula of Concord was never revoked — only declared (Crocius on the Augsburg Confession, p. 162).

The Swiss approved it point by point (Crocius, pp. 100 and 107).

Because some have doubted that approval, we must call the Helvetians’ own reply letters from Zurich to Luther as witnesses — written a little later, yet not as late as 1539 (the year a Berlin printing of Werenfels’s sermon assigns them, perhaps by typographical error, in this very year of my writing).

They were drawn up on 4 May 1538 — about half a year after Luther’s letter reached them — as Selneccer, Kirchner, and Chemnitz, the three most celebrated Lutheran historians of the Augsburg Confession, recount when they cite the letters in these words:

207The Zurich letter opens: Honorable, highly learned friend in Christ — we received with highest joy your kind answer to the writing we sent you toward Schmalkalden, thanking our heavenly Father.

From your letter and from Capito and Bucer’s faithful report while they were with us, we can only take it that you mean this holy unity well, and that you gladly accept our Basel Confession with the Declaration that followed.

On the outward Word and Baptism you find no misunderstanding; on the holy Sacrament of Christ’s body and blood we gather you have never taught — and do not teach — a descent or ascent from the Father’s right hand that would set a presence or eating in the Supper contrary to the true incarnation and ascension.

We for our part refuse bare empty signs in the Supper: the Lord’s body and blood are received, yet truly grasped only by the believing mind, as our Confession and Declaration sent to Schmalkalden still hold.

So we now see nothing else than that — God be praised — we are one in understanding and right substance, at peace, with no dispute left between us. (Full page Hh.) Thus far the Zurichers’ words.

208Those Zurich words seem to move Werenfels — once chief theology professor at Basel — to end his sermon with this wish, adding the Luther letter that had drawn the Zurich replies: would that the Concord made in 1536 between the evangelical theologians of both sides — alas lasting no more than three years — were renewed.

Of that Concord Luther wrote to the evangelical Swiss on 1 December 1537 (Jena Works, Tom. 6, f. 507): take me for one who means it from the heart; so far as I can, nothing that furthers Concord shall be lacking in me.

We join Werenfels’s wish — the more warmly because, alas, it is surer still that for merely carnal causes (Calixtus the Elder, Jud. Controv. nos. 72 and 75) the earlier Luther broke the Wittenberg Concord.

Worse: by his letter to Jakob Praepositus in the month before he died — 18 February, the holy day of Concord — Luther can seem to have died into the schism (we hope at least beside his intention and knowledge): Blessed is the man who has not walked in the counsel of the Sacramentarians, nor stood in the way of the Zwinglians, nor sits in the chair of the Zurichers. You have what I think. (17 January 1546; Buddeus, Supplement, Epistle 255, pp. 287–288.)

Stop before §. III — the third, Frankfurt attempt after Luther’s death.

209§. III. The third Consociation attempt of this Reformation century is the Frankfurt one.

It came after Luther’s death, while Melanchthon was still alive — in 1557 and 1558 — undertaken by the Imperial Estates and their leader, Otto Henry the Palatine.

Twenty-five theologians were called to Frankfurt; among them Johann Pistorius, Andreas Hyperius, and Nicolaus Rhodingus, Marburg professors commonly counted as rigid Calvinists.

210In the prior year, the assembled theologians tell the Papists with whom they were to confer: none among them fosters erroneous opinions alien to the Confession, and they stand in consensus on the foundation.

211In the later year, after comparing reasons, they also agree on a Formula for the Sacred Supper (our author summarizes it at p. 335).

On this article, they say, our churches must teach according to the Augsburg Confession: in the Lord’s ordinance of the Sacred Supper, Christ is truly, vivifically, and substantially present.

With the bread and wine he has so ordained, he exhibits his body and blood for Christians to eat and drink, testifies that we are his members, gives himself with the promise of grace, and works efficaciously in us — as Hilary says: what is taken and drunk makes Christ to be in us and us in him.

212The words clearly speak of action or use — as Paul says expressly of use or action: the bread we break is the communion of the body of Christ.

That cannot mean bread outside the use; take it this way: this bread is the thing by which communion of Christ’s body is exhibited to us — and so speak the older writers and chief Fathers in the Church.

213Irenaeus says the Eucharist consists of two things, earthly and heavenly; Epiphanius and Theodoret clearly say the nature and substance remain, yet with the bread gifts are given — namely Christ’s body and blood.

Later new phrases came in: that the bread is changed, as Moses’ staff was changed into a serpent (Crocius on the Augsburg Confession, p. 204).

Stop before §. IV.

214§. IV. To the Frankfurt attempt, by the link of years, one may join the Heidelberg one.

Its authors were Electors Palatine Otto Henry and Frederick III, in the Palatinate in 1559 — pressing hard for Protestant Concord, and opposing the very turbulent Heshusius (so Schmidlin in Hospinian, Concordia Discordans ch. 46 near the end, new Geneva ed. p. ~409).

From Philip Melanchthon’s counsel they restore the Fathers’ ways of speaking about the Sacred Supper. That counsel, given about half a year before Melanchthon’s death, stands in the later part of his Theological Counsels and Judgments supplied to Elector Frederick III (p. 378ff).

215Some of Melanchthon’s words to the Elector are worth keeping: he approves the Elector’s counsel that both sides’ quarrelers be silenced, lest the tender church split and the weak nearby be troubled — and he wishes such quarrelers gone from either party.

Second, once the contentious are removed, the rest should agree on one Forma of words; best here is to keep Paul’s: the bread we break is the κοινωνία of the body — and to speak richly of the Supper’s fruit so people love this pledge and use it often, declaring what κοινωνία means.

Melanchthon inserts: the Son of God is present in the ministry of the Gospel and efficacious in believers — present not for the bread but for the man ("Abide in me…"; "I am in my Father, and you in me…"). By these consolations he makes us his members and promises to vivify our bodies.

216Yet some brand this true, simple fruit-doctrine as Cothurnos (inflated tragic boots) and demand a yes/no: is the body in the bread, or in the species of bread — as if the sacrament were instituted for the bread and that papistic adoration.

Then they invent how to shut it into the bread; some invent Conversion, others Transubstantiation, others Ubiquity.

All these portentous inventions are unknown to learned antiquity.

217Heshusius refuses assent to Origen, who calls bread and wine σύμβολα of body and blood; he calumniously rejects Clement of Alexandria.

The same verdict would fall on Augustine, Ambrose, Prosper, Dionysius, Tertullian, Bede, Basil, and Nazianzen (who speaks of an ἀντίτυπον body), and on Theodoret, who says of the bread φύσιν and μεταβαλών (pp. 379–380).

218Also worth remembering is a passage from Elector Frederick III’s Testament to his sons, taken from Johann Jacob Grynaeus and joined to his pious admonition on the duty of godly men who must live beside the cataract of anathemas against sound eucharistic teaching (pp. 47–49).

Third and above all, he warns his dearest sons to watch most carefully against turbulent ministers of churches and schools who, in religion and faith, spawn every kind of contention, word-fight, and deadly condemnation against pious churches and schools that still agree on the foundation and the chief heads of Christian religion and place their salvation with us in Christ alone.

From ambition and crooked zeal, under pretext of a ministry by which they claim the Spirit should convict the world, they introduce this without declared cause and not without scandal — trying, no less than in the cursed Papacy, to dominate magistrates’ and subjects’ consciences and raise a new primacy for themselves everywhere.

219From such turbulence follow not only political and church distraction and ulcerated minds — disturbance and ruin of both governments — but also an opening for the Pope and his retinue to persecute our true Christian religion with iron, flame, exile, and countless other punishments, and so to fix their tyranny.

How great and miserable the resulting divisions and calamities are, even our own age shows too many examples in Electors’ and other German princes’ lands, and among neighboring peoples.

Christian princes, churches, and schools should therefore take the lesson: guard hard against these turbulent enemies of public peace; do not let them seize posts, inflame parties, or tear people apart; avoid and flee them; and if no hope of amendment appears, remove them outright — as Frederick says he and other Electors and princes have more than once agreed for these and other pious, weighty reasons.

Yet nothing in that counsel should strip godly church ministers of due daily reproof and correction of vices, or of error-refutation drawn from God’s word with Christian moderation and equity — aimed at building up, not tearing down.

Stop before §. V.

220§. V. The last Consociation attempt at Protestant Concord in that first Reformation century was not in Germany but in Poland in 1570.

It is the most perfect of all — the Sendomir attempt, celebrated under the name Consensus Sendomiriensis.

221Of this Consensus we have not only prepared a new Latino-German edition, but in a special Prefatio set out nine clearest arguments for the perfection by which it leaves every other Protestant consensus many parasangs behind — and we have answered all the usual objections.

So there is no need to linger further either stating its cause or praising its excellence.

222Better to pray with whole heart that Protestants in our Germany, in the neighboring northern kingdoms, and throughout Europe — wherever either party’s Protestants are found — imitate so wholesome, clear-headed, and thoroughly Christian a deed and example.

223For the rest we rest in blessed Hornbeck’s judgment on this Consensus — and we will always make it ours — when he says: no better, more august, or more perfect Confession than this was ever made.

It was approved politically and ecclesiastically, and they confirmed it mutually by a most joyful and illustrious communion of the sacraments.

224From both sides they more than once acknowledge each other’s Confessions and churches as true.

We have agreed: just as the Augsburg Confession’s associates testify that we, our churches, and our Confession published in this synod of the Brethren are Orthodox — so the Bohemian Confession’s associates speak of themselves and of the Helvetic Confession’s associates — so also we will pursue their churches (the Augsburg associates’) with the same Christian love and confess them Orthodox (Hornbeck, Miscel. Sacr. Part 1, p. 703).

Stop before §. VI.

225§. VI. After the Reformation century come two most famous Consociation attempts at reconciling Protestants with one another.

One is the Leipzig attempt — Saxon, Brandenburg, and Hessian theologians, 1631; the other the Cassel attempt — Hessian collocutors alone (Marburg and Rinteln), 1661.

The prior (Leipzig) is marked out in three ways.

226(1) Right at the start the Reformed theologians did not hesitate to bind themselves to the Unaltered Augsburg Confession, and were fully ready to subscribe it whenever the other side asked — without rejecting or repudiating the Variata (Philippica), which they defended as the Imperial Estates had admitted it at the Nauenburg Convention in 1561.

Since this Leipzig Reformed act has been remembered before, it helps to bring in their own words from the German Relation of the Leipzig Colloquy.

There the Brandenburg and Hessian theologians voluntarily confessed with mouth and heart the 1530 Confession delivered to Charles V at Augsburg, and said they would subscribe it — even the Saxon Elector’s exemplar in the Augapfel — whenever and wherever asked, because they and their lords already bound themselves to it in church and school.

227(2.) At the colloquy’s end both sides signal why they met: to see how far they agree in the Augsburg Confession’s articles, and what hope remains of a closer union later — to enlarge Christ’s true church and quench the papists’ confidence drawn from Protestant division — while stipulating Christian love to one another in the meantime.

Their Relation words put it thus: the colloquy was meant first to learn, in summary, whether and how far both parties are one in the twenty-eight Augsburg articles, and whether further conferences of peace-loving theologians, with Christian high authority, might raise a nearer holding-together; and both sides’ theologians would show each other Christian love going forward, faithfully and without deceit.

228(3.) Finally, in the third year afterward the Imperial Estates gathered at Frankfurt am Main not only approved the Leipzig Colloquy, but — judging they would not be cheated of the Leipzig theologians’ hope — sanctioned by a special decree that Electors Saxony and Brandenburg be asked in the Estates’ public name to keep the Protestant peace business begun at Leipzig going through more moderate theologians’ work, and to bring it to a happy end.

Because few know that decree, we set it out here in the words printed in John Dury’s Prodromus Irenicorum, p. 1.

229Decree of the Evangelical Estates made at Frankfurt.

John Dury again laid before the Evangelical Estates’ convention (Circles present, and absent princes’ legates) the business of union and fraternal reconciliation among Evangelicals inside and outside the Empire on the fundamental heads of Christian evangelical religion — a matter floated before — and in a notable deputies’ sitting he was heard by all confederated Estates, citing many leading theologians and academies of either party in Germany, France, England, and Transylvania on how that Christian unity-aim might be reached.

The six Circles unanimously judged the work grateful to the God of peace, praiseworthy, most necessary, and useful to evangelical churches — yet also a heavy business for which many deputies present had no instructions. So the present legates and deputies undertook to report home faithfully the proposal and the theologians’ opinions shared with them.

230Some legates also offered friendly proposals: that the Circles forward at once a declaration on Dury’s proposed procedure and on a peaceable theologians’ colloquy — modeled on the Leipzig collation three years earlier among Saxon, Brandenburg, and Hessian-Cassel electoral theologians — and that the Electors invite foreign princes and kings by letters.

Others usefully proposed that, saving each Elector’s, prince’s, and Estate’s rights, Electors Saxony and Brandenburg be asked to continue that Leipzig-friendly collation and call a convention where other peaceable theologians of either party can sit or send judgments — aiming at a modest Christian consensus-confession on every salvation-foundation head, while parking scholastic fights on the rest.

Several also agreed that meanwhile both sides should use Christian moderation and mildness in teaching and writing, and that public prayers for the work be framed in both parties’ churches, committing the business to God Most High.

This recess was made in witness of that. Done at Frankfurt am Main, 14 September 1634.

Stop before §. VII (Cassellanum).

231§. VII. This century’s later Protestant-peace Consociation attempt — the Cassel one — claims three peculiarities of its own:

232(1.) It carefully weighed the force of the special disputed doctrines, marked consensus and dissent everywhere without varnish,

and only then gave a modest judgment on the weight of that consensus and dissent more than on bare truth — leaving both sides’ consciences unhurt.

233(2.) After everything was duly examined, it candidly and heartily judged that Evangelicals agree on the Foundation of Faith and Salvation:

the disputed questions touch that foundation less — and still less tear it up or overturn it;

234and lest either side next tear or damn the other for some leftover dissent, they judged it wise and agreed:

remaining controversies should not be handled from church pulpits — or if necessity plainly forced it, only with utmost modesty, naming no dissenters, using no harsh words, forging no consequences, declaring truth from Scripture alone;

and in schools and academies likewise with great moderation, without persecution, personal attacks, or name-pointing (Autor p. 330).

235(3.) Both colloquy sides vigorously and learnedly defended their charitable colloquy against detractors and every hater of Protestant peace, and won near-universal applause from foreign Protestants.

Even the Rinteln Epistola Apologetica — by that pair of high-judgment, many-sided theologians Peter Musaeus and John Hennichius — was translated into other languages.

Compare the Cassel Colloquy defenses of Maresius, Hornbeck, Heidegger, and others.

Stop before §. VIII (fruits of Lipsiacum and Cassellanum into the present age).

236§. VIII. The fruit of both those Consociation attempts — Leipzig and Cassel — was not small.

It reaches not only the age in which they were begun and finished a few years back, but even our present century, itself not long under way.

237For besides this: the better theologians on both sides grew used to thinking more mildly and kindly of one another and of their own parties, and by example led their hearers to do the same;

so they filled their magistrates more and more with love and desire for reconciling church peace.

238After the Leipzig Colloquy, Charles Louis of the Palatinate had a pacific project in hand — one our Author celebrates —

though Dannhauer’s virulent writings then overturned it (Autor p. 335).

239After Cassel, the many peace attempts of Frederick William the Great, Elector of Brandenburg — whom our Author (p. 341) rightly calls Germany’s Mars and upholder of liberty and religion — are even publicly known;

yet other theologians near the March, Dannhauer’s disciples or fellow-initiates, blocked them out of deadly hatred of the Reformed,

and all but blasphemously prayed God to fill them ever more with hatred of Calvinists — not knowing what they asked.

240So the same seems to have befallen that prince of immortal glory — famed no less for piety toward God and sincerity of heart than for warlike fortitude, a strenuous emulator of St. David on both sides — as befell that Hebrew:

David burned to build Jehovah a stone temple, yet was barred from the work for set causes, and the building passed to his son Solomon, for whom God had also destined it;

likewise the most glorious Achilles of the Marchers, kindled with zeal to advance day by day the Evangelical peace once sought at Leipzig with him as persuader and author,

even with tears attested as much to us when we humbly offered our little Dissertation on Ecclesiastical Peace (which by his special order was soon to be put into the vernacular and dedicated to his most serene consort Dorothea, worthy of so great a hero),

and was about, as often before, most kindly to open his then thoughts on that peace and press perpetual peace-zeal upon us with all his force —

yet God so disposing, for reasons known to the All-wise alone, he was drawn off from raising the sanctuary of Protestant peace,

and transmitted by inheritance to his son — our Solomon, everywhere pacific, now crowned by God with the royal diadem — both richer furniture collected for finishing that sanctuary and his own desire for peace.

241This is what we vow and pray from the heart for our Most Pious King:

that, with the Most High God of Peace blessing him, he may carry the building of Sacred Peace as happily as possible to its very summit — last year he again strove to lay its foundation, most kindly using our slight labor —

other kings and princes also helping as tireless promoters of kindly church peace, for God’s glory and the comfort and joy of all Evangelicals.

We judge the Royal Rescript in this business — given to his first bishop, the Most Reverend Lord Benjamin Ursinus, and turned from German into Latin — should be set before our reader here,

so anyone may judge the most sincere intention of our August King and his most fervent zeal to promote ecclesiastical peace.

Stop before the Rescript body (Nos Dei Gratia Fridericus Rex Borussiae…).

242It runs thus:

We, by God’s grace, Frederick King of Prussia, etc.

Our greeting and clemency!

Most Reverend Bishop, beloved and faithful.

243You know how, especially under Our reign, promoting peace among Evangelicals has been Our highest care —

and with God’s grace helping we have come so far that in the Kingdom and Our other subject provinces those public bitternesses, charges of heresy, and Protestants’ mutual condemnations are scarcely heard any longer from the pulpit.

So a sure hope shines on us that Our peace-counsels, God blessing them, will reach a happy end.

244But since Evangelicals of both sides have here and there put into print various counsels on closer union — or at least on mutual and greater tolerance —

and We, moved by such public writings and by everyone’s unanimous desire ahead of other princes, have been stirred to set hand to this salutary work of restoring peace,

We have most clemently resolved to erect in Our very capital a College of Theologians who love both peace and Our salutary intent, for God’s greater glory and the increase of Christ’s kingdom.

By these presents We name You Our Bishop its President.

245joining to You for now these Assessors:

Samuel Strimesius, Our man for sacred sermons and Ordinary Professor of Sacred Theology in Our Frankfurt Academy, and Daniel Jablonski;

also Francis Julius Lütkens, councillor of Our Consistory and Provost of Cölln; and Winkler, Archdeacon of the Magdeburg Basilica.

246Yours, then, as Bishop and President of this whole assembly, will be to make those Assessors sure of Our most clement will declared in this Rescript.

Meet and confer with them first inside private walls, without noise.

See that — by colloquies and by letters to foreign theologians — solid means are found by which the church peace all Evangelical Protestants long for may be procured and settled, if not elsewhere, at least in Our Kingdom, Electorate, and other lands.

247If You and Your Assessors judge foreign theologians should also be brought into this College and convention, invite them with fitting courtesy — yet only after Our prior most clement approval — and report to Us by word and writing all that is done among you.

And so that everything in this charitable College or convention may be recorded in better order, We join to you Our intimate secretary and librarian Frederick Henry Ursinus as Proto-Notary, and for this business most clemently free him from the ordinary library duty that binds him.

As we do not doubt this irenical work will please God and that Our royal Christian intent will share divine blessing, so we most clemently trust you all, from true zeal for truth and peace, will gladly take up this care and strain every nerve.

Then we may obtain Our most ardent vow — the long, anxiously desired peace among Evangelicals made firm.

248As for the rest, take security from Our royal clemency.

Issued at Cölln on the Spree, 25 March 1703.

Frederick, King.

The Count of Wartenberg addresses Lord Bishop Ursinus.

Directed to Benjamin Ursinus, our Most Reverend First Bishop, beloved and faithful.

Stop before Annotatio IV (Obices Consociationis Ecclesiasticae).

249ANNOTATION IV.

On the Obstacles to Ecclesiastical Consociation (Autor pp. 341–343).

250§. I. After so many frustrated attempts to compose church peace, the Author not without cause turns to the OBSTACLES set against such pious efforts (p. 341ff.).

He points only at the special ones, passing the more general sources in silence — yet it is worth at least summarizing those generals too, mainly so they may be more carefully guarded against.

251We divide them, first, into Externals — placed outside the person — and Internals — at home in the person.

252The external sort fall under the Devil’s varied instincts, tricks, and wicked arts — he being the first parent of lies, quarrels, and slanders.

We must neither exaggerate with the crowd that dumps nearly every misdeed on the Devil, nor, with the author of this fascinated world, exempt him from the community of human things and deeds.

253For the Holy Spirit Himself names the Devil father of dissensions no less than of slanders and of the murders that sprout from them (John 8:44).

He does not only gape after people like a roaring lion (1 Peter 5) and spur them to his works (James 4); God permitting by just judgment, he also works in the sons of unbelief and through them (Ephesians 2:2 with 5:6), and even entered a Judas, betrayer of Christ (John 13).

Moreover he stirs up, feeds, and pushes quarrels of that kind — so, from their first spring, they are rightly called diabolical (James 3:15) — sowing tares of lies and dissension in the wheat of truth and peace.

254So to anyone who asks who wrecked the peace attempts recounted above, you may aptly answer with Christ’s words:

the wicked one — our common enemy — did it (Matthew 13:28).

Stop before §. II (internal fountains: pravity of will and error of intellect).

255§. II. The later obstacles you may call other fountains — arising from two common vices in the first principles of human action, intellect and will: pravity and error.

From those fountains spring still more rivulets, greater in number.

256Of the two fountains, the first is the free-acting pravity of the will — which, under the covenant of grace no less than of works, runs ahead of intellect’s error.

For any divine covenant with man presupposes enough light in the mind to restrain or repel malicious will-pravity.

So whoever has gone on to needless sacred quarrels and church splits — even with the Devil prodding — should know he rushed in not unwillingly, nor merely by intellect’s mistake or the Devil’s talk, but by his own free choice and προαίρεσις.

Three larger rivulets from will-pravity, well marked by the Apostle John, promote that work of dissension; we list them here in reverse order:

257(1.) Pride of life — or ambition — which usually clings even to the sacred order (as in the Pharisees, Matt. 23:5–7).

It is most hostile to truth and peace (John 5:44; 7:18) and most fertile of quarrels (2 Tim. 3:1–3).

That common couplet on quarrelsome Arius makes the same point: ask why the heretic (schismatic) Arius became what he was — the ready answer is, he was ambitious.

258(2.) Lust of the eyes — meaning spiritual lusts of the soul; in a word, excessive curiosity in sacred things, born of ambition — against Romans 12:3: do not think beyond what you ought, but think unto sobriety.

For the puffed-up man languishes among questions (1 Tim. 6:3–5) that a bishop must flee (2 Tim. 2:23–24; Titus 3:9).

This breeds two evils most hostile to church peace: an extraordinary multiplication of theological dogmas, and an unhealthy doting on novelties.

259(3.) Lust of the flesh — craving carnal and worldly goods — plus the love-of-money the Apostle rebukes as the mark of Pharisees and false teachers (Luke 16:14).

It sticks close to self-love (φιλαυτία, 2 Tim. 3:2), which Peter insists Christian teachers must keep far from (1 Pet. 5:2).

260The second fountain is error of intellect — which anyone who loosens the reins to will-pravity is apt to fall into; conversely, whoever hates malice draws nearer the truth (Ps. 25:14; Matt. 5:8; John 7:17).

Error is born nearby from prejudices, passions in the saddle, warped schooling and teaching, the reading of slanderous books, and the like.

261It is finished either by grasping theological things badly and weakly and measuring them by earthly standards — with Nicodemus (John 3:12) and the Capernaites (John 6) —

or by twisting apparent contradictions into harmony outside Scripture: for example Christ’s two sayings in Matt. 26:11 and 28:20, reconciled by inventing a double body of Christ, visible and invisible, though the biblical distinction of Christ’s two natures (Paul, Rom. 1:3–4; 9:5; Peter, 1 Pet. 3:18; 4:1) does it far more easily.

Or by confusing what differs and not distinguishing enough — e.g. any theological truths whatever versus the fundamental and more necessary ones;

or by inferring clumsily — e.g. that God’s omnipotence is denied when his will and revelation in some dogmas are debated; or that a dissenter holds as sure everything rightly or wrongly drawn from his opinion; and so on.

Stop before §. III (further rivulets from either fountain, noted by our Author).

262§. III. From either fountain of these obstacles still other rivulets run down, drawing the same kind of water — ones our Author notes.

263From the first fountain: (1.) Stretch any error into heresy at will, or turn a lesser dissent into a fundamental one.

“Fundamental,” I mean, when the dissent is wholly feigned and so none at all, or only verbal, or at most about the mode of the thing.

264(2.) Labor under practical heresy — leave no room for charity’s judgment, and take everything dissenters say in the worst possible sense.

265From the second fountain: [1.] Swell with your own sense, and in good faith drip your novelties into others — to the hurt of the church and of church peace.

266(2.) Cling stubbornly to church adiaphora from long habit, even where sin is a real risk,

and even with open disobedience to the higher magistrate, under a zeal that is really owed to ignorance.

267Gather more from the Northern Olive-branch of Johannes Matthiae, Bishop of Strängnäs — berries four, six, seven, and eight.

Stop before Annotatio V (Limites Consociationis Ecclesiasticae).

268ANNOTATION V.

Concerning the bounds of church Consociation — Autor pages 347 through 352.

269§. I. Limits stand opposite Obstacles: limits are understood of right, obstacles of fact.

An unjust boundary acts like an obstacle; a just obstacle acts like a limit.

So here the limits of church consociation are not whatever happens to obtain in practice, but what by divine and church right can and ought to be set.

270Taken that way, limits are either Material — the things or articles of the Christian religion that justly bound church consociation and keep it inside those bounds —

or Formal — the limitation itself, the act of limiting in its various degrees.

271§. II. What sets just bounds for church consociation is not every Christian truth whatever, but the Fundamental dogmas of the Christian faith (described in Annotation 2).

That such fundamentals exist, distinct from less fundamental dogmas, has been shown elsewhere — by our Author’s Tract on Fundamentals (Disp. 1–2) and his Specimen against the Bishop of Condom (pp. 63–70), and by us in the Dissertation on Church Peace (ch. 7) and the Inquiry into the Arminians (Annot. 17) —

and all Protestants reckon the same way, even against the Roman party,

272who own no fundamentals in themselves — neither by immediate divine authority nor by their nature as founding the Christian faith —

but hang every dogma of the faith, great or small, as to truth, necessity, or fundamentality, on the authority of the Roman Church.

So what barely touches the Christian faith, or even runs against it, can still, through some Constance or papal council, become essential to that faith — even the greatest point.

273Thus someone who affirms with Paul that in the Eucharist the substance of bread and wine remains (1 Cor. 11:26–28) is treated no milder than if he had trampled the whole foundation of the Christian faith:

Trent, Session XIII, Canon II, launches a terrible anathema in these words — if anyone says the substance of bread and wine remains with Christ’s Body and Blood, and denies that marvelous conversion of the whole substance of bread into the Body and of wine into the Blood (species alone remaining), which the Catholic Church most aptly calls Transubstantiation, let him be anathema (pag. m. 130).

Stop before the proof that true divine Fundamentals make the limits — from Ephesians 4 (authoritative and ratiocinative).

274That the same true, divine Fundamentals set the limits of church Consociation is proved two ways — by authority and by reason.

275By authority: take Ephesians 4 as a standing commonplace for the point — covering the whole foundation, theoretical (vv. 1–17) and practical (v. 17 to the chapter’s end).

There the Apostle bids us keep the Spirit’s unity in the bond of peace (v. 3), and affirms one body and one Spirit — one spiritual body — where there is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, above all, through all, and in all (vv. 4–6).

276Yet afterward, and for what remains, grace is given to each — even in different measures — according to Christ’s gift (v. 7).

Some are set as apostles, others as prophets (v. 11), and that for the building up of Christ’s body (v. 12).

277The aim is that we all arrive at the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a full-grown man (v. 13) — not tossed by every wind of teaching (v. 14) —

meanwhile speaking truth in love, studying truth in charity (v. 15).

278By reason: those agreed on the fundamental — and so necessary and chief — dogmas of the Christian religion, though they still differ on lesser points, yet press on toward fuller unity in charity.

They are more one spiritual body than not.

Or, what comes to the same, they are more held in the Consociation of one Christian church than they are shut out of it — for we name a thing from its greater part.

279Just as people with a body and a rational soul still count as human and as members of one society — even when the soul’s force is weak and some bodily members are badly misshapen —

so those who keep the church’s essentials, theoretical and practical, should be counted sharers in the same church Consociation,

even while they wrestle with many errors and sins that do not overturn the Christian religion.

Stop before §. IV (consensus and Consociation judged from the same fundamental principle).

280§. IV. From that same principle of the Christian religion’s fundamental dogmas we must judge both Christians’ Consensus and their Consociation —

that is, both unity of mind (or Spirit) and unity of body (or Church).

281Otherwise there will never be any catholic Christian consensus, nor any Catholic Church joined by that consensus.

Then we would believe that Church in vain, and sing falsely: “All Christendom on earth holds quite evenly in one mind.”

282Unless those who today brandish the Orthodox name try — how ridiculously — to claim the Catholic Church’s title for themselves alone, or snatch it without thinking.

They cannot even be reconciled with the kinds among their own people, still less with each person in those kinds — not even with one individual, that is, with none of their own at one with himself —

once you allow for shifts of place, time, and other externals that greatly change internals.

283So, as in Annotation 2 above we rightly called consenters in the faith only those who agree in all Fundamentals, though they differ elsewhere,

here we hold that all who keep the same Fundamentals make up one and the same Christian Church.

284By that measure we count as exiles from church Consociation only those who fail in the Fundamentals —

theoretical failures such as the Socinians, or practical ones such as the Pontificians, who under anathemas bind any Christian conscience to their extra foundation,

against all Christian charity, which is most essential to the Christian religion.

285Conversely, Evangelical Protestants — Reformed and Lutheran — though they dissent in some points, are already held in the same Christian Church and joined by church Consociation because of fundamental consensus.

At least those who treat the modes of dissent in about three dogmas (both sides keeping the substance) as less essential and less fundamental — and who not only refuse but abhor damning dissenters on that account.

On Arminians strictly so called we long ago gave a like judgment (Inquiry into the Arminians, Annot. §. 1. 3).

Stop before §. V (Hannekenius on truth and charity at the end of the Preliminary Questions).

286§. V. So those remarks apply only where Fundamental Truth is understood and laid out.

Toward the end of the Preliminary Questions on the Theological Declaration for a true estimate of the Augsburg Confession, Hannekenius (cited above) treats the point this way:

287Wound Truth, and the mystical Body with its members cannot stay in sound union.

Charity — the very bond of that union — is violated the moment it loses the Truth from which it springs.

288Charity with injury to Truth is vain; Truth without the exercise of Charity is empty.

No one shows true charity without a solid profession of Truth.

Nor is anyone heard as a faithful confessor of saving doctrine who, having broken Charity, splits the Union.

289He points to a long run of 1 Corinthians (chs. 1–3, 8–10, 12–14, and 16:13–14).

The letter’s strongest closing cry is: anyone who does not love the Lord Jesus — the one true Salvation and saving Truth — is anathema, Maranatha.

290On that reading, salvation sits in knowing the Truth, and that knowledge teaches us to love Jesus.

Where the synaxis of union is already torn, that love cannot go deep.

291Charity without Truth is pestilent, and every church union that does not love Jesus in Truth is cursed (1 John 4:10–12ff., p. m. 39).

Compare our German tract: Short Sketch of the Unity of the Evangelical-Lutheran and Reformed, §. 4, pages 21–25.

Stop before §. VI (limits of Consociation considered formally — Tolerance vs perfect Union).

292§. VI. So far we have treated the limits of church Consociation on the material side.

Taken formally — as naming the act of drawing that limit — they show up in roughly two degrees.

293One degree reaches only as far as Tolerance.

That grade is rightly called partial Consociation.

294The other stretches out to perfect Union.

There it completes total ecclesiastical Consociation.

295I mark those two grades chiefly because common opinion mixes Political Tolerance with Ecclesiastical Tolerance.

That confusion is what makes the double ladder look sharp to the crowd.

296Otherwise, anyone to be tolerated in the church must already agree with the Foundation of the Faith and the Fundamentals of the Christian religion.