Part I Protheoria: Who rejected the Formula of Concord — Ludwig's five charges; Ursinus

It 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.