The Apostle Peter exhorts us: “Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, being alwas ready to respond to everyone who asks you the reason of your hope” (1 Pet. 3:15). This is what the Lutheran Church tries to do with her confessions.

The Lutheran Confessions could be considered as a standard, around which the Lutherans gather in their common defense of the teachings of Scripture and against error; or they can be considered as a flag to which the teachers of the church swear their allegiance. Each member of the Lutheran Church should subscribe to the Bible, but also the Confessions as a correct explanation of the biblical teachings. For the laity, this means at least Luther’s Small Catechism; for the pastor and the professor this means all the confessions adopted by the Lutheran Church.

In their constitutions, Lutheran groups—congregations as well as synods—generally define their doctrinal position more or less along the following lines: “We confess that that canonical books of the Old and New Testaments are the inspired Word of God and, for that reason, the only rule of faith and life and that the Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church are a correct exposition of the teachings of this Word.” Why this strong insistence on the faithfulness to Sacred Scriptures and to the Biblical teaching as summarized in the Lutheran Confessions? Because for true Lutherans nothing is more important than true words.

On the basis of the proceeding, the term “church” should ever be used to define a religious group that des not belong to the Body of Christ (Eph. 1:22-23). A religious group that denies the divinity of Christ, such as the Unitarians, Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses do, should not be called “church".

Luther wrote in the Smalcald Articles: “Thanks be to God, (today) a child of seven years old knows what the church is, namely, he holy believers and sheep that hear the voice of their Shepherd” (Part III, Art. XII, cf. Book of Concord). In his Large Catechism, he presents the classic definition: “I believe that there is upon earth a little holy group and congregation of pure saints, under one head, even Christ, called together by the Holy Ghost in one faith, one mind, and understanding, with manifold gifts, yet agreeing in love, without sects or schisms. I am also a part and member of the same, a sharer and joint owner of all the goods it possesses, brought to it and incorporated into it by the Holy Ghost by having heard and continuing to hear the Word of God, which is the beginning of entering it. For formerly, before we had attained to this, we were altogether of the devil, knowing nothing of God and of Christ. Thus, until the last day, the Holy Ghost abides with the holy congregation or Christendom, by means of which He fetches us to Christ and which He employs to teach and preach to us the Word, whereby He works and promotes sanctification, causing it [this community] daily to grow and become strong in the faith and its fruits which He produces.” (Creed, Article III, Book of Concord)

The Augsburg Confession

The Augsburg Confession is a notable document which Phillip Melanchthon wrote and which was presented as a Lutheran witness to the Emperor Charles V and to the Diet of the Holy Roman Empire on June 25 of 1530. It consists of 28 articles. Of these the first 21 present the Lutheran teaching and summarize the teachings of Luther. They show that Lutherans were not teaching new things contrary to the Holy Scriptures and that they are not a new religious sect. Articles 21-28 concern the medieval abuses which the Lutherans corrected.

The reading of the Confession left a profound impression, not only on the Lutherans but even on many of their opponents. The bishop Stadion of Augsburg affirmed: “What was read is pure truth and we cannot deny it.” When John Eck, one of the most active opponents of Luther, said to Duke William of Bavaria that he could refute the Augsburg Confession with the fathers of the Church but not with the Holy Scriptures, William retorted: “So then, I understand that the Lutherans are with the Scriptures and we, who follows the Pope, are without them.” 

The Ecumenical Creeds

In response to the accusation that the Lutheran Church had departed from the ancient faith of the Christian Church and that, for this reason, it was a new sect, the Lutheran fathers officially declared their total agreement with the ecumenical creeds. In the preface of the Formula of Concord, they declared: “And because directly after the times of the apostles, and even while they were still living, false teachers and heretics arose, and symbols, i. e., brief, succinct [categorical] confessions, were composed against them in the early Church, which were regarded as the unanimous, universal Christian faith and confession of the orthodox and true Church, namely, the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed, we pledge ourselves to them, and hereby reject all heresies and dogmas which, contrary to them, have been introduced into the Church of God.”