The Wittenberg Concord: Creating Space for Dialogue

By Gordon A. Jensen

Rethinking the Wittenberg Concord for Today

One of the mostly forgotten gems of the sixteenth century Reformations is the Wittenberg Concord. Signed in 1536 by representatives of evangelical southern German imperial cities and territories and the Lutherans, the dialogue that led to the concord provided space for the participants to have a meaningful dialogue that led to the recognition of each other's understanding of the sacraments as orthodox. This was remarkable, given the very public failures at Marburg in 1529 and Augsburg in 1530. The lack of agreement threatened the unity of the evangelical estates and made them, along with the Reformation teachings, vulnerable to attack by the Holy Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic Church.

The dialogue participants created enough space in their own understandings of the sacraments of baptism, absolution, and the Lord's Supper to allow the agreement to occur--and function reasonably well, at least until the beginning of the Thirty Years War in 1618.

The final two chapters explore how this concord has impacted the church since its acceptance, and how the lessons learned from this dialogue can assist churches today in providing healthy spaces for ecumenical dialogue to discuss controversial issues.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781506448770

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Introduction

The churches that developed out of the Reformation movements of the sixteenth century have a self-created public-relations problem. A common preconception of these Reformations is that their leaders were not interested in unity or ecumenism. After all, the Reformations irreparably fractured the unity of the church. Echoing a common sentiment, Carlos Eire observed that the fragmentation of Christianity was the most immediate and long-lasting effect of the Reformations.[1] There is justification for this claim. The reforming agendas of Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, Ulrich Zwingli, Andreas von Karlstadt, Johannes Oecolampadius, Martin Bucer, John Calvin, and countless other Reformers tore apart the Roman, or Western, church so badly that the Christian church is still dealing with this fracture today. To add fuel to the fire, even today, whenever differences in doctrine appear in those churches tracing their lineage back to the Reformations, the default solution is to split away from their church of origin and start a new church. The actions are justified by pointing to the Reformers themselves. Because of doctrinal and pragmatic differences, they, like the Reformers, leave their church of origin and start others more to their liking.

The Reformations’ role in the fragmentation of Christianity—at least the Western part of the church—is undisputed. It has damaged the credibility of the church, along with its witness to the world, in a society where authorities and institutions are increasingly questioned and challenged. The prayer of Jesus, that all may be one (John 17:11), appeared forgotten in the sixteenth century as Reformers split from the Roman church and from each other. The efforts of the ecumenical movement arising out of the International Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1910,[2] have sought to heal these divisions and heed the prayer of Jesus. It is not an easy road, however. Every statement and every dialogue have critics and supporters, whose reaction to the official statements or results of formal dialogue are most often based on their perceptions of how accurately the agreements mirror the words and phrases used in their own tradition. It is not surprising, then, that stereotypes and long-festering preconceptions of others in the Christian family, accumulating over hundreds of years, have hindered the work of formal ecumenical dialogues and informal conversations among confessional bodies. The image of the evangelical Reformers leading their followers out of the church to form new churches—often because of disagreements over the Lord’s Supper—haunts the ecumenical movement today. The sacraments are still one of the main stumbling blocks to agreement. The failure to heal these divisions in the sixteenth century, notably at Marburg in 1529 and Regensburg in 1541, has cast a shadow over ecumenical relationships.

As one rereads the history of the Reformations in the sixteenth century, however, it becomes obvious that, contrary to the perceptions, the Reformers were concerned about the unity of the church. It was inconceivable for them to imagine either a divided church or a society that would accommodate different confessional positions. The magisterial Reformers, including Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli, and Calvin, were committed to reforming the church rather than starting a new one.[3] Their opponents did not see it that way, however. Cardinal Cajetan had warned Luther, as early as the fall of 1518, that the Wittenberg professor’s views on justifying faith amounted to creating a new church that was not really a church but a heretical institution. In the following year, Johannes Eck reminded Luther that by accepting Jan Huss’s views, Luther was supporting another, heretical church, that was, in fact, not the church at all.[4] While one could have made the same claim about the split between the Western, or Latin, church and the Eastern, or Orthodox, church in 1054 CE, such details were conveniently overlooked.

Many of the Reformers rejected the accusations leveled against them by Cajetan, Eck, and others. By making a distinction between the institutional church (the Roman church) and the gathered community, led by the spirit to proclaim the Gospel and distribute the treasures of Christ to a world in need, they claimed that it was the Romans who had abandoned the true church, not themselves.[5] A church other than the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church, as confessed in the creeds, was unthinkable to the Reformers. However, in faithfulness to the gospel and the gathered community of believers, the Reformers felt that circumstances forced them to temporarily organize as church movements within the church catholic—until the Roman church was reformed and renewed in a way that allowed the unfettered proclamation of the gospel. It was more a reformation of the gospel than a reformation of the church. The latter followed as a consequence of the former.

The claim that the Reformers had no interest in the unity of the church, or in bringing about reconciliation in the one true church, is false. The Reformers also sought, on multiple occasions, to bring about a unity, or common front, among the reforming movements. The Marburg Colloquy, held at the beginning of October 1529, achieved agreement on fourteen-and-one-half out of fifteen points. It could not agree on one section of the statement on the Lord’s Supper. That was the only point of disagreement in the negotiations at Marburg. Yet since then, the Marburg Colloquy has been considered a failure because of that one point of disagreement. The 1527 Schleitheim Confession of Faith was another show of unity among the newly developing Anabaptist movements.[6] This Confession reveals points of agreement among those who sought to be the church set apart from the world, even if it was opposed to the institutional church represented by the Roman church. Its importance in defining later Anabaptism cannot be underestimated, despite the disregard for its call for pacifism by the militant Reformers in Münster a few years later. The Regensburg Colloquy of 1541, an attempted consensus between the Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and South Germans, also achieved a large measure of consensus among the participants, particularly on the doctrine of justification.[7] Politics, as much as theological divergences and a great deal of mistrust among the confessional bodies, however, meant that the Regensburg articles were put aside in favor of using military options to settle the divisions in the Holy Roman Empire. The Schmalkaldic War of 1546–47 was a much more convenient way to solve the fragmentation caused by the Reformations.

* * *

One series of negotiations among the Protestant, or evangelical, theologians in the sixteenth century did lead to a favorable conclusion, however—the 1536 Wittenberg Concord.[8] Following the failed attempts at consensus at Marburg and the 1530 Diet of Augsburg, the possibility of reaching an agreement on the sacraments in general and the Lord’s Supper in particular seemed remote. The repeated call for consensus on these matters by the members of the Schmalkald League, formed by members of the evangelical estates, following the Diet of Augsburg in 1530, gave a measure of political support to the attempts at reaching concord. But political support alone was not enough to ensure a concord. Reaching a consensus was, in large part, made possible because of the commitment of theologians like Bucer and Melanchthon. Their commitment to reaching a consensus was spurred on by their ecclesiological understanding of the one true church.

One of the distinct features of the Wittenberg Concord was that confessional documents played a significant role in shaping the wording of the agreement. While it was signed by theologians representing the Lutherans and South Germans (who would eventually become a part of the Reformed confession) in Wittenberg in May of 1536, the Wittenberg Concord built upon the confessional documents of previous years. Most notable and most important among these confessional documents was the Augsburg Confession, the statement of faith presented in June of 1530 before Emperor Charles V. Melanchthon’s 1531 Apology of the Augsburg Confession also played a major role in imparting Lutheran content to the Concord, most notably in article 10, dealing with the Lord’s Supper. The South Germans relied on the 1530 Tetrapolitan Confession, the 1534 Constance Articles, the 1535 Augsburg Articles, and the 1536 First Helvetic Confession as their public confessions of the faith. In addition, the Marburg Colloquy Articles gave shape to the Concord, not just in terms of the positions taken regarding the sacraments, but by eliminating the need for the negotiators to discuss matters already agreed upon in Marburg. Thus, the Wittenberg Concord was as much a confession of the broader reforming, evangelical church as it was a theological statement by individuals. The corporate nature of the Wittenberg Concord was further emphasized by the expectation and requirement that the Concord be approved by the various participating territories and cities after the document had been approved in principle.

The Wittenberg Concord was also not meant as a stand-alone document. The Lutherans understood it as a further explication of the Augsburg Confession, rather than as its replacement. Likewise, the South Germans saw in the Wittenberg Concord a further clarification of the Augsburg Confession, allowing them to subscribe, with integrity, to the Augsburg Confession—one of the requirements for membership in the Schmalkald League, following their December 1535 meetings. This sixteenth-century mindset that considered theological agreement a necessary basis for political alliances seems foreign to contemporary thought, but it was integral to the success of the Reformations. The South German theologians also considered the Wittenberg Concord to be a document that provided room for them to emphasize their particular concerns over the sacraments and to state these concerns and beliefs in ways that were more comfortable to them. In retrospect, the Concord was one of the first documents that accepted the notion of differentiated consensus, later made popular by the 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, an agreement between the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation.[9] It allowed room for the participants to interpret commonly agreed-upon statements in different ways, thus giving some flexibility to the document. The framers of the Wittenberg Concord created space for dialogue, and this space made it possible for the participants to reach a mutually satisfying agreement. There was a caveat, however, for the Lutherans would not move away from their conviction that above all, the sacraments were a means of grace, and to bestow that grace, forgiveness, and comfort to troubled souls, Christ needed to be present, distributing these gifts in person. Only within these parameters was there space for dialogue.

Creating the space necessary for constructive dialogue, along with experimenting with ways to create sustained dialogue, is essential for both individual theologians and confessional bodies. This is one of the strengths of the Wittenberg Concord. But the Concord also succeeded because it chose to say less, rather than more, about controversial and divisive doctrines. The Concord did not require agreement on all of the theological doctrines being reevaluated by the Reformers in the sixteenth century. Nor did its negotiators insist that every facet of a particular doctrine be explicitly stated and agreed upon. Rather, the negotiators picked the most contentious challenges facing them concerning the sacraments and addressed only those issues. These two principles practiced by the negotiators of the Wittenberg Concord can be instructive for formal ecumenical dialogues today. The ecumenical agreements that have been reached, including full Communion agreements, have followed those principles that were used in successfully negotiating the Wittenberg Concord, long before the concept of modern ecumenism developed.

The approach taken by the drafters of the Wittenberg Concord also had its flaws, leading some to see the Concord not as a model to be emulated but as an approach to be avoided. One could argue that it was because all the identified and potential divergences were not explicitly and precisely addressed by the negotiators that the Wittenberg Concord ultimately failed. Consequently, the drafters of the 1577 Formula of Concord had to address these weaknesses directly in order to salvage the Wittenberg Concord, at least from the Lutheran perspective.

A careful study of the Wittenberg Concord can be helpful for those involved in ecumenical, theological dialogue today. How the Concord might be a helpful model for ecumenical dialogue, however, may vary. Some will want to study the Wittenberg Concord because it is a model for creating space for dialogue. Others will want to use it as an example of a flawed model that illustrates what happens when every aspect of a disputed doctrine is not identified and agreed upon before concord is recognized. Examining the purpose for the Concord, the context in which it was written, and the way in which theological issues were addressed is crucial in evaluating this proto-ecumenical document from the sixteenth century. Rather than immediately jumping into an examination of the document itself, the first section of this study will begin by looking at a very basic question: why was a theological agreement so important to the rulers of the evangelical estates and cities (those adopting the Reformation’s focus on the gospel)? It was this perceived need for a theological agreement that drove the quest for reaching an agreement on the sacraments among the Reformers. The initial attempts for consensus failed in the last half of the 1520s, as illustrated by the very public tract wars, the frustrations of the Marburg Colloquy, and the difficulties  encountered  by  the  evangelical  estates  in  presenting  a common front at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530. A study of these failures makes it easier to appreciate what it took to turn things around. But the tide slowly changed, and a renewed effort at reaching consensus—albeit under some political pressure—developed in the early 1530s, making room for dialogues to take place, largely under the impetus of the Strasbourg Reformer Martin Bucer. The Kassel negotiations at the end of December 1534 involving Bucer and Melanchthon also need to be studied to show how these conversations moved the negotiations to a new level, making it possible to finally reach an agreement mutually acceptable to all.

The second section of this study explores the Wittenberg Concord itself, looking in detail at the agreements reached on the Lord’s Supper, baptism, and confession/absolution and how each side in the negotiations understood the wording of the agreement. The influence of various confessional statements by evangelical groups is also noted. The Concord was not created from a blank slate. This second section also looks at the one matter, the role and rights of civil authorities over ecclesial properties in their territories, in which the negotiators could not reach agreement. As much as the civil authorities had hoped for such an agreement at Wittenberg, consensus on the rights of the rulers was not reached until a few years later. Rather than scuttle the Wittenberg Concord over the failure to reach agreement on the boundaries of civil authority, however, the negotiators signed an agreement on the sacraments and moved on.

Every negotiated agreement has its critics and its supporters. Otherwise, negotiations would not be needed. The final section of this study examines how the Wittenberg Concord was received in the immediate aftermath of the negotiations and how it has been received over the long term. The Wittenberg Concord, even though it has been largely confined to the perimeters of Reformation studies, has had a remarkable resiliency. It has influenced confessional documents and ecumenical agreements. Much of its resiliency and influence can be traced to its connection to the official confessional documents of the church. But on a deeper level, the Wittenberg Concord has continued to influence later generations of theologians and church bodies because it provided room for the unfettered proclamation of the gospel. Its negotiators did not get caught in the trap of trying to use words and phrases to impose a legal authority on the gospel-freeing power of the sacraments. Rather, the Concord’s focus on the gospel gave the participants room for dialogue over how to best proclaim the gospel to a people and society caught in the fragmentation of theological, political, and sociological movements that were sweeping through the land and creating confusion, doubt, and fear. The Reformers who sat down in Wittenberg to draft a concord did so to provide the comfort and promise of the gospel, as proclaimed in the sacraments. That commitment to proclaiming the gospel, for the sake of all creation, is always an excellent rationale for engaging in ecumenical dialogue—then, as well as today.

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Carlos M. N. Eire, Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450–1650 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), ix, 741–57. ↵

Tim Dowley, ed., Introduction to the History of Christianity, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2018), 605–6. ↵

For more on this discussion, see Carl E. Braaten, That All May Believe: A Theology of the Gospel and the Mission of the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 4–5. ↵

Gordon A. Jensen, The Gospel: Luther’s Linchpin for Catholicity, Concordia Journal 39, no. 4 (Fall 2013): 282–95. ↵

The true treasure of the church is the most holy Gospel of the glory and grace of God. Ninety-Five Theses, or Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences (1517), in Luther’s Works, ed. Helmut Lehmann, Jaroslav Pelikan, and Christopher Boyd, 82 vols. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press; St. Louis: Concordia, 1958–), 31:31 (series hereafter cited LW); see also Martin Luther, D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Schriften, 73 vols. (Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1883–2009), 1:236.22‒23 (series hereafter cited WA). In his Summer Postil, Epistle for the Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity (1544), Luther also states, If we have the genuine Gospel, then we have the treasure which God gives to His Church, so that we cannot lack anything. LW 79:169; WA 22:309.19‒21. ↵

Michael Sattler, The Schleitheim Confession of Faith, in The Protestant Reformation: Major Documents, ed. Lewis W. Spitz (St. Louis: Concordia, 1997), 89‒96. ↵

Suzanne Hequet, The 1541 Colloquy at Regensburg: In Pursuit of Church Unity (Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2009). ↵

For a brief overview of the main issues of the Wittenberg Concord and its immediate impact, see Jensen, Wittenberg Concord, 150‒71. ↵

The term arises out of paragraphs 14 and 40 of the document. Paragraph 14 states, in part, "This common listening, together with the theological conversations of recent years, has led to a shared understanding of justification. This encompasses a consensus in the basic truths; the differing explications in particular statements are compatible with it" (emphasis added). Lutheran World Federation and the Roman Catholic Church, Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 15. ↵

1

The Quest for an Evangelical Political Alliance

In contemporary multicultural and religiously diverse Western society, it is hard to fathom that political alliances would require religious concord to succeed. Western culture in the first decades of the twenty-first century sees the prayer of Jesus in John 17, that all may be one, as a prayer for a spiritual unity, with no relevance for civil society. Nor does contemporary Western society understand a worldview that insists upon a single faith expression in any one region of the world. Those regions of the world where religious sects impose monolithic religious visions of theocratic societies are treated with distrust and even disdain. The idea of freedom of religion is enshrined in our minds, if not our constitutions. The unity of the church has nothing to do with civil authority. There is an expectation that there will be a clear distinction, if not separation, of church and state.

In late medieval Europe, however—in a society where there was only one dominant religion in any one territory, whether it be Islam, Judaism, or Christianity—it was inconceivable that the fabric of a community could remain intact if there was religious diversity. Even different variations of Christianity in the same community were seen as a threat to that community. Unfortunately, the enforcement of religious unity often led to heresy trials and pogroms, whose purpose was to eliminate the minority ethnic or religious groups from a community (most often Jews and Muslims), all for the sake of religious homogeneity.

In the last half of the sixteenth century, the quest for religious uniformity in any one territory became described by the phrase, the religion of the ruler is the religion of the people (cuius regio, eius religio). While this phrase was made popular in the 1555 Peace of Augsburg and the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, it is not a sixteenth-century concept.[1] Its principles have long been exercised in history. When the Israelites went into Babylon under captivity, it was assumed that they would adopt the god of their conquering rulers. In ancient Rome, it was understood that the state religion must be the religion of the people, a theory that was challenged by the development of Christianity. Yet, when Christianity became the state religion after Constantine, the Justinian law codes soon made it clear that heresies were crimes against the state because they affected the common welfare of the people.[2] Thus, in the early years of the missionaries in continental Europe, baptisms were social and community events where the whole community would be baptized into the Christian faith as soon as the local or territorial ruler was baptized. Under Charlemagne, this practice was expanded, with the king considering himself responsible for Christianizing his domain. In these cases, the change to Christianity was essentially a matter of royal policy.[3] The protection of the community overruled the freedoms of an individual.

One of the most important benefits of this practice was that it prevented the social fabric of the community from being torn apart by religious differences. On the other hand, it meant that many people were baptized into a faith about which they knew absolutely nothing, leading to Charlemagne’s insistence that every cathedral have a theologian in residence so that those who were baptized—often by force by Charlemagne’s own armies—could be taught the faith.[4] The inculcation of the common faith, however, was seen as a basic requirement for any territory.

Justifying an Evangelical Alliance

At the Second Diet of Speyer (1529), six rulers and fourteen imperial cities of the Holy Roman Empire formally filed a protest over the decision that the edict of Worms, which had decreed that Luther and his followers were outlaws, be properly enforced.[5] The protesting rulers immediately filed a minority report and began the process of launching an official appeal to the emperor.[6] However, on July 12 of that same year, the emperor, who was in Barcelona at the time in order to finalize a peace treaty with Pope Clement VII, responded by demanding that the protesting estates withdraw their official Appeal and Protest.[7] The protesting estates refused to do so, and so in mid-October of 1529, the emperor arrested the delegation that had been sent to give him the official Protest and Appeal of the Protestants.[8] In the face of this animosity, the rulers of the evangelical territories were propelled into a crisis that had to be dealt with immediately in order to survive. Knowing full well that their appeal process would languish in the courts for some time, however, the evangelical estate rulers took two proactive actions. First, in the immediate short term, they recognized that an evangelical defensive alliance had to be forged. This would require that they agree on a common understanding of the evangelical faith, something that seemed unlikely, given the animosity over the sacrament of the altar that had developed between the Swiss and Wittenberg theologians in the previous four years. They would also have to convince their theologians that resistance to the emperor was a valid, legal action. Second, in the long term, they realized that they had to become an institutional and territorial church, since their proposed reforms were not accepted by the Roman church. However, these attempts to form a territorial church that would stand up against the emperor on theological and legal grounds, especially when the Reformers could not agree on the essentials of the evangelical faith, were often met with resistance from the Reformers, including from Martin Luther.

In the early 1520s, Luther had taken the position that there were two distinct spheres—the spiritual and temporal realms[9]—and that the temporal rulers were, like all the baptized, a part of the common priesthood as individuals, but their office did not give them the authority to interfere in affairs of the church. Thus, when it was suggested that he stay under the elector’s protection at the Wartburg castle in 1522, Luther writes, if I thought that Your Electoral Grace could and would protect me, I should not go [back to Wittenberg]. The sword ought not and cannot help a matter of this kind. God alone must do it—and without the solicitude and co-operation of men.[10] Luther, perhaps somewhat naïvely, felt that the preaching of the word would bring about reform simply by the power of the word and apart from the interference of civil authorities.

In the last half of the 1520s, however, Luther slowly came to recognize that the office of territorial ruler gave a prince or ruler the right to carry out reform as a part of their public mandate, and it also gave them a right to impose a common faith in their territory. Luther’s later position was based on a Saxon treaty of partition of 1484 and later ratified at the First Diet of Speyer of 1526.[11] In a letter Luther writes to Duke John, elector of Saxony, dated February 9, 1526, he states that

it is the task of a secular ruler not to tolerate that obstinate preachers cause division and discord among his subjects; one has to worry that from this situation might finally come rebellion and mob-actions. Rather, in one place [in the sense of one territory or city and its surrounding area] there should be uniform preaching.[12]

Luther insists here that the crucial point is that in the interest of public peace and order, only one doctrine can be preached in any one community.[13] This necessitated, in the minds of many of the theologians, an increasingly well-defined and government-imposed orthodoxy of faith and practice.[14] Thus, as the controversy over the Lord’s Supper was at its apex, Luther made some telling comments about John 17:11. When Jesus prays that all may be one (ut sint unam), Luther insists that this unity that Jesus expects and prays for is a unity in substance (una res), which cannot happen with sectarians and heretics.[15] A few years later, in his commentary on Psalm 82:6 of 1530, Luther makes the argument that since the princes are responsible for creating a society that increases God’s kingdom, and not just ensuring peace and unity in the territory, it is acceptable for a defensive alliance to be established. James Estes comments:

Long convinced that public blasphemy was a crime and that religious divisions threaten the peace and stability of a community, Luther now saw as well the need of governmental protection for the legitimately called and regularly appointed pastors of the struggling new churches in Saxony and elsewhere against the Anabaptist corner preachers (Winkelprediger) and other troublemakers.[16]

Luther had come to the conclusion that for the Reformation to succeed, there needed to be territories where the theological principles of the Reformers could be established without harassment by a hostile state. It was not enough to simply provide a safe haven for the magisterial Reformers to preach and teach as the evangelical churches were established. False teachings, heresies, and legalistic impositions not found in Scripture had to be purged from the territory so that the gospel—at least as Luther defined it—could be taught purely and take root in the lives of people and communities. There was much work to be done in the fledgling reform movement, as the visitations in Saxony and elsewhere had revealed. Catechisms and other teaching aids were of course important in this task, in the spiritual realm, to inculcate piety, but social and political support were also needed. Without unity in the community and the development of what would later evolve into territorial or state churches, Luther feared that the devil would win and all would be lost.[17]

The authorities of the evangelical estates were also hindered by a delicate legal and theological question: did they have the right to oppose the emperor? It was a question that they directed their lawyers and theologians to explore. Biblically, they had to deal with Saint Paul’s injunction to honor the civil authorities, whose authority had been instituted by God (Rom 13:1–7). On the other hand, if authorities (in this case, the emperor) opposed the proclamation of the gospel, the Bible also insisted that