Confessional Texts

Justification is the point of division between the Reformation and Rome. The confessional texts supply the most precise formulations of each position and make the depth of the divergence visible.

Augsburg Confession, article IV (1530)

This is the first official Protestant formulation of justification presented before an imperial diet. Four elements are articulated: gratuity (ex gratia), by grace and not by merit; the christological ground (propter Christum), for Christ’s sake and not by any satisfaction of one’s own; the means (per fidem), through faith; and imputation, in the words “regard and reckon,” which carry the forensic character. The appeal to Romans 3 and 4 anchors the position exegetically.

Council of Trent, session VI, canon 9 (1547)

The canon is directed at Lutheran sola fide. It does not condemn justification by faith as such, but the exclusive role assigned to faith. Trent affirms the primacy of grace while maintaining the cooperation of the human will and the necessity of the sacraments. The Joint Declaration of 1999 held that these anathemas do not touch the doctrines now taught on either side, but it did not abrogate the canon itself.

The Church and the sacraments

Augsburg Confession, article VII (1530)

The definition is ecclesiologically decisive on three counts. It is functional rather than institutional, naming neither hierarchy nor apostolic succession among the marks of the Church. It distinguishes what unity requires, doctrinal agreement, from what it does not, ceremonial uniformity. And it implies, without stating, that the medieval church is not fully Church where the gospel is not purely preached.

Westminster Confession, chapter XXIX (1647)

Westminster holds the Calvinist position: a real but spiritual presence of Christ in the Supper, against Lutheran sacramental union on one side and Catholic transubstantiation on the other. It is the position that emerged from the failure of Marburg in 1529, where Luther and Zwingli could not agree and where Calvin later proposed a mediation: the presence is real, its mode spiritual rather than corporeal.

Scripture and ecclesiastical authority

Westminster Confession, chapter I §4-5 (1647)

Two major themes are joined here. The first is autopistia, the self-attestation of Scripture: its authority derives from God and not from the Church, which recognises the canon without constituting it. The second is the testimonium Spiritus Sancti internum, the inward testimony of the Spirit, as the ground of subjective certainty, a theme Calvin develops in Institutes I.7.4-5. The position stands apart both from Catholicism, where the Magisterium is the authorised interpreter, and from a subjectivist pietism in which experience alone would ground certainty.

Council of Trent, decree on the canonical Scriptures (1546)

The decree places Scripture and apostolic Tradition on the same footing of veneration, pari pietatis affectu ac reverentia. This is the explicit answer to sola Scriptura: not Scripture alone, but Scripture and Tradition together. The same decree declares Jerome’s Vulgate authentic, against the Protestant humanists who preferred the Greek and Hebrew originals.

Barmen (1934) and confession in the twentieth century

The Barmen Declaration, theses 1 to 3

Barmen is the most important confessional text of the twentieth century. Its force lies in the radical application of solus Christus to a concrete political situation. The first thesis excludes any revelation outside Scripture, whether race, people, history or the “orders of creation,” the favoured formula of the German Christians. It is sola Scriptura turned into a theology of resistance.

Barmen and the Confessing Church

The Declaration was adopted by the first Confessing Synod of the German Evangelical Church, meeting at Wuppertal-Barmen from 29 to 31 May 1934. It is the theological founding act of the Confessing Church in the face of National Socialist encroachment. Among its signatories were Martin Niemöller and Hans Asmussen, alongside Barth. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, engaged in the same struggle, paid for it with his life; he was executed at Flossenbürg on 9 April 1945.