Confessions of a Lutheran: Philip Melanchthon and the Theology and Politics of the Augsburg Confession
Benjamin Storm and Dr. Kyle Robinson
After the Protestant Reformation, German Lutherans had to learn how to interpret and approach civil authority that did not match their beliefs. The Holy Roman Empire, headed by the Catholic Habsburgs and inhabited by many states that still adhered to Rome, was fertile for potential violence between Lutheranism and Catholicism, and Lutheran leaders attempted to address the purpose and limitations of civil obedience. Martin Luther’s successor and mouthpiece, Philip Melanchthon presented a political philosophy within the Augsburg Confession that exhorted Lutherans to obey magistrates for personal survival and disobey when laws contradicted scriptural truths – a tolerance of mutual existence.
How can we study belief? What are the longer term implications of religious change in society? These connected questions form the core of our course and our investigation of Early Modern Europe (c. 1450-1789). Indeed, the meaning of belief was the central issue of contention in Europe from the dawn of the Renaissance until the twilight of the eighteenth century and its Revolutions.
The shattering of the Christian consensus and the rise of the empirical frame was a pathway cleared with the twin swords of Humanism’s cry of ad fontes and Luther’s injunction of sola fide. The route uncovered was a journey to the “Modern” in all its beauty and ugliness. Yet, stones lay upon this trail, rocky reminders whose pain and obstacle convey the irony that Europe’s greatest religious revolution resulted in the ultimate secularization of the continent and of the West in general. Still, secularization, caught as it is in a dialectic with Christianity, is a form of belief, and belief remains central.
The effort to experience, define, and understand both acceptable and unacceptable beliefs will be our compass to map Europe’s Early Modern world, the world of unfolding Reformations. This course will consist of primary and secondary readings, lecture, classroom discussion, as well as multiple student writing assignments culminating in a final research based student podcast.
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