The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

to speak of the three General Creeds to which the Lutheran Church pays
higher reverence than to the Augsburg Confession itself, many of the
Lutheran Churches before the preparation of the Book of Concord, had
their Bodies of Doctrine, as bulky as the collection which has been so
much decried for its vast extent, and sometimes more bulky. There lies
before the writer, for example, the first of these, the Corpus Doctrinae, the
Symbolical Books of Saxony and Misnia, printed in 1560, edited by
Melanchthon, which, in addition to the General Creeds and the Augsburg
Confession, has the Apology, and four other extensive statements of
doctrine, forming a folio of more than a thousand pages. Every one of the
seven ponderous Corpora Doctrine has additions to the Augsburg
Confession, as, for example, the Apology, both the Catechisms of Luther,
and the Schmalcald Articles, in fact, everything now in the Book of
Concord which had appeared up to the time of their issue. The Church
Orders and Liturgies of the Sixteenth Century embraced Creeds. We have
examined nearly all of them in the originals, or in Richter's. Collection.
We have not noticed one which has the Augsburg Confession alone.
The Book of Concord repressed the multiplication of Creeds.
It is an historical fact easily demonstrated, that the Book of Concord
diminished both the number of doctrinal statements and the bulk of the
books containing them, in the various Lutheran Churches. It not only
removed the Corpora Doctrinae, but the yet more objectionable multiplied
Confessions prepared by various local Reformers, and pastors, of which
not only lands, but cities and towns had their own. So far from the Book of
Concord introducing the idea of addition to the Augsburg Confession, it,
in fact, put that idea under the wisest restrictions. But, not to dwell on this
point further, it is certain that the Lutheran Church, with a positive, almost
absolute unanimity, decided, both before and after the Book of Concord,
that it is desirable to have more than the Augsburg Confession as a
statement of doctrine.
The Lutheran Church in America is no exception to this rule. Her
founders confessed to the whole body of the Symbols. The General Synod
recognizes, in addition to the Augsburg