Philip Melanchthon drafted the Augsburg Confession in the spring of 1530 as Emperor Charles V summoned the German princes to Augsburg to settle the religious division that had opened since Luther's protest thirteen years earlier. Melanchthon worked from the Schwabach and Torgau articles that Luther and his colleagues had already prepared, softening some of the language in the hope of a settlement the emperor might accept, while Luther himself stayed away, still under imperial ban and confined at the Coburg fortress reading drafts sent to him by courier.
The confession that resulted has two parts. Twenty one articles state the doctrine the reforming territories held in common with the ancient church, on God, original sin, the person of Christ, justification by faith and the church, phrased to show continuity rather than novelty wherever the drafters honestly could. Seven further articles defend specific changes already made in practice, communion in both kinds, clerical marriage, the abolition of private masses and monastic vows, arguing that each corrected an abuse rather than broke with catholic order.
Read publicly in German before the emperor on 25 June 1530, it satisfied neither the Catholic theologians who answered it with a Confutation nor the more radical reformers who thought it conceded too much, but it became the founding document of a distinct confessional church rather than the reconciling statement Melanchthon had hoped to produce.