The Unaltered Text and Its Descendants

The 1530 wording, soon called the Invariata to distinguish it from Melanchthon's own later revisions, became the confessional standard to which Lutheran ordination candidates and church constitutions still subscribe, printed at the head of the Book of Concord that Lutheran territories assembled in 1580 to close a generation of internal doctrinal disputes.

Melanchthon himself produced a revised Variata in 1540, softening the article on the Lord's Supper in a direction some Reformed theologians could accept, a text John Calvin was willing to sign but that confessional Lutherans came to regard as compromised and set aside in favor of the original. The confession gave its name to an entire church family: Augsburg Confession churches or evangelical Lutheran churches are still the working legal titles used in several European countries and their overseas daughter churches. Twentieth century ecumenical contact has treated the document as common ground rather than a barrier.

The Lutheran World Federation and the Roman Catholic Church signed a Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification in 1999, stating that the condemnations the two sides once traded over the article the Augsburg Confession states most sharply no longer apply to the other side's current teaching as each now presents it, a formal narrowing of a division that the Confutation of 1530 had first made official.