Philipp Melanchthon

Luther produced a torrent of occasional writing, sermons, treatises, commentaries and pamphlets, and no ordered account of what he taught. Melanchthon supplied one. The Loci Communes of 1521, written when he was twenty four, takes the central topics of theology in sequence, sin, law, grace, faith, and works them through in a plain humanist Latin, and it is the first systematic theology the Reformation produced. Luther said of it, with characteristic overstatement, that it deserved a place in the canon.

He was a philologist by training, appointed to teach Greek at Wittenberg at twenty one on the recommendation of his great-uncle Reuchlin, and the training shows everywhere in his work: he wanted texts read accurately and arguments set out in order, and he thought both were teachable.

That instinct produced the other half of his output. He wrote grammars, rhetorics and textbooks, drew up curricula, and reorganised schools and universities across Protestant Germany, to the point that he was called the teacher of Germany. He also drafted the Augsburg Confession of 1530, presented to the emperor as a statement of what the reforming party actually held, deliberately moderate in tone and framed to show continuity with the ancient church. It remains the primary confessional document of Lutheran churches worldwide, and it was written by a layman who never took ordination.

Melanchthon's temperament was conciliatory in a period that did not reward it, and after Luther's death in 1546 it made him the target of his own side.

The trouble began with the Leipzig Interim of 1548, an imperial settlement imposed after military defeat, under which he accepted the retention of certain Catholic practices, vestments, ceremonies and the like, on the ground that they were adiaphora, matters indifferent, and that keeping them was better than losing the preaching of the gospel entirely. A party which came to be called the Gnesio-Lutherans, the genuine Lutherans, held that in a time of persecution nothing is indifferent and that yielding on ceremony is yielding on confession. The argument was bitter and personal.

A second dispute followed over the will. Melanchthon's later formulations allowed the human will some role in conversion, alongside the word and the Spirit, and his opponents read that as a retreat from the position Luther had defended against Erasmus. A third concerned whether good works are necessary to salvation, on which his students split.

The Formula of Concord of 1577, drawn up seventeen years after his death to end the quarrels, settled most of them against his particular formulations while retaining the Augsburg Confession he had written as the foundation of the whole structure. The atlas records the disputes as a real theological division within a movement rather than as anyone's failure.