Evangelicals & the Bible

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May/June 2022

R E F O R M AT I O N R E S O U R C E S

Does the Augsburg Confession Teach Anything Outside of Scripture? Defensio Augustanae Confessionis (Chapter IX) by Friedrich Balduin; translated by Todd Rester

In 1613, the Hungarian Catholic Cardinal Peter Pázmány, S.J. (1570–1637) published Hodegus Igazságra-Vezérló Kalauz. In Book 4 of this work, Pázmany devoted six chapters to a refutation of the Lutheran Augsburg Confession. In 1623, Lutheran theologian Friedrich Balduin published a direct response to Pázmany's work, titled Defensio Augustanae Confessionis (Wittenburg: Paul Helwigius, 1623). Balduin's Defensio was originally a series of Latin disputations publicly delivered in Wittenberg that Balduin authored and presided over with a student respondent. 1

the Esauite approaches the Scriptures, which must be first of all. For if before this judge our confession cannot stand, then we freely confess action has to be taken regarding it. For it is the only thing by whose judgment the professors of any religion must stand or fall. “It is necessary for those who are subject, who are imbued with the Scriptures,” says Basil in his On Christian Ethics, rule 72, chapter 1, “to prove those things which are asserted by professors, both to receive those things that are consonant with the Scriptures, and to reject what is foreign to them, and to vehemently oppose those who persevere in strange teachings of this sort.” But our adversary shows his true character, which is to say, “You speak in the manner of allies and your cause has the Scriptures in your mouth, yet there is hatred of them in your heart.” Now the shortest path forward would have been to show in individual articles where the Confession states something contrary to the Holy Scriptures, but it breaks apart under its own force, so he frankly admits “that he does not want to overturn those controversies that could produce genuine disputation.” But that was what was especially necessary to do; for to pluck out one or the other locus and twist it at will is characteristic of sophists, not of candid disputers. Without a doubt, if he would have examined it without hypocrisy, he will confess the very thing the papists at the Augsburg Assembly frankly confessed: that the confession offered by the Protestants cannot be refuted from holy Scripture. I certainly have been convicted in my conscience that of all the articles that our confession sets forth, there is not one that can be solidly refuted from the holy Scriptures; and the Jesuits themselves in the Colloquy of Regensburg [1601] said that there is not even one heresy that can be sufficiently refuted from only Scripture. Therefore, because they hold our doctrine as heretical, it follows that the Esauites would strive in vain to 60. NOW AT LAST,

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