The
Book of Concord

The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church

Translated and edited by

THEODORE G. TAPPERT

in collaboration with

Jaroslav Pelikan, Robert H. Fischer, and Arthur C. Piepkorn

FORTRESS PRESS PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 1959 by Fortress Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 59–11369

ISBN 0-8006-0825-9

Foreword

The publication of a new translation of the Book of Concord has been made desirable, if not necessary, by a number of considerations. In the first place, in so far as every translation is an interpretation, the tremendous advances must be taken into account which have been made during the last generation in our understanding of the literary and historical backgrounds of the documents included in this book. In the second place, allowance must be made for the literary tastes of modern readers for whom the English style of earlier generations seems heavy, cumbersome, and sometimes almost unintelligible. In the third place, the needs of those who may use the volume must be considered by furnishing them with quick and easy reference, in both the introductions to the several documents and the footnotes, to persons, events, literary citations, and other tools essential to understanding and study.

Serious students of the Lutheran Confessions will continue to consult the original Latin and German texts on which the present translations are based. These are available in the critically superior and typographically incomparable second, revised edition of Die Bekenntnisschriften der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1952), edited by Hans Lietzmann, Heinrich Bornkamm, Hans Volz, and Ernst Wolf. The translators gratefully acknowledge their indebtedness to and reliance on this edition and commend it to the use of others.

Several English translations of individual documents, notably the Augsburg Confession, have been available since the sixteenth century. Three major English editions of the entire Book of Concord have been published before the present edition. The first was by David Henkel and others and appeared in 1851 (published by Solomon Henkel & Brothers in New Market, Va., with an improved edition in 1854). The second was by Henry E. Jacobs and others and appeared in 1882 (published by G. W. Frederick in Philadelphia, with a revised “People’s Edition” in 1911). The third was by F. Bente and others and appeared in 1921 (published by the Concordia Publishing House, St. Louis, in three languages, and then also in English alone). In 1940 John C. Mattes undertook to make a revised translation but died (in 1948) before the work was completed. It is of course inevitable that the present translators should have been influenced by the work of those ...