Magdeburg Confession

The Magdeburg Confession (officially, the Confession, Instruction, and Admonition of the pastors and preachers of the Christian congregations of Magdeburg) was a Lutheran statement of faith. It was written by nine pastors of the city of Magdeburg in 1550 in response to the Augsburg Interim and the imposition of Roman Catholicism. The Confession explains why the leaders of the city refused to obey the imperial law, and were prepared to resist its implementation with force if necessary.[1] The Magdeburg Confession calls for resistance to political tyranny, and argues that the "subordinate powers" in a state, faced with the situation where the "supreme power" is working to destroy true religion, may go further than non-cooperation with the supreme power and assist the faithful to resist.[2]

Magdeburg in 1551

Carter Lindberg calls it "the first Protestant religious justification of the right of defense against unjust higher authorities."[3] John Witte notes that Theodore Beza saw the Magdeburg Confession as an example of how to respond to political abuse of tyranny, and that it was a "major distillation of the most advanced Lutheran resistance theories of the day, which the Calvinist tradition absorbed."[1]

References
  1. Witte, John (2007). The Reformation of Rights: Law, Religion and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism. Cambridge University Press. p. 106. Retrieved 11 August 2014.
  2. Wernham, R. B. (1968). Counter-Reformation and Price Revolution, 1559–1610. Cambridge University Press. p. 98.
  3. Lindberg, Carter (2011). The European Reformations. John Wiley & Sons. p. 199. Retrieved 11 August 2014.
  • The Magdeburg Confession – advertises a modern translation (from the original Latin) by Matthew Colvin, published via Amazon Createspace.
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