Concordia Ecclesiae: An Inquiry into Tension and Coherence in Philipp Melanchthon’s Theology and Efforts for Ecclesiastical Unity, Especially in 1527–1530 by Ragnar Andersen (review)

This book is for its author a labor of love. After a lengthy period of research, Andersen presented the Norwegian version in 2011 as his doctoral dissertation. He then went to great lengths to translate and publish the work in English to assure a broader readership. The detail with which he examined Melanchthon’s position vis-à-vis his Roman opponents, especially in the negotiations in Augsburg, is praiseworthy. Any reader will learn new facts about the complicated development of Melanchthon’s attitudes. His summary of Melanchthon’s theology in part three is also worthwhile reading.

The first section examines Luther and Melanchthon’s relationship prior to Augsburg, especially their approaches in the Visitation Articles of 1527/28, their rejection of the Anabaptists, and their behavior toward the Swiss and Strasbourg churches at Marburg in 1529, and ends with an account of the Torgau memoranda produced for the Augsburg Diet of 1530. The second section tries to reconstruct Melanchthon’s attempts at reconciliation with his Roman opponents and argues that two competing impulses were at work: a “Reconciliation Project” and a “Confessional Project.” By September 1530, the Confessional Project took the upper hand (in part due to pressure from Luther and others), and the “Reconciliation Project” that arose out of Melanchthon’s humanistic impulses faded into the background. The third section then revisits the earlier material, searching for the “background and preconditions, goals and tactics” of these two strategies.

The book disappoints on several levels. First, the translation (done in part with the help of a computer program) is filled with hundreds of grammatical and syntactical errors, leaving the reader at times in the dark as to the author’s intentions. Second, it is not finally clear whether these two strategies are proper to Melanchthon or only to Andersen. As a systematic way of dividing Melanchthon’s varying positions in Augsburg, especially during the negotiations in August 1530 and the tension-filled communication with Luther, reconciliation and confession may indeed provide new clarity. But when the author insists that the former is humanistic and the latter “Evangelical” or “Lutheran,” he has simply imported hackneyed views of Humanism into the analysis and missed an opportunity in the first two sections of his work to define humanists more historically (as did Paul Oskar Kristeller, whom Andersen finally cites in the third section) and to expand the number of humanists to include not only Melanchthon but also Justus Jonas, Johannes Brenz, and (as Helmar Junghans demonstrated) Martin Luther himself. We are left with a description of an uncertain Melanchthon at Augsburg, a Leisetreter [pussyfooter] torn between the opposite poles of Luther’s Reformation and Erasmus’s humanism. Finally, in many instances, while the author is to be applauded for introducing so many important primary texts into his work, he allows his over-arching interpretative framework to exaggerate what he reads there. This is true both for his reading of Melanchthon’s contacts at Augsburg with Cardinal Campeggio, Archbishop Albrecht, and others from the Roman party and for his misreading of Melanchthon’s transitional comments between articles twenty-one and twenty-two of the Augsburg Confession (where Master Philip is not minimizing the theological differences but using striking rhetorical irony to make the point that the Evangelicals are the catholic party). He also does not always seem aware of the latest secondary literature (for example, on the relation of Melanchthon and Erasmus by this reviewer or the correspondence between Luther and Melanchthon at Augsburg by Gerhard Ebeling).

By contrast, the third, systematic section is far more helpful. Indeed, the author’s description of Melanchthon’s methodus and loci communes (351–64) is worth much broader distribution. Here a better definition of humanism often obtains, and the nuances of Melanchthon’s Reformation thought come into much clearer focus. Thus...