Justified True Belief

(●) Luther’s quiet colleague, who put the Reformation into sentences that a whole church could sign. + Luther is the voice everyone remembers: the hammer at the church door, the talk at the dinner table that his students wrote down, the refusal to take it back when the emperor himself was asking. Standing a few feet behind him for twenty-eight years was a thin, stammering Greek professor who never once preached a sermon from a pulpit, and who did something Luther could not have done. He wrote it all down, in order, in language careful enough to be handed to an emperor. Melanchthon is the man who produced the first systematic theology the Reformation had, the confession of faith that Lutheran churches still subscribe, and the school system that taught Protestant Germany for the next three centuries. Germans called him the Praeceptor Germaniae, the Teacher of Germany, and they meant it literally: he wrote the textbooks, drew up the curricula, and advised city after city on how to run a school. When people today speak of the Reformation as an event that made ordinary people literate, much of what they are describing is his work. He was also, by his own account and everyone else’s, an anxious man who hated a fight. That one trait produced both his best work and his worst hours, and it is worth holding on to, because the same temperament is behind both. A man who cannot bear a quarrel is exactly the man you want drafting a statement of faith that two hostile sides have to read without exploding. He is also the man who, twice in his life, gave ground where a braver friend would have stood still. He was buried in the Castle Church at Wittenberg, in the ground beside Martin Luther.

(●) 1497 AD: Born in Bretten to an armourer’s family, and given a Greek name at twelve by the best Hebrew scholar in Germany. + He was born Philipp Schwartzerdt on 16 February 1497, in the little Palatine town of Bretten near the Rhine, in his grandfather’s house. His father, Georg Schwartzerdt, was an armourer so good at his trade that princes sent for him, and so devout that he kept the hours of prayer like a clergyman and was known to rise at midnight to kneel. Philipp was the eldest of five. Then, in October 1508, the household came apart in a fortnight: his grandfather died, eleven days later his father died too, and the eleven-year-old boy and his brother were sent off with their grandmother to her native Pforzheim. His first schoolmaster, John Unger, taught with a rod, and Melanchthon remembered him with something close to love. Decades later he wrote that Unger "drove me to the grammar, and required me to construct sentences," that "whenever I would make a mistake he plied the rod, and yet with the moderation that was proper," and that "he loved me as a son, and I him as a father." At Pforzheim he came into the orbit of Johann Reuchlin, his grandmother’s brother and the man whose De rudimentis hebraicis of 1506, the first full Hebrew grammar and lexicon written by a Christian, put the language within reach of Christian scholars, so that anyone who wanted to read the Old Testament in the tongue Moses and Isaiah wrote it in no longer had to find a rabbi willing to teach him. Reuchlin looked at the twelve-year-old, praised him, called him his son, and set his own red doctor’s hat on the boy’s head. Then he did the thing Renaissance scholars did to promising students: he translated the name. Schwartzerdt means black earth, so in Greek, Melanchthon. Reuchlin also gave him a Latin Bible, and he carried it with him for the rest of his life. After that things moved quickly, the way they could for a clever boy in a century that saw no reason to make one wait. He went up to Heidelberg at twelve, matriculating on 14 October 1509, and took his bachelor of arts on 11 June 1511, not yet fifteen. A year later he applied for the master’s degree, and the university turned him down for a reason the record states without embarrassment: he was too young, and he looked it. Piqued, he moved to Tübingen, and on 25 January 1514 took the master’s degree there, first among eleven candidates, three weeks short of his seventeenth birthday.

(●) 1518 AD: He arrived at Wittenberg looking like a schoolboy, and four days later the university changed its mind. + Wittenberg wanted a professor of Greek, and Reuchlin recommended his great-nephew. What got off the coach on 25 August 1518 was a small, slight, stammering young man of twenty-one whom nobody took seriously on sight. The university registered him at once as its first professor of the Greek language. On 29 August he delivered his inaugural address, On Improving the Studies of Youth. His argument was that Christian teaching had gone stale because its teachers had stopped reading the sources, and that the cure was the languages: Greek and Hebrew first, and then the Scriptures themselves rather than the commentaries on the commentaries. Two days later Luther sat down to write to the secretary of the elector of Saxony, the prince who ruled the territory, paid for the university, and held one of the seven votes that chose the Holy Roman Emperor. Melanchthon had delivered a most learned oration to the delight and admiration of all, he reported, "we quickly retracted the opinion which we had formed when we first saw him," and he wanted no other Greek teacher so long as they had this one. The two men fitted together like a hand in a glove, and Luther said so in print. "I am rough, boisterous, stormy, and altogether warlike," he wrote in a preface to one of Melanchthon’s commentaries. "I must remove stumps and stones, cut away thistles, and thorns, and clear the wild forests; but Master Philip comes along softly and gently, sowing and watering with joy." The softness was real. So was the steel underneath it. In 1519 Melanchthon travelled to Leipzig for the disputation there, a formal public debate staged before judges with a university audience listening, and he went only as a note-taker. He wrote a short account of what he had heard, and Johann Eck, the Catholic theologian who had argued against Luther on that platform, rounded on him in print as "the Wittenberg Grammarian" and "thou dusty schoolmaster." It was a mistake. Melanchthon’s reply went through Eck’s use of the church fathers, the Christian teachers of the first few centuries after the apostles, and calmly took it apart, and nobody who read that reply went on calling its author a grammarian. His private life settled about as quickly as his public one. On 25 November 1520 he married Katharina Krapp, daughter of the mayor of Wittenberg, and on the morning of the wedding pinned a couplet to the university notice board telling the students that Philip would be reading no lecture on St. Paul that day. They were married thirty-seven years and had four children.

(●) 1521 AD: While Luther was hidden at the Wartburg, he published the first systematic theology the Reformation had. + The book began as lecture notes on Romans. Melanchthon wrote to a friend in April 1520 that the notes had grown in his hands and that he now meant to write a set of loci communes on law, sin, grace and the sacraments. A locus communis is a commonplace, a standing heading under which you gather everything that belongs to a topic, the way a lawyer keeps a file per question. His idea was to take the headings straight out of Romans rather than out of Aristotle, and to put the whole of Christian teaching under them in order. Loci communes rerum theologicarum appeared in 1521, while Luther was in hiding at the castle of the Wartburg after the Diet of Worms. A diet was the assembly where the emperor and the princes of the empire met to settle its business, and the one at Worms was where Luther had stood up and refused to take back what he had written, which is why he now had to be hidden. The book went through edition after edition for the rest of the century. Luther’s verdict was characteristically excessive and never retracted: there is no better book after Holy Scripture, he said, and he thought it deserved a place in the canon. What made it new was not any single doctrine but the shape. Here, for the first time, was the Reformation laid out as a connected body of teaching rather than as a series of protests. The same year showed him his limits, and it did it in a way he never forgot. At Christmas 1521 three men arrived in Wittenberg from Zwickau, two weavers and a former student, claiming direct revelations, conversations with God, and knowledge of the future, and arguing against infant baptism. Here was the question the whole Reformation would have to answer sooner or later. If Scripture is over the church, what do you do with a man who says God has told him something new this morning? Melanchthon, left in charge of a town whose leader was in hiding, listened to them and could not make up his mind. He wrote to the elector on 27 December: "I can scarcely tell how I am moved by these things. For certain strong reasons I cannot bring myself to condemn them. That there are spirits in them is very apparent. But no one can easily judge concerning them except Martin." Luther came back in March 1522, preached for eight days, and the town settled. Melanchthon knew exactly what had happened. A saying his biographers repeat, at second hand, puts it without any softening: "I can write in the presence of the whole Roman Empire, but I am dumb in the presence of an audience."

(●) 1527 AD: He rode out to inspect the parishes of Saxony, and what he found there set him to building schools. + Ten years into the Reformation, the elector of Saxony sent teams of theologians and lawyers around his territory to find out what was actually being taught in the village churches. Melanchthon went out with the first of them in 1527. The answer was worse than anyone expected: pastors who could not recite the Creed, congregations who had never heard the Ten Commandments, whole villages with no idea what baptism was for. He wrote home about it without any professional distance at all. His heart bled, he said, and after finishing the visitation of a place he would go off by himself and weep. Then he did the practical thing, which is the part of him worth watching, because grief that turns into a timetable is rarer than grief. Under commission from the elector he wrote the Unterricht der Visitatoren, the Instruction of the Visitors, published at the beginning of 1528 with a preface by Luther, and it reads as much like a school plan as like a doctrinal guide. It tells preachers to press the people to send their children to school. It divides a Latin school into three classes and says exactly what each reads. It insists that children not be loaded with many books at once, and that every child, small and large, spend the first hour of the afternoon learning music. From that document grew the Protestant school system. Melanchthon wrote the constitutions, arranged the courses, and named the first masters for school after school; correspondence survives between him and fifty-six cities asking his help in setting one up. He wrote the textbooks too, and they stayed in use for generations: his Greek grammar alone went through seventeen editions between 1518 and 1544, and twenty-six more between 1545 and 1622. This is the work that earned him the title Praeceptor Germaniae.

(●) 1530 AD: He drafted the Augsburg Confession, and seven princes put their names and their necks behind it. + Charles V summoned the German estates to a diet at Augsburg in 1530, the estates being the princes, the bishops and the free cities who between them governed Germany, and he asked the evangelical princes to state, in writing, what they actually believed. Luther could not go. He was still under imperial ban, which meant that anyone could kill him without penalty, so he was parked in the castle at Coburg, four days from Augsburg by messenger. The drafting fell to Melanchthon. Imagine being handed that assignment. Whatever you write will be read aloud to the most powerful man in Europe, and the men who sign it are gambling their lands and their lives on your sentences being both true and unprovocative. He worked on it from April to June, revising daily, and hated every minute. "I could almost believe I was born under an unlucky star," he wrote to his brother from Augsburg. On 11 May the draft went to Luther, who replied to the elector four days later: "I have read over Master Philip’s Apology. I know not how to improve or change it, nor would it become me, since I cannot move so softly and gently." That is as close to unqualified approval as Luther ever gave anything he had not written himself. On 23 June it was read to the princes and subscribed by seven of them and by the representatives of two cities. On Saturday 25 June the diet gathered at three in the afternoon in the private chapel of the bishop’s palace. The emperor asked for the Latin copy to be read; the elector of Saxony pointed out that they were standing on German soil, and the German copy was read instead, by the Saxon chancellor, in a voice loud enough that the crowd in the courtyard below heard every word. Both copies were handed to Charles. Neither has ever been found since. When the Roman theologians answered with a Confutation, a point-by-point refutation read out to the same diet, Melanchthon wrote the reply, the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, published in 1531 and several times the length of the document it defends. An apology in this sense is not an expression of regret but a defence, from the Greek apologia, the speech a man makes for himself in court. Between them, the Confession and its Apology are the charter of the Lutheran churches, and he wrote both.

(●) 1540 AD: His secret counsel to a bigamous prince broke his health, and Luther had to threaten him into eating. + Philip of Hesse, the landgrave, which was the title of a prince who held his lands from the emperor with nobody in between, was the most powerful evangelical prince in Germany and a man of notorious appetites, miserable in a political marriage and, by his own account, unable to receive communion with a clear conscience. In December 1539 he asked the Wittenberg theologians, through Martin Bucer, the reformer of Strasbourg and the most determined negotiator of the age, whether he might take a second wife while the first still lived. The answer came back on 10 December in a letter drafted by Melanchthon and signed by Luther, Bucer and six others. It refused to endorse bigamy as a rule, treated the case as an emergency dispensation, urged him to prefer a quiet arrangement to adultery, and told him to keep it secret. Philip married Margarethe von der Saale at Rotenburg on 4 March 1540, with Melanchthon among those summoned to be present, and the secret lasted a matter of weeks. The counsel was indefensible and Melanchthon knew it before anyone told him. What followed is what happens to a man who cannot live with what he has signed. Crossing the Elbe in May on his way to a colloquy at Hagenau, one of the conferences at which Catholic and evangelical theologians were set down together and told to talk their differences out, he said, half joking, that he had lived in conventions and would now die in one. At Weimar he collapsed, and the physicians gave him up. The elector sent his own doctor and summoned Luther, who rode to Weimar, found his friend past speaking, prayed over him, and then bullied him back. Melanchthon begged to be let go, saying he was on a good journey. Luther told him he must serve God a while longer, fetched food himself, and when Melanchthon refused it said: eat, Philip, or I excommunicate you. He ate. Afterwards he wrote to his friend Camerarius that he could not describe the pain he had suffered, that Luther had raised him not only with kind conversation but with salutary reproof, and that "if he had not come to me I should certainly have died." Luther shook the episode off and turned on the landgrave. Melanchthon never really did.

(●) 1560 AD: He died weary of the theologians who had called him a traitor for yielding on ceremonies, and was buried beside Luther. + Luther died in 1546, and after that the supports came away from under Melanchthon one at a time. The war everyone had feared broke out that summer, and in the spring of 1547 the Protestant princes were beaten and the emperor’s army took Wittenberg. In the wreckage Charles imposed a settlement of his own, the Augsburg Interim, an interim arrangement in the literal sense: it was to govern the German churches until a general council of the whole church could rule on the questions properly. On the doctrine in it Melanchthon would not move an inch. He rejected it outright and said he would go into exile or die rather than approve a change in teaching. So the pressure moved to the things that were not doctrine, and there he gave way. When the Saxon court pressed him about ceremonies, the vestments (the special garments a minister wears to conduct a service), the feast days, the order of readings, he yielded, on the argument that these were adiaphora, matters neither commanded nor forbidden by Scripture, and that submitting on them was better than losing the pulpits altogether. What Saxony adopted on that basis is the Leipzig Interim of 1548. It cost him the last twelve years of his life. Matthias Flacius and the party at Weimar, who took the name of Luther’s true heirs, accused him of betraying the gospel for a surplice, the white linen garment worn over the rest at the old service, and the Lutheran churches split into two camps that pursued each other for a generation. He would not fight back. "Ajax in Homer in his fight with Hector was satisfied when Hector fell and acknowledged him as victor," he wrote to Flacius. "You make no end of criminations. What foe strikes those who have surrendered and grounded their arms? Conquer! I yield." On 5 April 1560, coming home from Leipzig where he had been examining the elector’s scholarship students, he caught a cold that turned to fever. He kept lecturing, writing letters and correcting proofs for a fortnight. A few days before the end he took a sheet of paper and wrote out, in two columns down the margins, the reasons why he need not be afraid to die. He died at a quarter to seven in the evening of 19 April 1560, aged sixty-three years, two months and three days. Two days later the largest funeral procession Wittenberg had ever seen carried him into the Castle Church, and he was laid in the ground next to Martin Luther.

What He Taught

(T1) Christian teaching begins with what Christ has done for you, not with how he is what he is. + Think of a man in a hospital corridor waiting for news about his wife. What he needs from a doctor is not a lecture on cellular biology. He needs to know what has been done and whether she will live. Melanchthon thought most of the theology he had been taught was cellular biology delivered to men in corridors. The theology of the late medieval universities is called scholasticism, the method of the schools: enormously sophisticated argument, conducted in Aristotle’s vocabulary, about questions like how two natures can be united in one person, or in what precise sense God is simple. Melanchthon did not think those questions were false. He thought they were being asked first, and at length, by men who never got round to telling a frightened person what the gospel was for. In the opening pages of his Loci communes he put it in a sentence Protestant theology has been quoting ever since: hoc est Christum cognoscere beneficia eius cognoscere, non, quod isti docent, eius naturas, modos incarnationis contueri. To know Christ is to know his benefits, and not, as those men teach, to gaze at his natures and the modes of his incarnation. So he opened the book with a sentence that shocked his readers: the mysteries of God are better adored than investigated, and there is no profit in spending years on the Trinity, the creation and the incarnation the way the schoolmen had. He is easy to misread here, and the misreading matters, so it is worth being exact about what he did and did not say. Melanchthon signed the Nicene Creed, taught the Trinity all his life, and wrote against those who denied it. His complaint was about the order of business and the source of the questions. Start where Paul starts, in Romans, with sin and law and grace, and let the doctrine of God be learned from Scripture rather than from the philosophers. Even on his deathbed the instinct held, and so did the honesty about its cost: among the reasons he listed for being glad to die was that he would finally understand the union of the two natures in Christ.

(Q) "Yet I desire nothing so much as to make all Christians thoroughly conversant with the Holy Scripture alone, and to transform them into the image of the same." + Source: Melanchthon, Loci communes rerum theologicarum (1521), preface (Corpus Reformatorum vol. 21), in the translation of James W. Richard, Philip Melanchthon (1898). The sentence explains why the book is as short and as plain as it is. He was not trying to replace Scripture with a system. He was trying to build a set of handles by which an ordinary student could pick Scripture up.

(T2) A sinner is accepted by God for Christ’s sake, and faith is the empty hand that receives it. + Justification is a courtroom word. To justify someone is to declare them in the right, the way a verdict does, rather than to make them gradually better, the way a course of treatment does. A doctor and a judge are both in the business of putting things right, but they do different things, and the whole argument of the sixteenth century turns on which of the two the New Testament means when it speaks of God justifying a sinner. The Reformation’s central claim was that God pronounces that verdict over guilty people on the ground of what Christ has done, and that the verdict is received rather than earned. Melanchthon is the man who wrote that claim into a form a church could adopt. The Loci of 1521 states it hard: our works, however good they may seem or be, are not our righteousness, and faith alone in the mercy and grace of God in Jesus Christ is righteousness. Nine years later he restated it for the emperor in Article IV of the Augsburg Confession, in the flattest possible prose, and it is worth noticing what the flatness is doing. There is no polemic in it, no naming of opponents, no rhetoric. It is written the way a contract is written, because men were going to sign it in front of Charles V and might be asked to die for the wording. Two features of his statement mattered enormously later. First, the ground is outside the believer: "for Christ’s sake," not for anything God finds or produces in the person. Second, faith is not a virtue that earns the verdict but the receiving of it, which is why Scripture sets faith and works of the law in opposition (Romans 3:28; Ephesians 2:8-9). Melanchthon would spend the rest of his life fighting on two fronts over this, against Rome for saying it was not enough, and later against Andreas Osiander, a fellow Lutheran who taught that we are declared righteous because Christ’s divine nature comes to dwell in us. Melanchthon’s answer to Osiander was that this puts the ground back inside the believer, where a troubled conscience will only find more reason to despair.

(Q) "Also they teach that men cannot be justified before God by their own strength, merits, or works, but are freely justified for Christ’s sake, through faith, when they believe that they are received into favor, and that their sins are forgiven for Christ’s sake, who, by His death, has made satisfaction for our sins. This faith God imputes for righteousness in His sight." + Source: the Augsburg Confession (1530), Article IV, Of Justification (Triglot Concordia, 1921). The whole article is three sentences long. Melanchthon’s draft was read aloud in German in the bishop’s chapel at Augsburg on 25 June 1530 and handed to Charles V the same afternoon. The article closes by citing Romans 3 and 4, which is where he had found it. The one hard word in it is imputes. To impute something is to credit it to an account, the way a debt settled by a friend still shows as cleared in the ledger, and the point of the word is that the standing is genuinely the person’s own while its ground lies entirely outside him.

(T3) Faith that is alive produces good works, and the works buy nothing. + The standard objection to justification by faith arrived within months of the doctrine, and it has never gone away: if God accepts me for Christ’s sake and not for my behaviour, why behave? Melanchthon heard it constantly, from Rome and from the peasants in revolt alike, and he answered it in the same two-part way every time. Good works are necessary. Good works do not pay for anything. The analogy he and the others reached for is a fruit tree. Nobody thinks an apple tree becomes an apple tree by producing apples; it produces apples because that is what it already is. A faith that produces nothing is not a modest faith, it is a dead one, which is exactly what James says (James 2:17). But the apples do not make the tree, and a man who starts counting his apples to reassure himself has gone back to the very accounting the gospel released him from. Luke 17:10 is the text Article VI cites: when you have done all that you were commanded, say that you are unworthy servants who have only done your duty. Melanchthon also gave later Protestantism the technical piece of this, in a phrase he first set down in the 1534 revision of his commentary on Colossians and then carried into the 1535 edition of the Loci: the third use of the law. The law of God does two obvious jobs, restraining bad behaviour in society and convicting the conscience of sin so that a person looks for mercy. The third use is what the law does afterwards, in the life of someone already forgiven: it teaches him what love actually looks like in practice, so that gratitude has a shape and is not left to improvise. It is a small phrase with a long history, and Reformed and Lutheran Christians have argued about how much weight it will bear ever since.

(Q) "Also they teach that this faith is bound to bring forth good fruits, and that it is necessary to do good works commanded by God, because of God’s will, but that we should not rely on those works to merit justification before God." + Source: the Augsburg Confession (1530), Article VI, Of New Obedience (Triglot Concordia, 1921). One sentence, holding both halves. The article goes on to quote Luke 17:10 and then Ambrose, the fourth-century bishop of Milan, to show that the teaching was not an invention of 1530 but something the fathers had said first.

(T4) The unity of the church needs agreement about the gospel and the sacraments, not the same ceremonies everywhere. + Two congregations meet on the same Sunday morning in the same town. In one the minister wears a surplice, the service is sung, and the calendar is full of saints’ days; in the other a man in a black gown preaches for an hour and nobody kneels. Are they the same church? Most of us have stood in both kinds of room and felt how different they are, and the sixteenth century went to war over questions in that neighbourhood. Article VII of the Augsburg Confession is Melanchthon’s attempt to answer it by drawing the line in the right place. His answer has two parts. The church is not an institution defined by an address or a chain of officers; it is the congregation of saints, the assembly of believers, and you find it wherever the gospel is rightly taught and the sacraments are rightly administered. The sacraments, for him, were the rites God commanded and attached a promise of grace to: baptism and the Lord’s Supper first of all, where the promise arrives with something a person can see and touch and taste, and in the Apology of 1531 absolution counted with them as a third. And for the true unity of that church, agreement about the gospel and about how the sacraments are administered is enough. Rites and ceremonies instituted by men do not have to be alike everywhere, because they were never what made the church one in the first place (Ephesians 4:5-6). This is the most generous sentence in the Confession and the most contested. It was written to show Charles V that the evangelical churches were not a new sect but the catholic church of the creeds, catholic there meaning universal, the one church of all times and places rather than the name of any single communion, keeping what had always been essential. Melanchthon meant it and acted on it, drafting for one union negotiation after another, from the Wittenberg Concord of 1536 with the south Germans to the talks at Frankfurt in 1539 where he met John Calvin and began a friendship that lasted until his death. It also cut the other way, and he found that out at his own expense. If ceremonies really are not essential, then when an emperor demands them at sword point, has a church lost anything by giving them up? That question destroyed his last years.

(Q) "Also they teach that one holy Church is to continue forever. The Church is the congregation of saints, in which the Gospel is rightly taught and the Sacraments are rightly administered. And to the true unity of the Church it is enough to agree concerning the doctrine of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments. Nor is it necessary that human traditions, that is, rites or ceremonies, instituted by men, should be everywhere alike." + Source: the Augsburg Confession (1530), Article VII, Of the Church (Triglot Concordia, 1921). The article ends by citing Paul: one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all (Ephesians 4:5-6). Four centuries of Protestant discussion about what a church is, and what may divide one, have run through these four sentences.

(T5) A church that stops teaching its children languages and letters will lose the gospel in a generation. + This is the conviction Melanchthon held longest, from his inaugural lecture at twenty-one to his last week of teaching at sixty-three, and it is the one with the widest footprint outside theology. The reasoning is short. The gospel comes to us in documents, written in Greek and Hebrew. A church that cannot read them is at the mercy of whoever tells it what they say. So grammar is not a rival to piety or a decoration on it; grammar is how a congregation keeps its hands on its own Scriptures. The Saxon visitations of 1527 turned that principle into an emergency. He had assumed the problem was bad theology and discovered it was blank ignorance, in pastors as much as in villagers, and it undid him. Out of that came the school plan in the Instruction of the Visitors and then, over thirty years, the correspondence with fifty-six towns, the curricula, the textbooks, and the appointment of the masters. His schools were not seminaries. They taught Latin, Greek, logic, rhetoric, mathematics, history, and an hour of music every afternoon for everybody, on the conviction that the mind God gave a child is a good thing in itself and that a people able to think clearly is a people harder to deceive. The pattern he set lasted in German schools, in its essentials, until the nineteenth century. He grounded it in the plainest commands: parents are to teach their children the words of God at home and on the road, lying down and rising (Deuteronomy 6:6-7), and Paul takes it for granted that Timothy has known the sacred writings from childhood (2 Timothy 3:15). Melanchthon’s contribution was to notice that a command like that needs institutions behind it, and then to go and build them.

(Q) "My heart bleeds when I regard this wretchedness. Often when we have completed the visitation of a place, I go aside and pour forth my distress in tears." + Source: Melanchthon, writing during the Saxon visitation of 1527 (Corpus Reformatorum vol. 1), in the translation of James W. Richard, Philip Melanchthon (1898). He goes on to ask who would not mourn to see the faculties of a human being so utterly neglected, so that a soul able to learn and grasp so much knows nothing at all of its Creator and Lord. The school system came out of these tears, not out of a theory of education.

(Q) "Thou shalt depart from sin. Thou shalt be set free from vexations, and from the rage of the theologians. Thou shalt come into the light. Thou shalt see God. Thou shalt behold the Son of God. Thou shalt learn those wonderful mysteries which in this life thou couldst not understand." + Source: Melanchthon’s note Caussae cur minus abhorreas a morte, the reasons not to shrink from death, written a few days before he died in April 1560, in the translation of James W. Richard, Philip Melanchthon (1898). He wrote it in two columns down the margins of a single sheet, losses on one side and gains on the other. The list of mysteries he expected to be shown ends with the one he had spent forty years telling students not to speculate about: what the union of the two natures in Christ actually is (T1). Asked by his son-in-law whether he wanted anything further, he said: nothing else but heaven, do not ask me any more.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) His confession became the document Protestants signed, and the model for nearly every confession written after it. + Before 1530 the Reformation was a movement with a library. After 1530 it had a text. The Augsburg Confession is the oldest of the Protestant confessions still formally subscribed, signed today by Lutheran churches on every continent, and it fixed the form that later confessions would take: numbered articles, short, each stating a doctrine positively and then naming what it rejects. Its reach went well past Lutheranism, and the two places to look are England and Geneva. Thomas Cranmer knew the Confession and drew on it, and the Forty-Two Articles of 1553 and the Thirty-Nine Articles that followed them show its influence in both their structure and their wording, so that the Church of England was working from a German draft whether or not it cared to say so. John Calvin, for his part, subscribed a version of it, the revised edition of 1540 that Melanchthon himself issued, and never regarded doing so as a compromise of his own position. As for the Lutherans, when they finally settled their internal quarrels in the Formula of Concord of 1577 and gathered their documents into the Book of Concord in 1580, three of the pieces in the book were his: the Confession, its Apology, and the Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope of 1537. The Loci communes had a parallel career. It was the first Protestant systematic theology, and every Protestant systematic theology since is in some sense a descendant, including Calvin’s Institutes, whose author knew the book well and said generous things about it. Melanchthon kept revising it for thirty-eight years, in three successive forms, and taught from it until the month he died.

(†) He built the schools that taught Protestant Europe, and his textbooks outlived him by a century. + The title Praeceptor Germaniae was given him in his own lifetime and has stuck for five hundred years, because the claim behind it is checkable. He designed the Latin schools, wrote or reorganised the statutes of universities from Wittenberg and Leipzig to Tübingen and Heidelberg, and supplied the books they taught from. His grammars, his logic, his rhetoric, his ethics and his natural philosophy were standard issue in Protestant classrooms into the seventeenth century, and the Greek grammar alone ran to more than forty editions. The habit of mind he planted is the durable part. Protestantism became, very early and by deliberate policy, a movement that expected its clergy to know Greek and its laity to read, and that treated the study of ordinary subjects as worth doing for its own sake rather than as a concession. That is not a self-evident consequence of the doctrine of justification; somebody had to argue for it and then build it, and Melanchthon did both. The mission schools, the church colleges and the parish literacy campaigns of later centuries are all working a field he cleared. Underneath all of it lies a Christian conviction simple enough to say in one sentence. If the same God made the world and gave the Scriptures, then careful attention to either one cannot in the end embarrass the other, and a Christian has no reason to be frightened of learning. Most people who believe that leave it at the level of a sentiment. Melanchthon put it into a school timetable.

(†) Christians have read him in two directions ever since, and the quarrel over his legacy shaped a church. + Within a few years of his death the Lutheran world had split into two parties named for what they thought of him. The Philippists followed his line; the Gnesio-Lutherans, from the Greek for genuine, claimed to be the real thing and him the deviation. Three points in his mature teaching were at issue, and honest readers have come down on both sides of each. - The will in conversion. In his later writings Melanchthon said that three things come together when someone is converted: the Word, the Holy Spirit, and the human will, which does not resist but assents. His formula was "Grace precedes; the Will follows. The Word begins, the Will is called and drawn. God draws, but draws him who is willing." His critics called this synergism, from the Greek for working together, a co-operation that gives fallen man a share in his own rescue, and they said it gave back the ground Luther had won against Erasmus, the great humanist scholar who had argued that fallen man keeps some power to apply himself to what leads to salvation or to turn away from it, and whom Luther had answered at book length in The Bondage of the Will. His defenders answered that he was only describing what conversion looks like from inside, and denying that God converts a person the way a man rolls a log. - The Lord’s Supper. Article X of 1530 says that the body and blood of Christ are truly present and distributed to those who eat, and rejects those who teach otherwise. The revised edition of 1540 dropped the rejection and said instead that with the bread and wine the body and blood of Christ are truly presented to those who eat, which is why Calvin could sign it. Melanchthon was accused of drifting toward the Swiss. He denied it to the end and kept teaching that Christ is truly present in the use of the Supper, given to those who eat and drink, and that the Supper is tied to the forgiveness of sins. - Philosophy. The man who warned students off speculation spent his life teaching Aristotle’s logic and ethics, and reintroduced philosophy into Protestant education after Luther’s blasts against it. Some see the recovery of a right use of reason; others see the seed of a later Protestant scholasticism as dry as the one the Reformation escaped. The Formula of Concord of 1577 settled these questions for Lutherans, ruling against the synergist formula while keeping the Confession and the Apology as his. It is a fair verdict on the man: the church could not do without what he wrote, and would not follow him everywhere he went.

(†) Where his own record fails: a secret dispensation, a surrender on rites, and a burning he approved. + The ledger has another column, and it is not made up of things other people did with his books. These are his own acts, from his own letters. - The Hesse dispensation. In December 1539 he drafted the counsel that allowed Philip of Hesse a second wife while the first lived, and told the landgrave to keep it quiet. The reasoning was pastoral and the outcome was a scandal that damaged the evangelical cause across Europe. Christ’s own answer to the question of two wives is not obscure: what God has joined together let not man separate (Matthew 19:4-6), and what Moses allowed for hardness of heart was not so from the beginning (Matthew 19:8). Melanchthon knew it; that is why the secrecy was imposed, and why the guilt nearly killed him. - The Leipzig Interim. In 1548 he advised the Saxon churches to accept imperial terms on ceremonies as adiaphora, things indifferent, in order to keep their pulpits. His own account is candid: "When the doctrine was to be retained intact, I preferred that ours should submit to this bondage, rather than forsake the ministry of the Gospel." His opponents had the better of the argument on one point, and it is the point Christians have made ever since: when a thing indifferent is demanded as the price of surrender, it has stopped being indifferent, and yielding teaches the watching congregation that nothing was really at stake. - Servetus. Michael Servetus, who denied the Trinity, was burned at Geneva in 1553. Melanchthon wrote to Calvin on 14 October 1554 that "your magistrates did right in punishing, after a regular trial, this blasphemous man," and to Heinrich Bullinger the next year that the Genevan senate had done perfectly right. This was the common judgment of nearly every magistrate and most theologians of his century, Catholic and Protestant alike, and saying so explains the act without excusing it. The New Testament arms the church with preaching and with exclusion from its own fellowship, never with the fire (2 Corinthians 10:4; John 18:36). None of this cancels the rest. It does mean the gentlest of the reformers was capable of the sort of accommodation that looks reasonable at the desk and indefensible afterwards, and he knew it better than his accusers did.