Cf., on the condemnations, "The Lutheran Position on the Rejections Directed against the "Anabaptists" in the
Augsburg Confession of 1530," in Enns and Seiling, Mennonites in Dialogue, Part II.2.
It is no coincidence that the characteristic formulation of the
Augsburg Confession is "It is taught among us that ..." or "Our churches teach that...." To use counseling language, we might say that faith is fundamentally an I-statement, not a you-statement of judgment.
Indeed, this teaching appears in the
Augsburg Confession, Art.
To illustrate the inter-confessional possibilities of the
Augsburg Confession, Seltmann appealed to St.
(1.) The
Augsburg Confession (1530) http://www.ctsfw.edu/text/boc/ac/
Both documents set the same conditions for full communion: recognition that both the Lutheran
Augsburg Confession and the Book of Common Prayer contain "the essentials of the one catholic and apostolic faith," a common understanding of baptism, Eucharist and the authority of Scripture; and a full acknowledgment of the authenticity of each church's ordained clergy.
"In the 1980s he was even interested in declaring the
Augsburg Confession [the first Lutheran declaration of faith] a Catholic document.
At first he was seen by Catholic theologians as a conciliatory spirit who might even be brought back into the fold; but his Apology for the
Augsburg Confession showed him to be no less an enemy of the people than Luther.
"Since preaching was the prominent channel of spreading the message, law and gospel also became a principle of Lutheran proclamation." (1) In the Apology of the
Augsburg Confession, Melanchthon highlighted the law's role to indicate the need for repentance and forgiveness.
This be gathered after explaining Benedict's attitudes to other confessional traditions (Anglican, Lutheran, and Orthodox) and to controversies internally and inter-ecclesiastically in the aftermath of Vatican II, as well as in ecumenical proposals (such as the Memorandum of ecclesiastical offices [1973], the Fries and Rahner Plan [1983], the
Augsburg Confession of Faith [1980], and the "Joint Declaration of the Doctrine of Justification" [1999]).
The West has seen some widely accepted confessions of faith, such as the
Augsburg Confession, the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, the Westminster Confession of Faith and so on.