Lutheran confessions.

[Colabomb]

What are the main Lutheran Confessions?

What must a person believe to be "Lutheran"

(I am looking into the Lutheran Church, as I see in Scripture that Presbyter/Bishop were initially the same thing)

[Protoevangel]

An ELCA lutheran can believe just about anything.

An orthodox Lutheran, on the other hand, subscribes to the Lutheran Confessions, which are combined into a book called the Book of Concord (http://bookofconcord.org).

[Lutherrunner]

An ELCA lutheran can believe just about anything.



oh Dan.....you're sooooo dramatic.......;)

[BigNorsk]

Welcome,

I believe the correct answer to what do I have to believe to be Lutheran is...the Bible!

Probably not a totally unique claim among various denominations.

To get a real good feel for Lutheranism the Book of Concord is a pretty good place to start.

Confessional Lutherans would subscribe to the entire Book of Concord as an accurate confession of the Bible. Most synods also have "what we believe" types of statements, part of the reason for this would be because the Book of Concord was written in the 1500's and some things, such as for instance the Charismatics, weren't an issue then so they really aren't covered.

If you go to www.bookofconcord.org (http://www.bookofconcord.org/) you can read the entire thing online. For a quick start, I would suggest reading the Augsburg Confession, The Small Catechism, and the Epitome of the Formula of Concord. Would give you a good feel for Lutheranism. The Augsburg Confession is pretty unique to Lutherans, and the Small Catechism does the best job of spelling out the important things in a relatively condensed version.

My church is not a confessional Lutheran church, we subscribe to the The Apostles’ Creed, Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, unaltered Augsburg Confession, and Luther’s Small Catechism. It's not that we say the other writings in the Book of Concord are wrong, but some of the things get kind of "messy" to defend, like the Smalcald articles for which the orginals are lost, there are German and Latin versions and they don't exactly agree. So instead of fighting over what was probably written, we sidestep the fight by not subscribing to it. The most famous discrepancy is where Mary is called always a virgin in the Latin but is not said to be always virgin in the German.

Marv

[AngelusSax]

Heh, Dan was kidding... the ELCA believes the BOC... we just think that proof-texting it is about as dangerous as proof-texting anything else. That's all. :)