Book of Concord source text
- Document
- Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration
- Article/chapter
- Erroneous Articles of the Anabaptists
- Source pages
- 603-604
- Numbered paragraphs
- 19
- Source status
- public-domain / publicly licensed source text
Erroneous Articles of the Anabaptists.
9]Namely, for instance, the erroneous, heretical doctrines of the Anabaptists, which are to be tolerated and allowed neither in the Church, nor in the commonwealth, nor in domestic life, when they teach:
10]1. That our righteousness before God consists not only in the sole obedience and merit of Christ, but in our renewal and our own piety in which we walk before God; which they, for the most part, base upon their own peculiar ordinances and self-chosen spirituality, as upon a new sort of monkery.
11]2. That children who are not baptized are not sinners before God, but righteous and innocent, and thus are saved in their innocency without Baptism, which they do not need. Accordingly, they deny and reject the entire doctrine concerning original sin and what belongs to it.
12]3. That children are not to be baptized until they have attained the use of reason and can confess their faith themselves.
13]4. That the children of Christians, since they have been born of Christian and believing parents, are holy and the children of God even without and before Baptism; and for this reason they neither attach much importance to the baptism of children nor encourage it, contrary to the express words of the promise, which extends only to those who keep God’s covenant and do not despise it, Gen. 17:9.
14]5. That a congregation [church] in which sinners are still found is no true Christian assembly.
15]6. That no sermon should be heard or attended in those churches in which the papal masses have previously been said.
16]7. That no one should have anything to do with those ministers of the Church who preach the holy Gospel according to the Confession, and rebuke the errors of baptists; also, that no one should serve or in any way labor for them, but should flee from and shun them as perverters of God’s Word.
17]8. That under the New Testament the magistracy is not a godly estate.
18]9. That a Christian cannot with a good, inviolate conscience hold the office of magistrate.
19]10. That a Christian cannot without injury to conscience use the office of the magistracy in matters that may occur [when the matter so demands] against the wicked, neither can its subjects appeal to its power.
20]11. That a Christian cannot with a good conscience take an oath before a court, nor with an oath do homage to his prince or hereditary sovereign.
21]12. That magistrates cannot without injury to conscience inflict capital punishment upon evil-doers.
22]13. That a Christian cannot with a good conscience hold or possess any property, but is in duty bound to devote it to the common treasury.
23]14. That a Christian cannot with a good conscience be an inn-keeper, merchant, or cutler.
24]15. That married persons may be divorced on account of faith [diversity of religion], and that the one may abandon the other, and be married to another of his own faith.
25]16. That Christ did not assume His flesh and blood of the Virgin Mary, but brought them with Him from heaven.
26]17. That He is not true, essential God either, but only has more and higher gifts and glory than other men.
27]And still more articles of like kind; for they are divided among themselves into many bands [sects], and one has more and another fewer errors, and thus their entire sect is in reality nothing but a new kind of monkery.
