Luther's Greek professor wrote the Reformation's defining confession, and Luther disliked its tone
Philipp Melanchthon arrived at Wittenberg at 21 to teach Greek and became the Reformation's first systematic theologian. He drafted the Augsburg Confession of 1530 while Luther was barred from attending, yet the conciliatory voice that made him a peacemaker also drew charges of heresy from fellow Lutherans.
He was born Philipp Schwartzerdt in Bretten in 1497, son of an armourer to the Count Palatine. His great-uncle, the humanist Johann Reuchlin, suggested he swap his surname, meaning black earth, for its Greek equivalent. At eleven he lost his father and grandfather within eleven days and moved to Pforzheim. Degrees followed at Heidelberg and Tubingen, where reading Erasmus convinced him that genuine Christianity differed from the scholastic theology on offer.
In 1518 he took the Greek chair at Wittenberg and soon joined Luther on a Bible translation. His Loci communes of 1521, built on Paul's letter to the Romans, set out a faith-first account of salvation and seeded the later Lutheran scholastic tradition. He married Katharina Krapp, daughter of the town's mayor, in 1520, and they had four children.
At the Diet of Augsburg, called by Charles V to unify Christians against a possible Ottoman war, he presented the confession largely of his own making, based on earlier articles by Luther. No reconciliation with the Catholics followed, and Melanchthon answered their rebuttal with the Apology. A revised version, the Variata of 1540, signed by John Calvin, softened the language on Christ's presence in the Lord's Supper, and many Lutheran churches still pointedly subscribe to the unaltered text instead.
After Luther's death he was widely seen as leader of the German Reformation, but hardliners around Matthias Flacius accused him of betraying the cause. He had moved from strict determinism to a position called synergism, and during the Leipzig Interim he accepted some Catholic customs as matters indifferent to doctrine. At the Colloquy of Worms in 1557 opponents tried to brand him a heretic. He kept pressing for church peace until his death in 1560.
Source: Philipp Melanchthon
