Who was Philipp Melanchthon?
The answer to the above question depends on who you ask. Skilled in astronomy, classical languages, education, music, and even poetry, Philipp Melanchthon is the ideal humanist scholar of the sixteenth century. Yet he is because of his theological works. He was, after all, one of the reformers of the sixteenth century. He wrote three of the confessions contained in the collected confessions of the Lutheran Church (The Book of Concord), namely, the Augsburg Confession, the Apology to the Augsburg Confession and the Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope. His Loci communes systematized evangelical Lutheran theology and instructed hundreds of Lutheran pastors. He counseled secular and spiritual leaders–the scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam, King Henry VIII, and the reformer John Calvin. He even participated in peace talks between rulers. Philipp Melanchthon was kind, moral, hospitable, and yet timid and frequently ill. He was a peace-minded man.
