Consequently the count, with the assistance of his chancellor and consistorial advisors, was presiding over this circus, while Ed was watching. In any station of life, a man can find something to be thankful for.
* * *
Somebody made another reference to the Formula of Concord. This, Ed had learned in his desperate pre-conference dash through the applicable chapters of the Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, supplemented by a briefing book that the new Grantville Research Center had pulled together for him from the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, had been produced fifty years earlier as part of a major effort to get all the Lutheran theologians on the same wavelength. It still served as a sort of measuring-stick for orthodox Lutheran views in 1633—and had in the twentieth century as well.
Ed glanced down toward the floor as the conscientious young man at the chalkboard, using his one good arm, quickly wrote the page reference for the audience to follow along. Jonas Justinus Muselius had been in Grantville for almost the whole two years since the Ring of Fire and had a pretty swift head and hand when it came to getting around in three languages at once. He now taught at the new Lutheran grade school next to the controversial church just outside Grantville’s borders.
In his own copy of the Concordia Triglotta, Ed leafed over to the proper page in English. The tome not only had the Formula of Concord, Latin and German on the left-hand page and English with a blank column on the right-hand page, but most of the major Reformation documents that had led up to it—the Lutheran catechisms, the Augsburg Confession, the Apology to the Augsburg Confession, etc. Ed guessed that they were lucky that the Lambert kid was a devout Lutheran. He’d had that book, with the whole thing conveniently lined up in all three languages so the content matched on each pair of pages—all 1,285 of them, index included. Every participant in the Rudolstadt Colloquy now had one, included in the registration packet, which made for a hefty weight in the tote bags.
The publisher in Jena had been happy to get the order. He said cheerfully that if he had any copies left over after the conference, he’d just get someone to smuggle them into England and cause that half-Papist Laud some trouble.
Ed’s pencil wiggled. A doodle bloomed on the upper left-hand corner of page 123 (Apology of the Augsburg Confession, Art. IV. (II.), English version) and gradually expanded to become an illustrated border all the way around the scholastics, the good works, and the “many great and pernicious errors, which it would be tedious to enumerate.” The speaker, clearly, had no problems with tedium. It looked like he was going to enumerate them all. The full sleeve of his gown snagged on a corner of the book; its skirt scrunched up under him, even though he had smoothed it out before he sat down.
* * *
“What is a colloquy?” Ed remembered asking that question when the project of having a colloquy in Rudolstadt to smooth over the differences among and between the various factions of Grantville’s up-time and down-time Lutherans was first brought up. Innocence, blessed innocence! Now he knew. Colloquies were events whereby someone put dissenting parties of theologians and their adherents into a room with spectators and insisted that they keep talking until they reached some sort of a resolution on the controversial issues.
Colloquies did not have time clocks.
This colloquy involved the Flacians, orthodox Lutherans on the model of Matthaeus Flacius Illyricus, and the Philippists, slightly less stringently orthodox Lutherans on the model of Philip Melanchthon—from the 1633 here and now. The two factions had been disputing since Luther’s death, and they were disputing still. In addition to these by-now classic components, it had as a plus factor those interesting up-time equivalents, the Missouri Synod, a largely German-heritage and theologically orthodox organization of Lutherans in the up-time USA, and the ELCA, or Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which appeared to Ed to be pretty much the outcome of a multi-stage amalgamation of the descendants of Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Danish, and some portion of German Lutheran immigrant churches.