New Bilingual Edition: Luther's Von den Conciliis und Kirchen (1539)
I am pleased to announce the completion and publication of a new bilingual edition of Martin Luther’s Von den Conciliis und Kirchen (On Councils and the Church), originally published in 1539. This work represents Luther’s mature ecclesiology—a systematic examination of what authority the ancient councils of the church possessed, what they actually decided, and how those decisions relate to Scripture. The second half develops Luther’s sevenfold mark of the true church, a question of enduring importance for Lutheran theology.
The German text is drawn from the Walch edition of Luther’s complete works (Concordia Publishing House, St. Louis, 1907), the foundational nineteenth-century compilation that shaped American Lutheran scholarship. The German source was carefully cleaned through multiple OCR correction passes, verified against the original Fraktur PDF. The English translation was produced by Claude, working paragraph-by-paragraph with constant alignment verification to ensure fidelity to Luther’s thought and register. A scholarly glossary of Early New High German vocabulary, calibrated to B1-B2 proficiency, accompanies the text.
The bilingual edition is available in two formats: a print-quality PDF with per-page lexical support, and an interactive HTML version with dark mode, synchronized columns, and hover-tooltip glossaries. Both offer the full side-by-side German and English text alongside the complete Wörterverzeichnis.