Christian notebook

Bible verse references in Formula of Concord

Matt Maldre

I love books with a ton of Bible verse references. The more verse references, the better.

While listening to the Thinking Fellows podcast episode, “The Reformation: Conclusions“, they touched on how Lutherans are great for basing their doctrine on Scripture alone.

At the 22:44 mark, one of the guys said, 

When was the last time you looked through the Formula? The Formula is kinda like that [has a lot of Scripture references]. The Formula is crazy. The Solid Declaration version is crazy for that. You'll get positive explanations of doctrine. But it's just LACED with Scriptures. It's just LACED with Scriptures. It's reputations are just laced with Scripture. It's very much like that.

My rough count, there are 458 verse references in the The Solid Declaration of the Formula of Concord.

Verse count by section in the The Solid Declaration of the Formula of Concord

I’d like to take the Formula of Concord, and re-lay it out with the actual Scripture verses in the margins. Not just the reference, but the actual verse.

In fact, so the verse doesn’t get plucked out of context, I’d like to take the entire chapter, and put that in the margin. Within the chapter, I’d highlight the verse that is referenced.

If there are 458 verses, does that mean my booklet would have 458 chapters? That would be quite a bit! There are 1,189 chapters in the entire Bible! But of the 458 verses, there are 185 unique chapters. Ok, that’s a little more reasonable.

Of course, entire chapters would not fit into a margin, so maybe the left side pages would be the Formula of Concord. The right side pages would be the full chapters of the Bible. The resulting layout would end up having lots of blank pages on either side. Sometimes you’ll have lots of Formula text with no Bible verses on the right. And many times you’ll have pages and pages of Bible chapters, but nothing on the left. Which is fine. That leaves plenty of space for notes.

And then once I’m done laying this out, I’ll got into my wide-margin bible, and look up every single verse referenced in the Formula of Concord, and I’ll make a little note next to the verse. Identifying where in the Formula this this verse is referenced. That would be cool to be reading along in my Bible, and then seeing that a particular verse is used in the Formula.

For those who’d like to see the full verse reference list by section, here it is:

Exit mobile version