Concordia Triglotta – now in Google Books (Part 1)

      Up until now, my only online source for all things "Lutheran Confessions" or "Book of Concord" was BookOfConcord.org sponsored by the LC-MS.  The searchable text, the parsed and hyperlinked paragraphs, the links to sources, etc. have been of immeasurable benefit.  I have stated elsewhere that I consider it the main online source for all things related to the "Lutheran Confessions"…  and it is freely available.  Truly the one who did the work (Norm Fisher?) of preparing all the digital material for this website has done a great service for the Church.  Unfortunately this site's doctrinal article that states

"Scripture is authoritative, according to our Confessions, not because it contains and proclaims the Gospel – the Gospel is proclaimed in many writings – but because it is God's Word"

is clearly no longer applicable to today's teachers of the LC-MS who say the Bible is a "plastic text" and is not of divine origin but divine-human origin.

Now on Google Books

      However, it has come to my attention (perhaps others may already be aware of this… I wasn't) that the complete printed Concordia Triglotta was made available by Google Books (and HathiTrust - full view) as of January 6, 2017 ("Digitized Jan 6, 2017").  What a wonderful celebration of the 500th Anniversary of Martin Luther's Reformation by… Google Books, HathiTrust, and the library of the University of California! Thank You!  (oh,… hmmmm)

      Anyone familiar with this massive book (I have the 1988 Northwestern Publishing reprint) knows that it includes Friedrich Bente's masterful Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. 

      I suppose someone from Concordia Publishing House (Paul McCain?) or Concordia Historical Institute or even Northwestern Publishing House (NPH) could inform us:  just when did CPH quit selling their 1921 Jubilee edition?  WorldCat shows that in 1955 Mott Press produced "An exact reprint of the original Concordia Triglotta, published in 1921."  And why was it that Mott Press and Northwestern (1988 & 1999), not Concordia Publishing, picked up these "exact reprints"?  Just why was it that the 1921 edition, which was the old (German) Missouri Synod's tribute to the 400th Anniversary of the Reformation, discarded?  Could it be that the "confessional Lutherans" of the LC-MS did not care for their 400th Anniversary?  These questions come to mind:

• Do today's "confessional Lutheran" teachers of the LC-MS really care about the 500th Anniversary?
• Should we care about their "celebration" like they care about old Missouri's 400th Anniversary celebration?

So all my future hyperlinking of old (German) Missouri writings which refer to the Book of Concord, or the Müller edition or the Concordia Triglotta ("Trigl.") will now include links to this copy by Google Books.  Anyone (all LC-MS teachers?) using the Tappert edition or Kolb/Wengert edition or McCain's Reader's Edition (which are not publicly available online) will have to figure out their own cross-references.  I am content to know the Lutheran Confessions from old Missouri!  (Isn't the Internet wonderful?)

Latin and German versions
      For those wanting to research the original languages of Latin and German, the situation is irregular, a "mixed bag".  Although Google Books and HathiTrust properly OCR'd the Latin and English texts, unfortunately neither processed the printed German text in fraktur font.  However, the German text is available online at the BookOfConcord site (searchable but not parsed by paragraph), and as a downloadable scanned image (not searchable).  The Latin version is searchable at Google Books, but not at BookOfConcord.org since it is only available as a scanned PDF image file and therefore not available to cite by section or paragraph – an oversight?
      I obtained the digital text documents for German only and Latin only versions some years ago, probably from a Northwestern Publishing House CD digital product.  The following language is inserted at various intervals in their text:

“Lutheran Church. Missouri Synod. (1997). Concordia Triglotta - German : The Symbolical books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Includes indexes. (electronic ed.) (:). Milwaukee WI: Northwestern Publishing House.”

A current search of the NPH website shows no indication that they are selling this any longer, so they appear to have divested themselves completely from all things "Concordia Triglotta".  —   I wonder that the text of these files was extracted by the webmaster of BookOfConcord.org (Norm Fisher?).  Anyway, call me reckless, but I am going to make these digital documents freely downloadable here:

• Concordia Triglotta (Latin)  —  Doc file (2 MB) [Published to web here, searchable]
• Concordia Triglotta (German) — Doc file (2 MB) [too big for Google Docs]

Note: if someone (i.e. CPH or NPH) wants to complain of copyright issues, I will remove the above links.  I am making these files available because the content is already freely available from (1) BookOfConcord.org and (2) Google Books, now in this year of the 500th Anniversary of Luther's Reformation, 2017.  Yes, I will celebrate this, just like the old (German) Missouri Synod did 100 years ago with their Quadricentenary Jubilee, I will celebrate this edition for the

Quincentenary Jubilee anno Domini 2017!

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      To further celebrate this unveiling by Google Books, I want to highlight just one small portion which had a big impact – a Reformation.  It has to do with the doctrine that started my research leading up to the above discovery: Franz Pieper's teaching on "sola fide" or the teaching of "by faith alone" – in my next Part 2a.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -   Table of Contents   - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Part 1 - this blog post
Part 2a - Lutheran shibboleth: SOLA fide– Luther & Triglotta (and Catholic Encyclopedia)
Part 2b - Warfare against SOLA fide
Part 2c - Lutheran confusion of SOLA fide?… not Triglotta!
Part 3 - Triglotta– difficult, impossible, not serious? OR Great work! Golden! (Scaer/LC-MS)