Reformation
Lutheran
The first Reformation body, and the most conservative of them: it kept everything it was not compelled to give up, including the baptismal exorcism.
In its own terms
What this body is doing
The Augsburg Confession was written to be conceded to. Melanchthon's purpose in 1530 was to show an emperor that the Lutheran position was catholic, and the document spends much of its length demonstrating continuity rather than difference. What it will not concede — that a person is justified by faith apart from works, and that Christ's body is truly present in the supper without the substance of the bread being destroyed — is the whole of the split.
For this section the interesting fact is the baptismal exorcism. Luther kept it. The renunciation of the devil stayed in the Lutheran baptismal orders when much else went, and it was later Lutherans, under Pietist and rationalist pressure, who removed it — which makes this the one branch here where the corpus can watch a position on spirits change without any doctrinal split occurring at all.
Where it stands in the tree
Descent
Separated from
The Latin West · 1517Justification, authority and the sacraments. As with the Great Schism, demonology was not the question — and as with the Great Schism, the answers moved anyway.
The same questions asked of every body
What it holds
Are the gifts still given?
Not established here. Not an exorcism question, and the one that decides the rest. A body holding the gifts ceased with the apostles has no room for a deliverance ministry; a body holding they continue has no reason to license one.
Who may act?
Not established here. The first thing a rite settles, usually in its opening rubric, and the sharpest divide between an office and a gift.
What counts as evidence?
Not established here. Where a tradition decides it is dealing with a spirit rather than an illness, a grief, or nothing at all.
Where is the spirit?
Not established here. All four inherit gospel scenes in which spirits are in people. What each adds beyond that is the largest difference between them.
Whom do the words address?
Not established here. A formal difference a reader can check by counting clauses rather than by weighing tone.
What restraint is written in?
Not established here. Every one of these traditions knows the practice can harm. What each does about that is what popular accounts leave out.
What closes the matter?
Not established here. Whether the encounter ends, and who declares it, separates a rite from an ongoing practice.
This page records what a body holds and where that is written down. It takes no position on whether any of it is true, and nothing here is instruction — the rites are described by what they contain, never as something to follow.