The initial stage of the “osiandrian controversy”

On November 6, 1548, Andreas Osiander, a Christian theologian and leader of the Reformation, filed a petition with the city council of Nuremberg for dismissal of the preacher and went through Breslau to Königsberg. This decision is connected with the Augsburg Interim adopted on June 30, 1548, a political and canonical document of a compromise nature that regulates the position of Lutherans in the territories controlled by Catholic rulers during the period of the Council of Trent. In the capital of Prussia, Osiander found himself in the spiritual and intellectual environment of a young university. The “Prussian period” of Osiander’s life, until his death in 1552, was a period of intense discussion with his opponents. The ideas of Andreas Osiander, who agreed with the central principle of the Reformation “sola fide”, contained a different anthropology than classical Lutheranism. Dispute of 1549-1552 around the ideas of Osiander, primarily on the nature of the justification of a Christian, can be divided into several stages. The first stage, with the arrival of Osiander in Königsberg and until the strengthening of the position of the reformer in the city, chronologically and meaningfully adjoins a series of public disputes on organizational and theological issues that have been going on in Königsberg since the opening of the university on August 17, 1544. This article is devoted to the consideration of the initial stage of the “Osiandrian Controversy”.