Editor’S Preface
EDITOR’S PREFACE
“This article treats of Christ, who is the center of all prophetic and apostolic Scripture, the foundation of the Church, the treasury of our hope, the fountain of salvation and grace. It is from Him that we are called Christians, and from Him come down all things necessary for our salvation” (§ 1). With these words, Johann Gerhard begins the present volume of his Theological Commonplaces and describes its importance. Here, the mystery of Christ—the heart of Christian faith and life—is set forth in clarity and scholarly erudition.
Gerhard’s Theological Commonplaces began to be published in 1610. After he had finished the entire series, he started over—repeating the commonplaces on Scripture, the nature of God, the Trinity, and the person and office of Christ—but this time in much more detail. The result of his labors was the 1625 Exegesis, or A More Copious Explanation of Certain Articles of the Christian Religion, which was included with printings of the Theological Commonplaces even in the seventeenth century. The present volume, On the Person and Office of Christ (1625 Exegesis), is thus the last volume of the Commonplaces to be written. Gerhard would live and work for another twelve years after the Exegesis was published, before being called home to heaven in 1637.
Regarding Gerhard’s terminology in this volume, a few things can be said. The terms “subsistence” and “hypostasis” mean “person.” Also, the earlier fathers of the Church often used concrete names for the natures in Christ (“Word of God,” “the Man”) in place of abstract names (“divinity,” “humanity”), even though they affirmed the unity of Christ’s person. (See § 253 for an example of this.) Sometimes Gerhard will speak this way as well, though not at all implying that there are two persons in Christ. Over and over, Gerhard stresses the unity of the God-man. Yet, like the early church fathers, Gerhard also speaks of “Christ our God” or “Christ the man,” not meaning two different persons, but meaning “Christ, considered according to His divine nature,” or “Christ, considered according to His human nature.”
When he comes to speak of the “communication of properties” (communicatio idiomatum), Gerhard uses three terms—one Greek and two Latin. Idioma (Greek 
) is by far the most prevalent, and it means “property,” that is, something characteristic or belonging specifically to one of the natures in Christ. Gerhard also uses the terms proprietas/proprium (“property”) and attributum (“attribute”). Often these three terms are used as synonyms. By using the term idioma, Gerhard shows us that he was well aware of patristic Greek teaching on the person of Christ, such as that of John of Damascus, and that he read the fathers in the original Greek. “Property” (idioma) denotes that which is “proper to something or someone” and is thus more concrete than the English word “attribute,” which can be understood as a conceptualization of how something is or as a quality that the mind of the beholder attributes to something. In Preus’s translation of Chemnitz’s Two Natures in Christ, the word translated as “attribute” was usually the Greek word 
. Thus, in the present volume, Gerhard is not introducing an innovation in speaking of the “communication of properties” (communicatio idiomatum)—that is how Chemnitz spoke of it as well.
The attentive reader will note that Gerhard’s arrangement of the three genera of the communication of properties differs from that found in the Formula of Concord. For Chemnitz and the Formula of Concord (and for Gerhard himself in his 1610 locus On the Person and Office of Christ), the communication of majesty was the third genus, whereas here, in the 1625 Exegesis, it is the second. This difference in arrangement does not affect the doctrine, but it can lead to confusion if one is not clear about what genus is being discussed. Already Matthias Hafenreffer, Loci Theologici, 3rd ed. (Tubingae, 1606), and Balthasar Mentzer, Catholisches Handbüchlein (Marburg, 1620; repr., Göttingen, 1938), had switched the order of these genera, putting the communication of majesty (later called the genus maiestaticum) second and the communion of effects (later called the genus apotelesmaticum) third, in order to connect better with the doctrine of the states of Christ that followed.
With regard to the states of Christ, Gerhard speaks of Christ’s “state of emptying” instead of the more familiar expression “state of humiliation.” Gerhard’s term is exinanitio (“emptying” or “emptying out”), which is the noun form of the verb 
(Latin: exinanivit) in Phil. 2:7. The distinction between “emptying” and “humiliation” becomes important in the chapter on the “state of emptying” (§§ 293–319). Gerhard’s Exegesis commonplace On Christ was published during a controversy on the person of Christ within the Lutheran Church, centering on the universities of Giessen and Tübingen during the years 1619 to 1628. As a professor at Jena, Gerhard was not in the center of the controversy; in the present volume he never explicitly mentions this debate. However, part of the controversy dealt with the state of emptying. When Christ was in His humble condition, how are His divine glories and majesty, which were communicated to His humanity, to be understood? Did Christ continue to make use of them, but in a hidden way (the Tübingen answer), or did He cease to make use of them (the Giessen answer)? Gerhard takes a position regarding this question and explains carefully that Christ’s emptying was His voluntary nonuse of His full majesty, power, and glory, not its hiding
(§ 316).
May God grant “that we learn the doctrine of Christ with singular zeal and diligence and fortify our hearts against any corruptions thereof. As Christ is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end (Rev. 1:8), so also He must be the beginning and end in our meditations and studies” (§ 5).
Benjamin T. G. Mayes