Editor’s Preface
EDITOR’S PREFACE
This volume of the English translation of Johann Gerhard’s Theological Commonplaces contains four commonplaces covering basically two topics: creation (part of which includes the creation of man and woman in the image of God) and predestination (which is related closely to providence).
The volume of the Theological Commonplaces that contained these commonplaces first appeared in print in 1611, sometime after May 30.1 This volume included Gerhard’s letter of dedication, an important writing that was omitted in later editions of the Theological Commonplaces. This letter of dedication gives a short history of systematic presentations of Christian doctrine, along with a few autobiographical remarks, such as the mention of “various calamities, especially domestic.”2 On May 30, 1611, Barbara Neumeyer Gerhard died. She had been Johann’s wife for less than three years, since their marriage on September 19, 1608. On January 10, 1611, the Gerhards’ infant son had died.3 In the course of a few months, at the age of 28, Johann Gerhard had been deprived of his young family. Gerhard’s biographer cites his diary to show how strongly this affected the young scholar and pastor: “Only God, the knower of hearts, knows how much and how bitterly the fate of my sweet wife has inflicted me with a wound. May He soon join me with her and my little son in eternal life!”4 Perhaps it is not a coincidence that 1611 also saw the publication of Gerhard’s Manual of Consolations and his Explanation of the History of the Suffering and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ.5
The first volume of the Theological Commonplaces had been published the year before, in 1610. During this time, Gerhard was superintendent of Heldburg, with ecclesiastical supervision over twenty-six parishes.6
The beginnings of the commonplaces that are being presented here can be traced back to Gerhard’s participation in formal disputations.,7 Beginning on February 5, 1607, Gerhard held monthly disputations in Coburg on theological topics. In advance of each disputation, the list of theses was printed. The disputations on creation and angels, on providence, on predestination, and on the image of God in man before the fall—the topics covered in the present volume—were held on June 1, August 3, and November 1, 1607, and on January 6 and March 3, 1608.8 It appears that these disputations were put into print in a collection, as a sort of short dogmatics: Gerhard’s Succinct and Select Aphorisms.9 This volume was published to give students an overview of theology, and it contains the theses of the disputations that he held at Coburg, though the list of “disputants” in the Aphorisms does not match the names of the respondents on the title pages of the previously printed disputation theses.10 Whatever the previous history of these Aphorisms may be, they are certainly a stage in the development of Gerhard’s famous Theological Commonplaces. The Aphorisms on creation, providence, predestination, and the image of God show the same outline and arguments as are included here in the Theological Commonplaces.