THE GOSPEL
THE GOSPEL
The proper, narrow definition of “Gospel,” as Gerhard explains, is the good news about the free forgiveness of sins through faith in Christ.5 Other, broad meanings of the word are distinguished from this, and it is this differentiation of usage to which much of this commonplace on the Gospel is devoted. A particular focus for Gerhard is the distinction of Law and Gospel, which is different than the distinction between the Old and New Testaments. In his discussion, Gerhard demonstrates his concern for consoling consciences, an emphasis that recurs when he shows that Christ is not a new Lawgiver, when he shows that the Gospel properly speaking is not a preaching of repentance, and when he refutes the “evangelical counsels” of Roman Catholic opponents and the “perfect commandments” of Socinian opponents, etc. In all of these things the Gospel should not be considered Law, or else it would lose its power to console.6
This commonplace on the Gospel is also of interest because of Gerhard’s discussion of the two covenants (cf. Jer. 31:31–34), which he calls the “old and new testaments.”7 (These are the old and new covenants, not the two halves of the canonical Scriptures. The latter are capitalized in this volume as “Old and New Testaments.”)8 Lutheran theology, if dealing with “covenant” at all, follows Gerhard’s biblical teaching here of two covenants.
This commonplace has received little scholarly attention. Some have noticed that Gerhard not only speaks of the differences between Law and Gospel (how they can be known, what they present, their function, their objects) but also their points of agreement: God is the author of both; both are addressed to all human beings; both have eternal blessedness as their goal.9 Indeed, in his Succinct and Select Aphorisms, Gerhard even stated that “the Gospel is parallel to the Law,”10 not contradictory to it nor opposite nor categorically different. Yet there, as well as here in the Theological Commonplaces, most of Gerhard’s time is spent distinguishing the two.11