Konfession, Politik, und Gelehrsamkeit. Der Jenaer Theologe Johann Gerhard (1582–1637) im Kontext seiner Zeit ed. by Markus Friedrich, Sascha Salatowsky, and Luise Schorn-Schütte (review)

This book makes available to the wider public most of the research presented in September 2013 at an interdisciplinary conference at the Forschungsbibliothek in Gotha, Germany. That library houses the Bibliotheca Gerhardina, the estate of Johann Gerhard (1582–1637) and his son, Johann Ernst Gerhard (1621–1668), consisting of over six thousand individual titles on a remarkably wide array of subjects. Included are some two hundred volumes of handwritten manuscripts of letters, correspondence, lectures, and other documents from the lives of the Gerhards that remain virtually unknown despite their incredible potential to enrich our understanding of Gerhard and of early modern Lutheran thought and culture. In 2009 the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft sponsored a project to catalog these manuscripts and make them searchable online in their entirety. The conference was organized in light of this newly available source material in order to serve as an impetus for further research into hitherto unexplored areas of Gerhard's life, thought, and influence.

The book shares this worthy goal. Filling in the significant and numerous gaps that still exist in our understanding of one of the most prominent seventeenth-century Lutheran theologians will go far in correcting unfair and less than accurate caricatures of this age known rather disparagingly as the "Age of Orthodoxy." Past Gerhard research has focused on his work as a dogmatician and delved into his understanding of particular doctrines. The research presented here goes further.

The first two sections investigate his influence in the realm of poli tics, a considerable gap in our understanding of Gerhard. The first section, "Political Norms and Practice, Political Advising," includes four essays that address topics ranging from a comparison of Gerhard's political and legal writings that appeared in the lawyer Arumaeus' Discursus academici de iure publico and his theological writing "De magistratu politico" of his Loci theologici (Matthias Schmoeckel) to an investigation of how Gerhard's work of visitation while superintendent of Heldburg served not only an ecclesiastical but also a social and political role, a role with which Gerhard was not entirely at ease and which partly contributed to his acceptance of the professorship at Jena (Siegrid Westphal). The second section, "Religious and Church Politics," includes three essays loosely focused on Gerhard's understanding of the relation between church and state. Ernst Koch examines a Gutachten written by the theological faculty of Jena at the beginning of the Thirty Years War in which they advocated remaining neutral, a stance that reveals their reluctance to let theology be used in support of war, even if between confessions. Joar Haga analyzes Gerhard's view of the independence of the church from the state as contrasted with the view of the Lutheran bishop, Hans Wandal, in the absolutist Kingdom of Denmark-Norway.

The five essays of the third section explore Gerhard's contribution as an exegete, devotional writer, preacher, and philosopher. Against the framework of the preface of Gerhard's Postil of 1613 in which the superintendent of Heldburg discusses eleven different ways of presenting the Word of God, Robert Kolb describes several specific ways in which Gerhard makes use of the Old Testament in his preaching and devotional writings. Throughout one comes to appreciate not only Gerhard's conviction that the entire Old Testament signals and points to Jesus Christ, but also his deep pastoral concern to apply the Scriptural texts in such a way that they strengthen the faith of his parishioners. The last essay is an invaluable addition to current Gerhard studies. Sascha Salatowsky examines for the first time Gerhard's hand-written private lectures on metaphysics from very early in his career (1603/4) before his doctoral work in theology. The lectures are one of the earliest examples of the return of this previously forbidden discipline into Lutheran theology. They also constitute some of the only...