The Catholic Confession: Book I—General, Volume I: Proem and Part I: The Principle and Means of the True Catholic Religion

Johann Gerhard’s Confessio Catholica — The Catholic Confession —is one of the monumental documentary works of Lutheran Orthodoxy. Written during the final years of Gerhard’s life, it answers the charge that the churches of the Augsburg Confession had abandoned the historic catholic faith and established a new religion. Gerhard’s method is both learned and audacious. He defends evangelical doctrine from Holy Scripture and the testimony of the ancient Church, while repeatedly confirming his argument through the admissions, histories, judgments, and internal disagreements of Roman Catholic writers themselves. This opening volume contains the Proem and Part I of Book I, the General Book. Gerhard establishes Holy Scripture as the perfect rule of faith and supreme judge of theological controversies. He examines the corruption and promised reformation of the Church, the instruments and occasions of the sixteenth-century Reformation, the commendation and propagation of the evangelical confession, and the historical circumstances surrounding its restoration. Translated from the Jena first edition of 1634, this volume includes an extensive translator’s introduction, explanatory and bibliographical notes, a biographical register of persons cited by Gerhard, and comprehensive indexes. It offers pastors, theologians, historians, and serious students of the Reformation an extraordinary encounter with Johann Gerhard at the height of his powers—and with his sustained case that the Lutheran confession belongs within the one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.