The Catholic Confession: Book I—General, Volume III: Part II, Chapters VI–XII: Apostolic Sources, Papal Decretals, Councils, and Church Authority

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 abandoned the historic catholic faith and established a new religion. This third volume presents Chapters VI–XII of Book I, Part II. Gerhard examines the writings and traditions advanced as witnesses to an unwritten apostolic inheritance: the Apostolic Canons, Apostolic Constitutions, ancient liturgies attributed to the apostles, and the decretal epistles assigned to the earliest Roman pontiffs. He investigates their origins, transmission, contradictions, and reception, exposing the uncertain and frequently pseudonymous foundations upon which later claims of ecclesiastical authority were constructed. Gerhard then turns to the authority of councils and the alleged infallibility of the Church. Drawing upon conciliar records, canon law, patristic testimony, historians, scholastic theologians, and Roman Catholic controversialists, he examines disputed councils, conflicting decrees, forged documents, contradictory judgments, and the limits of ecclesiastical custom. Throughout, he distinguishes the genuine authority of the Church from claims that place councils, traditions, or customary practice beyond the judgment of Holy Scripture. Translated from the Jena first edition of 1634, this volume includes extensive explanatory notes informed by modern textual scholarship, a biographical register of authors and historical persons, and comprehensive indexes of persons, works and documents, and Scripture. It offers pastors, theologians, historians, and serious students of the Reformation an extraordinary documentary examination of apostolic tradition, forged decretals, conciliar authority, ecclesiastical infallibility, and the proper use of Christian custom.