Gerhard Archives - Jack Kilcrease

December 25, 2025December 23, 2025

The Double Benefits of Baptism

Objective and Subjective Justification

Earlier in his Annotations on Romans, Johann Gerhard discusses the nature of salvation in Christ at some length. In particular, Gerhard affirms and grounds the forensic nature of justification in the work of Christ. Contrary to the claims made by some within the Lutheran tradition, the distinction between “objective” and “subjective” justification is not a late innovation. Rather, Gerhard employs the conceptual distinction to explain Christ’s work in both his death and resurrection. Gerhard writes:

He [God the Father] also condemned it, in that He punished our sins in Christ, which were imposed on Him and imputed to Him as to a bondsman. So also, by the very act of raising Him from the dead, He absolved Him from our sins that were imputed to Him, and consequently also absolves us in Him, so that, in this way, the resurrection of Christ may be both the cause and the pledge and the complement of our justification.¹

In a word, Christ paid for all the sins of humanity when they were imputed to him in the crucifixion. Raising Christ from the dead, God the Father “absolves” Christ of the sins of the whole world. This is possible because Jesus has already paid for all sins. Among the many striking images for redemption that Gerhard uses, this is one of the most vivid and compelling.

From this it follows that even before believers subjectively lay hold of Christ in the act of baptismal faith, God pronounces them absolved. Through faith they participate in the objective absolution of Christ in the resurrection. Hence, the pastor does not tell his congregation that “if” they believe, then they will be absolved. Rather, the pastor—serving as the voice of Christ—calls the congregation to trust that God in Christ has already pronounced them absolved.

December 22, 2025December 22, 2025

Cleansing Waters: Baptismal Typology in Gerhard

Johann Gerhard makes the promise of justification, along with its effective outworking in Christian life through sanctification, central to his treatment of baptism. Gerhard writes that God has been faithful to his promises of justification and redemption through the whole course of salvation history. Baptism is simply the covenantal promise of grace and justification as it has been manifested throughout the history of salvation. As his main n premise, Gerhard held that God is faithful to his promises of forgiveness and grace. Therefore, the promise of justification present in baptism runs through various types and rituals in the Old Testament. Ultimately, for Gerhard the sacrament of baptism manifests God’s faithfulness and willingness to forgive sinners for the sake of the blood of Jesus….

Gerhard mines the Old Testament for types of baptism. Those familiar with Gerhard will know that, like others in the period of Lutheran Orthodoxy, he is extremely fond of typological readings of Scripture.¹ … [Christians today may find some of his typological interpretations unconvincing.] However, Gerhard finds more plausible prefigurations of the justifying and sanctifying properties of baptism in the texts of the Old Testament major prophets. God promised the prophet Isaiah that he would give water to the thirsty and pour out his life-giving Spirit (Isa. 44:3-4). He also promised that the resurrected Suffering Servant would “sprinkle many nations” (Isa. 52:15).²

December 19, 2025December 22, 2025

Baptized in the Substantial Blood of Jesus – Literally

Johann Gerhard asserts that the word and the water do not merely mediate the presence of the Triune God. The sacrament also conveys the presence of the risen man Jesus, who possesses a hypostatic unity with the second person of the Trinity. Jesus is not merely present according to his divinity, but also according to his deified and, therefore, omnipresent humanity. The substantial blood of the risen Jesus is literally present in the waters of baptism, which cleans us from our sins. Gerhard writes:

[T]he Son of God in the fullness of time took upon Himself a true human nature and united Himself with it in an indissoluble link. Thus it further follows that He is present at Baptism not only according to His divinity, but also according to His assumed human nature. And especially the blood of Christ is not to be excluded from holy Baptism: 1. Because the Son of God’s true human nature also assumed flesh and blood, in which, with which, and through which His human nature now performs all His works; 2. because the power of holy Baptism arises and springs forth from the merits of Christ and from the shedding of His blood as it occurred on the timber trunk of the cross; 3. Because in holy Baptism we were washed from sins through the blood of Christ; 4 because we were baptized into Christ’s death. Now, however Christ’s death also includes His shedding of blood.¹
Continue reading “Baptized in the Substantial Blood of Jesus – Literally”

February 18, 2025February 18, 2025

Pastoral Disaster: Justification After the Formula of Concord

Throwback Post

Although the Formula of Concord affirmed Luther’s concept of justification by the word, Lutherans of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century quickly returned to the problematic paradigm St. Augustine bequeathed to the West. In this, Lutheran theology tended to take the sacramentalist trajectory in the Augustinian Dilemma.¹ This is probably partially based on the early Lutheran desire to polemically to differentiate itself as a confessional tradition from Calvinism. It is also possible that there were lingering Melanchthonian undercurrents regarding how question of sin and grace was conceptualized. Nevertheless, the largest catalyst for the almost total abandon of the doctrine of election lay in the overreaction to the teaching of a Swiss Lutheran theologian named Samuel Huber.²

Samuel Huber and Theological Overcorrection

Samuel Huber began his career in the Reformed communion.³ Having been censored for some his views of divine grace, he left the Reformed confessional camp to become a Lutheran and taught at Wittenberg.⁴ Huber held that because the grace of God was universal as the Formula of Concord had taught, then it must logically follow that election was also universal.⁵ In teaching this, he was not affirming universalism as many of his contemporaries claimed, but merely conflated election with the gracious invitation of humanity to trust in the gospel.⁶

Aegidius Hunnius, Superintendent and Faculty of the University of Wittenberg

In response to Huber’s claim, Aegidius Hunnius⁷ and Leonhard Hütter⁸ asserted that election is merely God’s passive foreknowledge regarding who would come to faith and preserve it to the end of their lives (ex praevisa fide). Although humans cannot initiate their relationship with God,⁹ humans could lose their faith as Luther had himself affirmed.¹⁰

From the possibility of apostasy, later Lutheran theologians like Johann Gerhard drew the conclusion that preserving or wrecking faith was a matter of contingent human volition (albeit, supported by the power of the Holy Spirit), and hence not subject to the predestining will of God.¹¹ Because God clearly foreknew who would continue to cooperate with him after regeneration and who would fall away, predestination was little more than divine foreknowledge of human faith.¹²

July 1, 2024July 2, 2024

Christ’s Substantial Presence in the Eucharist According to Scripture

The Augsburg Confession affirms the ancient and medieval consensus of the catholic Church that Christ’s flesh and blood are substantially present in the Eucharist: “Of the Supper of the Lord they teach that the Body and Blood of Christ are truly present, and are distributed to those who eat the Supper of the Lord; and they reject those that teach otherwise.”¹ This avowal of the substantial presence of Christ’s flesh and blood in the Lord’s Supper was integral to the Lutheran Reformation from the beginning. In On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Martin Luther criticized the practice of communion in one kind (i.e., the pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic practice of withholding the cup from the laity), transubstantiation, and the idea of the Mass as a sacrifice for the living and the dead. Nevertheless, unlike most other reformers, Luther very clearly confessed the real presence based on canonical and evangelical principles. Since the real presence was overwhelmingly the catholic consensus of the Church from its inception, the catholic principle also applies to this theological question.

Martin Luther, *The Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ—Against the Fanatics*, 1526 (AE 36:329ff.) – image: St. John Lutheran Church, Wheaton, IL

Paul’s Affirmation of the Substantial Presence

First, with regard to the canonical principle, the New Testament straight forwardly affirms the substantial presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. As Luther tirelessly emphasized, the words of institution themselves (“this is my body . . . this is my blood”) do not admit a metaphorical interpretation. The words of institution are a promise regarding the sacramental elements set before the Christian. Moreover, they are also deed-words that accomplish the consecration so that the bread and wine become vehicles conveying the true body and blood of Jesus to all recipients.