Johann Gerhard - Sacred Meditations

Ken McGuire
Ken McGuire Member Posts: 2,074 ✭✭✭
edited November 20 in English Forum

At the beginning of the 17th century a young theological student wrote a set of meditations on the Christian life, influenced by Johann Arndt.  These Sacred Meditations became a best-seller, and were translated into many languages (including English). And Gerhard became one of the most important Lutheran theologians of Orthodoxy.

At the end of the 19th Century they were again translated into English and published by the publishing house of the General Council.  This translation is still being reprinted by Repristination Press.

For better or worse (in my opinion worse) this translation uses "King James English" which was obsolete then and even more so now.  It makes it a bit clunky, at least to me, but it shows that Pietists were at best highly exaggerating when they described what came before as "dead orthodoxy".

There is a recent English translation by a Saginaw pastor out on the web (http://www.christsaginaw.com/webdocs/Sacred%20Meditations%20-%20John%20Gerhard%20-%20Johnston.pdf ) but I picked this one because it is clearly Public Domain.

Source was Google Books, specifically http://books.google.com/books?id=5m5IAAAAYAAJ&  Calibre converted the Google EPUB into RTF, I then manually cleaned up the resulting file in Word 07.

SDG

Ken McGuire

The Gospel is not ... a "new law," on the contrary, ... a "new life." - William Julius Mann

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