Calvin had studied Plato – no friend to Christianity – and is amused how accurately he depicted (in the Republic) the antics of medieval priests in celebrating the Mass – preying on the innocent and uneducated by fooling them into…
Private Communion (or Masses): Calvin is against them. True, he is against the Mass “period”; but mutatis mutandis he is against private celebrations of the Lord’s Supper for the same reason: the Supper is meant to define the communion of…
The Mass. At the heart of Calvin’s theological method in assessing the value of the Mass is the cross. The Mass signifies an on-going ritual of sacrifice, undermining the “once-for-all” of Calvary. By its constant repetition, it declares all prior…
Scottish Highland Presbyterians need to hold their breath for a second while Calvin refers to an annual Lord’s Supper ritual as “a veritable invention of the devil” [4.17.46]. Calvin then adds, something which he has been cited for ever since,…
One of the other debated issues in the Lord’s Supper, in addition to the question of presence, is that of fencing the table. Who may participate? What does it mean to eat and drink unworthily? Who is worthy? Who is unworthy? Calvin takes…
Calvin continues his discussion of the errant Roman Catholic view of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper by prattling on about one of his favorite subjects to rail upon: superstition and idolatry. The two, for Calvin, go together like ham…
Calvin continues extolling the virtues of the spiritual presence of Christ in the sacrament of communion over and against repudiating the errors of the physical presence of Christ within the sacraments (the view of transubstantiation). One of the dangers that…
Calvin continues his distaste for transubstantiation attacking the notion that Christ’s ascended body is ubiquitous (can be present everywhere in space and particularly in the consecrated sacrament) and invisible (“by a special mode of dispensation”). a) There is no Scriptural support…
Calvin identifies in the polemics of transubstantiation a fatal hermeneutical flaw: interpret the text to fit the theory rather than allow the theory to be governed (in this case, abandoned) by the text. Add to this a suspicion about Scripture’s…
What does “ís” mean in “This is my body”? Metonymy, Calvin answers in the same way that Scripture represents one thing by another in such expressions as, “circumcision is a covenant” (gen. 17:13), the “lamb is the Passover” (Exod. 12:11)…
