In this new video series, our professors of church history explore the significance of some of the Reformation's key players. This week, Dr. R. Scott Clark on John Calvin.
Calvin's letter to Cardinal James Sadoleto [1477-1547] is most impressive a must read which resulted from Sadoleto trying to take advantage of Calvin being away from Geneva for three years. Also, Calvin knew that the Anabaptist doctrine of soul sleep posed a threat to the doctrine of Justification, which is why he published his famous essay psychopanichia [soul sleep] to refute the Anabaptist idea that you had to wait and see if you had eternal life instead, he quoted John 10:28 where Jesus says of His sheep "I give unto them [now] eternal life." The American historian John Fiske says that Calvin's doctrine which says that a Prince is as unworthy as a serf or peasant before God became the impetus in America for democracy because Calvin's teachings were in early America unquestioned.
Are Luther's ideas about the host similar to Calvin's? I read examples showing that even 60 years before Luther, the idea that "Jesus is not really in the host" were known and people were being imprisoned for it.
Not really, he has a treatise on the Lord’s Supper. He essentially holds a view that’s between Luther and Zwingli: more than mere memorialism but not quite Lutheran
