THE PROVENANCE OF JOHN CALVIN'S EMPHASIS ON THE ...

Much more recently, three scholars in particular have attended closely to
Calvin's earliest doctrine of the Lord's Supper, though only one has delved deliberately
into the prospective influences on that doctrine. Thomas Davis, whose The Clearest
Promises of God has already been noted in this study, argues convincingly that one
simply cannot take Calvin's doctrine to have been expressed consistently throughout his
entire lifetime, already fully-formed at the time he wrote the 1536 Institutio. 554 Though
Davis plumbs Calvin's thought on the Lord's Supper, including its earliest expression in
1536, he does not plumb the provenance of such thought with respect to Calvin's
predecessors and/or contemporaries. While he makes references, as so many scholars
do, to the "influence" of Luther and Zwingli, he does so generally. 555 Extensive
specificity of "provenance" or "influence" is—understandably—beyond the scope of his
intent, which is, in its essence, to prove "development" in Calvin's expression. The same
may be said of Wim Janse's essay "Calvin's Eucharistic Theology: Three Dogma-
Historical Observations," the point of which is similar to Davis', namely, to demonstrate
'It was one of the fathers who said that the true body was not in the sacrament of the Supper, but only the
mystery of the body . . . . Therefore they overstep the bounds when they make it real and substantial.'"
Ford Lewis Battles, in his translation of the 1536 Institutio, determines this reference is to the Opus
imperfectum in Matthaeum, Hom 11, on Matthew 5:22, and then cites the patristic passage in full (see
Inst. 1536, 238, entry on "word"). Notice Calvin's appeal to this very passage again at the Lausanne
Disputation, at which Calvin acknowledges that this text is spuriously attributed to Chrysostom. In any
case, here Tylenda well applies what Lane will eventually declare a metholodogical principle: Calvin
"marshals" patristic resources as authorities in support of his view. Certainly Tylenda is on to something
here, assessing Calvin's use of patristic thought differently than Niesel and McDonnell after him, who
claim Calvin discovered the Spirit in Chrysostom (Niesel, Calvins Lehre vom Abendmahl, 91-92).
554 Davis, Clearest Promises, 1 and 3.
555 Davis, Clearest Promises, 84-85, working off the studies of especially Wendel, Origins and
Development, and Ganoczy, Young Calvin. In a footnote, Davis writes regarding the 1537 Confessio:
"The emphasis on the Christian's relation to Christ's body and blood, and Calvin's appropriation of this
concept in his later work, may well have come from the influence of Bucer and the way he (Bucer)
appropriated Luther's thought (Davis, Clearest Promises, 92n35). See Ganoczy, The Young Calvin, 118.
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