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

publication, to discern the prospective assimilation of their thought into his own. 6 In the
third, I listen intently to voices of the Christian tradition, some of whom Calvin
assimilates directly, with explicit references to their thought, and some of whom we
might well wonder whether he assimilates indirectly.
Finally, in the fourth and final part of this study (IV), I listen intently to Calvin's
liturgy and the liturgies from which it is taken to be formed. What is discovered is
striking: While Calvin's doctrine of the Lord's Supper is pneumatologically rich in his
Institutio and in his incidental theological treatises, it is not so in his liturgy. His
exposition of the meaning of the sacrament in his form for the celebration of the Lord's
Supper, and the prayers which accompany that celebration, simply do not account for
the integral work of the Spirit as one might expect given Calvin's persistent appeals to
the person and work of the Holy Spirit in his theological discourses on the sacrament.
So there is, it seems, an interesting failure on Calvin's part to assimilate his doctrine
liturgically. His successors, however, fill this gap, out-Calvining Calvin, as it were,
liturgically and euchologically.
All of this, then, serves as something of a response to an observation made by
Hermann Sasse in his seminal study This Is My Body: Luther's Contention for the Real
Presence in the Sacrament of the Altar. In pressing the relation of Luther's theology to
that of his contemporaries, Sasse writes of Calvin:
The origin of the idea of the Holy Spirit as the transporteur who brings the body
of Christ to us is unknown. Perhaps Calvin was influenced in this respect by one
6 To borrow from the introduction to that chapter: Calvin is a second generation reformer. By the
time he prepared his first doctrinal exposition of the Lord's Supper in the first edition of his Institutio
(1536), those who preceded him in the effort toward reform had already composed and published
numerous, even voluminous expressions of the same.
6