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

"Lutheran-leaning," or, as Amy Nelson Burnett would indeed have it, whether
"Zwinglian" or "Bucerian." 908 Capito presided over the synod, and at its end, produced
"an important document entitled simply the Berner Syodus, which was a cross between
a confession of faith and an ecclesiastical ordinance." 909 In its chapters on the
sacraments, Capito explicitly mentions the Holy Spirit and often. 910 Two occasions are
worthy of citation here:
Chapter nineteen: The holy sacraments and baptism in general
. . . . the sacraments are the mysteries of God, or the mysteries of the churches of
Christ. By these external means, Christ is presented to believers, He being
present in the Holy Spirit, filling and imbuing the heart. Therefore, we pray the
Almighty that He would make the use of the sacraments among us to be a truly
divine operation, not leaving it a human undertaking. Thus the great mystery of
God in the flesh will always live and grow in us at the same time that He is
presented externally through the sacrament.
Chapter twenty-two: The Lord's Supper
. . . . The breaking of the bread is no bare ceremony, but a sacramental action in
which there is presented to believers the body and blood of Christ Jesus, who
died for us. This body and blood of Christ feeds us and gives us to drink, albeit
908 Burnett presents a compelling argument against the long-held assumption that "Lutheran" is
the legitimate moniker for one particular theological faction in Bern during the 1530s and 40s. According
to Burnett, this faction is not Lutheran but "Buceran." Scholars' persistent identity of this faction as
"Lutheran" is in keeping with the seminal work of Carl Hundeshagen, Die Conflicte des Zwinglianismus,
Luthertums und Calvinismus in der Bernischesn Landeskirche von 1532-1558 (Bern, 1842). See Burnett,
"The Myth of the Swiss Lutherans," 45-70.
159ff.
909 Bruening, Calvinism's First Battleground, 65. For more, see also Kittelson, Wolfgang Capito,
910 This accords with his rich mention of the Holy Spirit in previous articles, where he declares
that "The Father still speaks to us today by His Son, who through the Holy Spirit dwells in our hearts,"
and that it is by the "inward operation of the Holy Spirit" that we partake of grace in Christ, and that "The
Spirit views the work and miracles of Christ in terms of the inward progress of grace and the spiritual
operations of Christ in the heart," and that "by the same Holy Spirit" by whom Christ was born, we are
made "children of God, if beyond the both which is from flesh and blood we are also made new and
heavenly people." For this reason, Locher declares that "Der Synodus steht in der Tradition nicht einer
sacramentalen, sondern eniner pneumatologishhen Frömmigkeit" (Gottfried W. Locher, "Die
Sakramentslehre des Berner Synodus," Der Berner Synodus von 1532: Edition und Abhandlungen zum
Jubiläumsjahr 1982, vol. 2 [Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1988], 234, 236, and 239
respectively).
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