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

"successfully encouraged the Bernese to grant him a hearing in September 1537." 936 He
and Capito arrived with a short, sacramentally robust confession regarding the Lord's
Supper, yet a confession that mentions the Holy Spirit not at all. 937 Sometime later, at
the same synod, the Genevan ministers Farel, Viret, and Calvin presented a confession
concerning the Lord's Supper as well, the Confessio fidei de eucharistia. 938 Taken to
have been composed by Calvin, it, too, is sacramentally robust, centering its entire
doctrine on the person and work of the Holy Spirit: Though Christ is in heaven and
though we as pilgrims in mortality are neither included nor contained in the
same space with him, yet the efficacy of his Spirit is limited by no bounds, but is
able really to unite and bring together into one things that are disjoined in local
space. Hence we acknowledge that his Spirit is the bond of our participation in
him, [but such that] he really feeds us with the substance of the body and blood
of the Lord to everlasting life, and vivifies us by participation in them. 939
rächt natürlich fleisch verwandlet oder der lyb imm brot verschloßsen werde, sonder geistlich, das ist
geistlicher wis und mitt dem glöubigen gemůt" (Letter no. 4268, WA Briefwechsel 12:255).
936 Bruening, Calvinism's First Battleground, 82.
937 For the text in Latin and German parallel, see BDS 6.1:294-297. Amy Nelson Burnett writes
of this confession: "Despite an initially unpromising situation [in Bern in September 1537], the
Strasbourg theologians succeeded in persuading Bern's clergy to unite behind a confession on the Lord's
Supper. The Strasbourgers confession taught that 'all of those who are in the congregation, approach the
table, and receive the holy sacrament and do not pervert the Lord's word, but who believe it and celebrate
it according to the Lord's institution, truly receive and eat the true body and the true blood of Christ
together with the visible signs . . . not as a perishable food for the stomach, but as food for the soul too
eternal life.' It should be noted that while this confession clearly went beyond Zwingli's symbolic and
representational view of the sacrament, it was by no means a full endorsement either of Luther's own
eucharistic theology or of the Lutheran position contained in the Augsburg Confession. It could be called
Lutheran only in the sense that it accorded with the Wittenberg Concord, which Luther had accepted
(Burnett, "The Myth of the Swiss Lutherans," 51-52, with reference to both BDS and to the "detailed
description" of the synod in Carl Hundeshagen, Die Conflicte des Zwinglianismus, Luthertums und
Calvinismus in der Bernischen Landeskirche von 1532-1558 [Bern, 1842], 74-89).
938 The Genevan ministers were invited by the Council of Bern at the request of Bucer and
Capito. They were requested to present a statement regarding the Lord's Supper, and were looked upon as
a neutral, third party to the ongoing discussion between Bucer, or Strasbourg, and the Swiss cities, given
the rapprochement of Strasbourg with Luther in the signing of the Wittenberg Concord, May 1536. See
Henri Vuilleumier, L'Âge de la Réforme, vol. 1 of Histoire de L'Église Réformée du Pays de Vaud sous le
Régime Bernois (Lausanne: Éditions la Concorde, 1927), 635; and Registres du Conseil de Genève à
L'Époque de Calvin, text est. Paul Hochuli Dubuis and Sandra Coram-Mekkey (Genève: Librairie Droz:
2004), 2:583.
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