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

often redact the theological inflections of Calvin's early discussions of the Lord's
Supper according to those of his presumed summa on the topic, namely, Book IV,
Chapters 14 and 17, of the 1559 edition of his Institutio—Calvin's doctrine of the Lord's
Supper develops throughout his lifetime. In the final pages of his work, Davis
summarizes his understanding of Calvin's development in the following way:
At the beginning of his career, as he wrote on the Eucharist in his 1536
Institutes, Calvin flatly and unequivocally denied substantial partaking of Christ
in the Eucharist. He claimed that the Eucharist could not, in fact, be thought of
as an instrument of grace. Moreover, he delineated no clear eucharistic gift. . . .
Calvin's eucharistic theology matured. It developed in such a way that Calvin
claimed as essential those very elements that he had originally denied as part of
his eucharistic doctrine. . . . He goes from denying substantial partaking to
strongly affirming it, linking that participation in the body of Christ to the very
means of salvation, Christ the mediator in his flesh and blood. Calvin advances
from denying the Eucharist as an instrument of grace to claiming for it the
highest honor—an intermediary brilliance sent and used by God to illumine
Christian existence. Finally, Calvin moves from no affirmation of a gift to
asserting that there is presented by the Eucharist a twofold gift: Jesus Christ
himself, on the one hand, and the clearest picture possible for sinful human
creatures of the promises of God on the other. 106
Finally, in a brief, heavily annotated study of his own, Wim Janse echoes Davis'
general conclusion. 107 "Calvin's eucharistic views," says Janse, "were not from the
beginning a detailed, coherent, and unified doctrine, of which the Agreement of Zurich
(1549) or the 1559 Institutio are supposed to be the representative expression, but show
105 Thomas Jeffrey Davis, The Clearest Promises of God: The Development of Calvin's
Eucharistic Teaching, Ph.D. thesis, The University of Chicago (1992); published as The Clearest
Promises of God: The Development of Calvin's Eucharistic Teaching (New York: AMS Press, 1995). The
published version of Davis' work is cited in this study.
106 Davis, Clearest Promises, 212. See also Davis, Clearest Promises, 7-8, which also provides a
summary. The conclusions of each of Davis' chapters, which are ordered according to phases in Calvin's
career, also provide summaries of developments in each respective phase of Calvin's career.
107 Wim Janse, "Calvin's Eucharistic Theology: Three Dogma-Historical Observations," in
Calvinus sacrarum literaram interpres: Papers of the International Congress on Calvin Research, ed.
Herman J. Selderhuis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2008), 35-69.
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