Given for You: Reclaiming Calvin's Doctrine of the Lord's Supper

Publisher Review:

The primary purpose of this book is to introduce, explain, and defend a particular doctrine of the Lord's Supper - the doctrine taught by John Calvin and most of the sixteenth-century Reformed confessions. This is not the doctrine that is taught in most Reformed churches today. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, two distinct views of the Lord's Supper gained some measure of confessional authority in the Reformed church. The first view traces its roots to John Calvin, while the second traces its roots to Ulrich Zwingli's successor Heinrich Bullinger. Zwingli's own strictly memorialist view was generally disowned by the Reformed churches and confessions of the sixteenth century. However, from the seventeenth century onward, it has gradually become the dominant view in the Reformed church. It is the thesis of this book that the gradual adoption of Zwingli's doctrine has been a move away from the biblical and Reformed view of the Lord's Supper. It is the thesis of this book that Calvin's doctrine of the Lord's Supper is the biblical doctrine, the basic doctrine of the sixteenth century Reformed churches, and the doctrine that should be reclaimed and proclaimed in the Reformed church today.