So last week, I don't know if you were here, some of you were here, we talked about, who? Who did we talk about? Calvin, that's an easy one, right? All right, so we're gonna just start off by going over a little bit of a review about what we talked about last week, and we'll see if you can get a couple of these right. Okay, are you ready? You at home watching this, I know what you're thinking, so just say it out wherever you are. All right, last week we talked about Calvin. Calvin was from where? At least get the country. What country? France. Thank you. What city did Calvin study in? No croissants here. Paris. So he studied in Paris. He wanted to go to which city to live after he exiled from Paris? Anybody? Strasbourg. He wanted to go to Strasbourg, but he ended up in which city instead? Geneva. Okay, okay, okay. You got some of them, all right. You got some of them. That's a start, but it's early, right? It's early. Okay, so I'm just gonna start with a very brief review of kind of the things that we chatted about last week, and then we're gonna move on, and we're gonna talk about what Calvin did in Geneva, and we're gonna start talking then about some of Calvin's teachings, and how they compared and contrasted to both what we have today, as well as to some of his contemporaries, and then Lord willing, in the coming weeks, we will do more of the same. So John Calvin, he's from a city which is about 60 miles north of Paris, grows up with a few siblings. Mom dies when he's young. Dad sends him to Paris. He's in Paris, and he's studying. Very studious little boy, Catholic church. This is kind of around the time of the Reformation, the 95 Theses, right? A little bit before that. Yeah, around the same time. Calvin's getting up at 4 o'clock in the morning to have prayers. 5 o'clock, he's going to Mass. And then 6 o'clock, he's going to some other sort of service. I forget what it was. But he's going through this regimented day, which this is kind of how he spends his youth, being well-educated. Studies a couple of things, including law and including theology. Started out more with theology. Moved later into law. Came back to theology. Was known as a humanist. So very intelligent guy. very well-spoken, wrote very well, was a humanist in France. During this time, of course, you have the 95 Theses, you have Lutheranism, as we might refer to it, the ideas of the Reformation spreading throughout Europe, and so this is happening in France, too. And so Calvin is listening to this, and we don't have lots of data to go back to and look at and read about his conversion into Protestantism. But we see the evidence of it taking place. So he's in Paris. We talked about this affair of the placards where people are taking these Reformation ideas and they're writing them down and they're posting these little placards throughout the city. One of these ends up on the king's bedroom door. Things go south from there and the people have to start making themselves scarce or they're getting arrested and executed. Then we had the event with Nicolas Copp, the rector there in Paris. where he gives this address, and in this address we hear Reformation ideals being taught. And so he's now persona non grata, he has to leave town. And Calvin leaves at the same time, and it is believed by some that Calvin actually wrote the speech which dealt with the issues of grace that Luther was teaching about. All right, so all of this happened. This is kind of his background. There was no Diet of Worms for Calvin. There was no tower conversion experience. This is a man who spent his formative years during the events of the Reformation. So he was coming to age at a time in which the ideas of Reformation had been introduced. So he was not the Luther, he lived, I think his life definitely overlapped with Luther, but the ideas that Luther introduced and that others introduced were making their way and then he, in his studies, comes to embrace these ideas and then he flees Paris because because of that, right? And so Paris was obviously Catholic. The French king was very Catholic. He came down pretty hard on anybody that went in the direction of the Protestants, and so many people left, right? And so there are a lot of exiles, including John Calvin. So this in itself is a very important fact, and what later transpired in Geneva. Because, let's move over to Geneva in our thoughts now. What did we say about Geneva? Geneva was a city that was, in its territory, part of the governing of the House of Savoy, and the House of Savoy was Catholic. Geneva was a smaller, not very militarily strong city, and it was invaded by neighboring Bern, which was a Protestant city. And so, Bern sent in the military, took over Geneva, then sent in some missionaries, including Pharrell, who we learned about later, right? And so, these missionaries that came over, of course, were Protestants being sent over by the military overlords now. And so, that is this situation. You have a city of Geneva which is very let's say, in a bit of turmoil because of this military conquest. It was also in turmoil because you had a lot of these folks coming over from France. Now, Geneva, if you go there even today, of course, it's French-speaking. It's part of the French-speaking part of Switzerland. What it is not is French. It is French-speaking. Okay, so what does this mean for these people coming over there? They were regarded as a bunch of Outsiders, right? There are a bunch of outsiders. Calvin and people like him were outsiders. Not everybody embraces outsiders. It's true today and it was probably more true then. I think we're more embracing those from other places now compared to that time. So Calvin would have been one of these outsiders, one of these French-speaking exiles that came in. And not only that, but he was a young guy, right? He was in his 20s, right? So he comes into Geneva and he's an outsider, he's an exile, he's a young upstart, and he wants to change the world. And so he tries to do that. with Pharrell's assistance and with the assistance of other people, and meets a lot of resistance. And so the resistance that he met was heavily due to the fact that he was going up against the council, the city council, that governed things. And not only did they govern secular things, but they governed sacred things as well. They governed the church. And so Calvin found himself butting heads against those folks. Remember, Bern, Protestant city, had introduced its own liturgy, its own government, and so it's not as if Calvin was going up against a Catholic government. He was going up against a Protestant government where he had differences of opinion about different things. So there was some butting of heads between him and these governing authorities. Young upstart, trying to change the world. Loggerheads with these governing authorities. Military takeover, a lot of stuff going on. We think there's a lot of stuff going on in our day. You can just about imagine what life would have been like for him. In this environment, he's trying to reform. So you can imagine the difficulties involved with that, right? In this environment, he's trying to reform. So I'm not gonna spend a whole lot more time talking about that other than there were a lot of difficulties, and eventually he had to leave because of them. So he goes over to Strasburg, which is where he wanted to go the entire time, and just live a quiet life, and be a professor or something like that, and write his books. So he goes to Strasburg, and he's happy as can be, and he spends a few years there, learns, grows, gets married, comes back, a bit matured, a little bit older, takes his experience with him, and now he's ready to re-engage. So he comes back and he re-engages in Geneva. And how did that happen? You'll recall that this person named Soldato, who was a bishop in the House of Savoy, he reached out to the people of Geneva and said, look folks, you tried your reformation, didn't work, right? Things didn't work out so well for you, why don't you come back to the fold of the Catholic Church? So the powers that be selected Calvin to make a response to this person, Calvin does that. A lot of people are very impressed with how he does it, and so he's invited back into the city to work and to teach, to preach, and to help lead. And so they send over an armed entourage, they bring him back, they give him a nice big house, they give him a nice salary, show him all kinds of respect, and boy, things have changed in three years, haven't they? Okay, so that is the situation in which we find ourselves today. And we also, it bears mentioning just how much he worked. He preached something like 250 sermons a year. You can just about imagine the work that went into that. Twice on Sunday and alternate weeks every day of the week. So that's a lot of preaching, right? Okay, so he comes back to Geneva, and again, how is Geneva reformed? Well, more or less by military conquest. Yeah, and the military, those who had taken over the city, sent in Farel and other folks to do their work there as missionaries. But this is a place in a bit of turmoil, so we might think about Geneva as being a little bit reformed, but certainly not all the way down the path, right? All right, so what does Calvin do besides preach? He introduces a series of ecclesiastical ordinances, which being signed into law by the government, places the governing of the Church of Geneva in the hands of the consistory. And so if you are like me and you grew up in the Reformed Church, the consistory is a term that you probably recognize. I think the way that we referred to it was a kind of a group of both pastors, elders, and deacons. So that was not far off from what he called the consistory. This consistory, however, was more of a political body, okay? And so it was formed of people like elders and pastors, but it was a political body. And so you gotta understand and remember that at this point we don't have the strong separation of church and state that we have in our own day. This was a political body that oversaw the day-to-day activities of people. And we say, you know, our elders do a bit of that, don't we? We help oversee and shepherd the flock. But this consistory, my impression is that they were very heavily involved in the day-to-day activities of the people. And so they govern and oversaw these lives to the end that they, they wanted to govern in such a way that they would lead people to live godly lives. And so they introduced, to that end, a degree of discipline. What happens when you don't hold people accountable for their actions? It's like me, you speed on your way to church. So, you don't hold people accountable for their actions, then you have a lot of loose living. So this consistory oversaw these activities of the people from day to day. If you didn't show up to church regularly, you would be seeing the consistory. You drank too much habitually, you would be seeing the consistory. You abused your children, you get the idea, right? So these people were overseeing these daily activities. And I have with me a little book, which you might like, It's called John Calvin, A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine and Doxology. It was written, I think, around the time of Calvin 500, or Reformation 500. Ferguson, Robert Godfrey, Michael Horton, a host of other well-known characters, pretty good stuff. I'm gonna just read a brief passage to you just to give you the flavor, or I'm gonna read the whole thing, just to give you the flavor of of what these people, what this consistory did. All right. It required parents to bring children to church for weekly catechism classes. Can you hear me now? Yeah. All right. We're back online, folks. A little technological glitch there, but we're back at it. All right. Quoting again from this book that I told you about, it required parents to bring children to church for weekly catechism classes It established weekly and quarterly meetings for the ministers for the sake of edification and mutual corrections. So what these guys would do, these ministers, they would get together on Fridays, and there would be somebody selected to preach. And so he would preach, and then after that sermon, the other ministers would have listened, they would respond. This whole idea of iron sharpening iron, they would talk to each other, they would get feedback. And so there would be mutual learning and edification. So this is something that happened, I think, every Friday. for the various ministers of the city. Interesting, right? I guess when I read this, I thought, well, maybe it was a little bit like, you know, those who today go to the seminary, you know, that they probably have to do that same type of thing, where they're listened to and critiqued and so on. So ongoing education for ministers, very interesting. All right, but more to the work of the consistory. In 1542 alone, the members of the consistory heard 320 cases. Half of these concerned such irregularities as people staying away from services and the ignorance of catechism. Others involved Genevans who had persisted in Roman Catholic devotional practices or dabbled in magic. In several instances, the consistory insisted the offending parties acquired Bibles for use in the home. or hired teachers who would offer instruction in the teachings of the church. By 1550, the number of cases before the consistory had increased almost twofold to 584. The jump stemmed from an expansion of subjects for the pastors and elders to oversee the lives of their flocks. In addition to correcting the religious practices of the city's residents, the consistory sought to resolve family quarrels, domestic assaults to correct sexual impropriety, misconduct, gambling, lewd dancing, deceitful business practices, et cetera. Almost as many instances of discipline addressed Genevans who had spoken disrespectfully to the city's pastors. So I guess a couple of thoughts as we think about that consistory. One is that, boy, these guys had a lot of work to do. And the other is simply that it presents itself to my mind. We think about Calvin going in and teaching and preaching and trying to reform and having struggled the first couple of years that he did that. Reformation does not happen overnight. It takes time and it takes a lot of work. And I think that's what we're seeing here. And I think that's not isolated to their time either. Reformation in our own time, even in our own circles, is an ongoing thing. It does require discipline. And it is not something that happens overnight in the heart and the mind of an individual or in a group of people. But I thought this was very interesting. So if you are interested, John Calvin, A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine and Doxology from Reformation Trust. All right, moving right along. Okay, so John Calvin was not the only exile in Geneva, of course, and we talked about there being a lot of folks from France, but it was not only France. During this time, there was persecution abroad, of course, and some of this persecution occurred in England, right? And there was a particularly notorious person in England who was responsible for some of that persecution of Protestants. And does anybody remember her name? I'll give you a hint. It's also the name of a cocktail. Bloody Mary. Good to know your cocktail's better than your church history, yeah? Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary was in power, and so one of the people, or I should say in general, some of the people that were there were English-speaking, right? And so one of the people that ended up in Geneva, of course, was John Knox. John Knox was, of course, we think about the Presbyterian Church, or Presbyterians here. Where does that come from? Scotland, the teachings of John Knox, right? So that goes back to Geneva with Calvin. So our roots here, are very closely related to the stuff that we're talking about. Our spiritual roots go back to this time and place. It's interesting to know. So John Knox was there, and he's taking this all in. He thinks, this is great. This is great. This is a very good model. But not everybody was so enthusiastic. So John Knox was an example of somebody who was, who really embraced it. But there were those who, of course, did not. And one such person was a physician, I believe he was a Spanish physician by the name of Cervides. Some of you might have heard of him, some of you maybe haven't. I wasn't very familiar with this guy before studying this, but I had heard of him. But Cervides... was a Spanish physician, and he and Calvin went way back. I think a lot of people don't know this. Cervides was a bit of a humanist himself. He had lived, I think, in Paris. I believe he had lived in Paris. At any rate, he had known Calvin. He and Calvin had corresponded in the past. Calvin knew who he was. Calvin knew what this guy believed. Cervides knew what Calvin believed and had followed his writings and his career. And he's a little bit of an odd individual because, aside from having a lot of weird ideas, he kind of hounded Calvin and sent him dozens, literally dozens of letters challenging him on everything under the sun. And so Calvin responded to some of these and some of these he just ignored. But at any rate, Servetus, what kind of ideas did he have? He thought papacy was the invention of the devil. He didn't believe in original sin. He didn't believe in the Trinity in the sense that we do, at least. He seemed to be pantheistic in his views of things. God and creation are not separate. He was apocalyptic in his outlook. He thought that the world was gonna end very soon. You know, you run into people like this today, too, don't you? They have a lot of, you know, Interesting ideas, yeah? And sometimes these folks are not afraid of making their ideas heard. You might have run into folks like that. And he was one such person, okay? So he hounded Calvin in writing day after day, and Calvin kind of ignored a lot of this stuff. Servetus ends up getting himself kicked out of one place and going to another. He ends up in, somewhere in Austria. Vienna, I think. He ends up in Vienna. Catholic, of course. And so those guys arrested him and they were gonna try him and he would've been executed, of course. I don't know if it's of course, but he would've been executed. And he escapes. So, around this time, he had correspondence with Calvin and he wants to come to Geneva. And John Calvin listens to this. He says, do not come to Geneva. And he knew what Servetus believed. He said, do not come to Geneva. And I'm gonna try to paraphrase his tone here. Calvin, speaking to Servetus, says, don't come here. If you do, I cannot help you. You're gonna end up getting in trouble. You're gonna get arrested. You're gonna get executed. I don't have the power to save you. And honestly, Calvin, the requirements of the time, the type of ideas that he espoused and how he was sharing them, that would have been a capital crime, right? Calvin's saying, don't come here, I can't help you, even if I wanted to, I couldn't save you, these people will not spare you because of me, so don't come. Servetus, of course, doesn't listen. He flees to Geneva and one day, there he is sitting in the front row of church, He's recognized and he's arrested. And so the Genevans are sitting there looking at each other and saying, what do we do with this guy? They talked to the folks over where he had been arrested, and those guys said, hey, please send him back. Extradition, please. And the guys in Geneva said, no, we're going to try him here. But they sought the advice of Byrne. They sought the advice of other folks. And they said, what do we do with this person? And the consensus was this person needs to face execution for his beliefs. And so there were discussions around how that should take place. And Calvin was pushing for a beheading, I believe, which would have been a very quick death. But he was not listened to and Servetus ended up being burned at the stake for his beliefs. Very painful way to go. As you can imagine, my understanding is it takes like a half an hour. You can imagine the torments that people go through. So, Servetus is put to death, and it's very strange, this whole affair, because it's not like he didn't see it coming. He knew exactly what would happen to him if he did the things that he did. So, people have discussed this and argued about this and saying, you know, why did he do it? And the opinions of some of the folks that I've read is he was so apocalyptic in his views, he thought the world was ending, and that informed the way that he behaved himself. And he saw himself as a murderer. And so he seemed to want to face a murderer's end. That, at least, is the take of some of the folks that I've read. Seems to be consistent with what actually took place. All right. What was the result of this? So there was a little bit of a fallout. Most folks rallied around Calvin and Geneva and said, you did the right thing. So Melanchthon, so Luther's key lieutenant, wrote Calvin, said, good job. A lot of other folks were saying the same thing. In other words, with respect to Servetus, wherever he would have gone, he would have faced the same end, right? And people were more or less saying, Yeah. That's what we would have done, too. But that voice was not unanimous. There were also those who took exception to this, and many of them took exception simply because they were opponents of Calvin, and they used this as an opportunity to kind of attack him. But other folks, you can imagine in a situation in a time and in a world where people were routinely persecuted for their faith, right? Protestants, think Protestants especially. If you're persecuted for your faith, you begin, I think, to look askance at people being executed in this manner for things that they believed. Whether you agreed with that person or not, If you yourself are persecuted, you might think twice about having that same type of persecution apply to even somebody like Servetus. So this growing voice was heard. In 1557, there was a book published, A History of the Death of Servetus, which promoted the cessation of execution of heretics. So there was no question among either Catholics or Protestants that this person was a heretic. The question was simply, how might we have better handled this? So because of that event, notwithstanding the fact that pretty much everybody agreed on what should take place, Calvin got a black eye, which among people who study the Reformation to this day continue to look at that and say, look at this guy, he was the tyrant of Geneva and look what he did. Doesn't really square with the facts, but there was a lot of historical context that needed to be taken into account. But anyway, you can kind of see how events started to unfold, whereby later in the Americas, of course, what do we have? One of the foundational rights is this freedom of religion, right? Later, in later years, Servetus' writings were recognized by many people as being foundational to their own thoughts. So I'm thinking specifically of Unitarians, people who don't believe in the Trinity, and other people, Enlightenment folks. Servetus was not really an Enlightenment guy, but they looked back at him as being somebody who stood up to the church and voiced his own thoughts and as bizarre as those thoughts were, that he stood up for them. And so Unitarians to this day look back at Servetus as being kind of a foundational leader to their own movement. You can look it up if you wish. All right, so I want to talk a little bit about Calvin's last years. And after that, we're going to get into some of his teachings. As we said, reformation is not something that takes place overnight. It took a long time. It took a lot of work. 250 sermons a year by Calvin alone. Of course, you had this host of other preachers who were working alongside him. And you had this consistory that was doing its diligent work to reform the way that people live, to give them admonition, to lead them, to shepherd them, to give them discipline. And so this discipline which had been sorely lacking in prior times was now applied and it really changed in time the way that the city lived. So Geneva went from being kind of a half-baked Reformation city to being a city that we still look at today and think of the Reformation, don't we? In fact, if you go to Geneva, there is a Reformation museum that you can go to, and it's really quite interesting. I've been there a few times. And in this Reformation museum, they have a lot of great information. I got into trouble there once, actually. They had this little wind-up toy where, I went back to the days of the Reformation, that you could kind of turn a crank, and then it had a little a little platform with Luther on one side and the Pope on the other, and then, you know, the thing went back and forth, and so I was kind of playing with that a bit, and they started saying things to me in French. Pardon my French. All right, Calvin's last years. So Calvin, he was, of course, living in the 16th century. Pre-modern times, people suffered a lot. Calvin was no exception. He was sick for much of his life. He suffered from that. He was involved in a number of controversies. We talked about Servetius. There was a split at the time in Lutheranism, maybe some of you know about this, we're not gonna go into it now, between those who followed Melanchthon and those who followed this other movement. And so somehow Calvin was involved with that, tried to kind of voice his own opinion on behalf of the Swiss reformers. So that was difficult for him. And he had difficulties with some of his friends. So remember Pharrell, kind of the crazy guy who had to kind of leave, crazy in not necessarily a bad sense, right? But not the most diplomatic person. So remember, Pharrell had gone over to Neuchatel, neighboring city, and become a pastor. Pharrell is now 59 years old. He gets married to a 16-year-old girl. Yes. So Calvin looks at that and says, are you nuts? You're 59 years old. She's 16. You're gonna make us all look really bad doing this. And so he gets all upset and Pharrell doesn't listen. He goes ahead and gets married to this 16-year-old girl. I think they had children. So that caused a scandal, of course, and it caused difficulties in this relationship. Melanchthon, Melanchthon was, by all accounts, a very nice guy. He had supported Calvin in this whole issue with Servetus. But then he seemed to have kind of gone behind Calvin's back and written to a friend doing the exact opposite. So he kind of criticized Calvin, it seems like, behind his back. And that ended up being published. And so that caused difficulties. So there are a number of interpersonal difficulties that he had to face. You can imagine the difficulties that he faced just in his normal work in reforming the city and applying that discipline. He continued to write his book and expand his institutes of the Christian religion, which becomes one of the most successful, most public tracks on theology, even in the English language, right? On February 26, 1564, he gave his last lecture on Ezekiel 20, and on May 27, at the age of 55, passed away in the arms of his successor, Theodore Beza, quoting the Psalms. So, we think, I think of Calvin as this kind of grandfatherly figure with a long flowing beard, but he was like five years older than me, so. You know what I'm gonna look like in five years. Anyway, he died in peace with his friends around him in the arms of his dear friend, Theodor Beza. And the next little bit here shows his modesty. He was buried the following day, wrapped in a plain shroud and placed in a plain wooden casket with no palm and laid to rest in an unmarked grave. So this is not somebody who wanted to attract a lot of attention. We look at people like Luther, And I believe Luther was buried in a very public place, in a cathedral, if I'm not mistaken. And I think it was in Wittenberg. I'd have to double check that. But with Calvin, we see a great deal of modesty. He was not trying to draw a lot of attention to himself. So I think his legacy, the way that he died, was as powerful as the way that he lived. Calvin's legacy and furtherance of the Reformed profession During his lifetime, toward the end of his life, he established the Academy of Geneva, so he placed a lot of focus on education. And this academy sent over 100 missionaries out, especially to the country of France. And so that was a remarkable achievement. Melanchthon revered him and referred to him as the most abler interpreter of scripture in the church and called him the theologian. Spurgeon, that prince of preachers, whom we all know and love, said Calvin propounded truth more clearly than any other man that ever breathed and knew scripture and explained it more clearly. And among those who had been born of women, which pretty much covers most of us, there's not risen a greater than John Calvin. No age before him has ever produced his equal. No age afterwards has ever produced his rival. high praise from some very distinguished gentlemen, right? Calvin introduced the theological standards with his institutes of the Christian religion, which continue to influence our own thinking to this day, and was one of the greatest theological standards of all time for Christian thinking. His influence spread throughout the world, promoting the establishment of Reformed Presbyterian Congregational Churches, and influenced even the teaching of Baptist churches. We just talked about Spurgeon, and think about today of some of our Reformed Baptist friends, right? All right, a few words to England and Scotland, because that is tied in, I think, to our own tradition. Calvin did not spend any time in England. He did not give England a lot of thought. But his writings and his work, of course, were very influential. And they were influential in a couple of ways, and we're going to just briefly touch on that. So we had talked about Calvin as having friends and mentors and brothers in arms, as it were. like Booser. And some of these people were invited by England to come in and to teach, which they did. And these people heavily influenced the education that took place in such places as, I think, Oxford and Cambridge. I want to say Martin Booser ended up in Oxford, if I'm not mistaken. All reports are that he hated the food and that he wasn't very happy. But at any rate, he had great influence there. The teachings of Calvin were embraced by a lot of folks in England, and you see the development of the English church going in different directions, and one of those directions was the direction of the separatist. I guess before we get to that, let's think about the Church of England and the Book of Common Prayer, which is the Book of Liturgy, was influenced by Reformed teachings, so I wouldn't say that It's necessarily completely aligned with Reformed teachings, but was heavily influenced by Reformed teachings and the teachings of Calvin. Over to the side of the separatists, think pilgrims, right? Think some of those who came to America. Puritans, separatists, these people were heavily endowed with the teachings of the Reformation, the teachings of Calvin. Of course, where did they bring that teaching? the American colonies, of course, which formed the early bedrock of religious faith in the American colonies. We think about the pilgrims, we think about the Puritans of Plymouth and the surrounding New England area, what an influence they had later, John, Jonathan Edwards and the like, right? Strong, strong influence. What you may not have known Is that a century before this? Even in going back to the time when Calvin was still alive, there were Calvinists in America. Some of the early settlements, I want to say in South Carolina and Florida by French Huguenots. So the French followers of Calvin had escaped and made their way to America. So there were actually Calvinistic settlements in the Americas at the time of the Reformation. Interesting, isn't it? All right. A few words to John Knox. He merits more than a few words, but this is not so much a lesson on John Knox. We talked about him already. John Knox was in Geneva, and he was watching all this unfold. He was listening to Calvin. John Knox, if you go there even today, you can see his church. John Knox preached to English-speaking folks down in Geneva, English exiles. And if you go to Calvin's church, it's called St. Pierre's. Right next to St. Pierre's, there's another somewhat smaller church, and that was the church where John Knox taught and preached, and it's still there today. And you can go in there, and it's all very interesting. So John Knox was heavily influenced by the teaching of John Kelvin. John Knox takes his teaching back to Scotland. And of course, in time, you have the establishment of the Reformed faith in Scotland in the form of the Presbyterian Church. And of course, that Presbyterian Church later expanded globally, right, to our own American shores. And here we are five centuries later in a Presbyterian Church. And Wisconsin, and where would we be without those who had gone before us, right? John Knox, maybe we might get into him at a later time. There were distinctions in some of his own beliefs compared to John Calvin. He seems to be a little bit sometimes more extreme in his interpretations of things. Among other things, he believed in the right to kill a monarch, apparently. Those were ideas that were considered kind of kooky at his time. And he got into a debate with John Calvin about this. I remember taking this issue up when I was teaching the high school kids several years ago, and we had a discussion about whether it's right or not to do that. And because, of course, John knocks. And you can imagine, living at the time of Bloody Mary, why he would have been led naturally in this direction. But that's an area where the two did not agree. Anyway, moving on to theological issues, we have very little time to go over this, and we're not going to get done, but we will get started. We're going to talk about an issue that was very distinct in terms of how it was seen between Catholics and Protestants and even within Protestants among the different Protestant groups. And you might be thinking, when you think about John Calvin, predestination, but that's not it. We're gonna be talking instead about the Lord's Supper, okay? We talked many eons ago about Luther's view of this, but I'm sure that that is too long ago to remember everything, so we're gonna get into a little bit about what he taught But before we get into the Lord's Supper, I need to introduce to you a little bit of vocabulary which will help us understand things, okay? So don't get wrapped around the axle. Don't worry if you don't understand everything. It's necessary to go through this to understand what comes afterwards. A few points. When we think about Catholics, and their beliefs about the Lord's Supper, what do we think about? We think about this actual physical presence of the Lord's body, and the blood, and the wine, right? And when we think about what that's called, that's called what? Transubstantiation. When we think about Luther, he had a little bit of a different view, and that we refer today as consubstantiation. And there were other views. Zwingli had a different view, Calvin had a different view. Okay, we need to step back and talk about what exactly it meant to be present, okay? So at the time, there were different ways of thinking about how the body could be present. And I'm gonna introduce some terminology here. Local presence, local presence is used to describe the way in which a physical finite thing is present in a given place. I'm standing here, it's my local presence, right? It can't be here and at the back of the room at the same time. Spiritual presence describes the way in which spiritual beings are present. And here's the other one I want you to listen to. Illocal presence. Not local, illocal presence. Describes the way in which finite spiritual beings, for example, human souls or angels, are present. So the idea was, if you're a spirit, an angel or something, or a human soul, you can kind of be present in a different way than you would be if you were just a physical human being. And then there's this other type of presence that's described in a way in which infinite spiritual beings like God are present. So there are all these ideas about presence. I think we tend to be a little simplistic in the way that we think about the Lord's Supper and the way that these people regarded presence. Because we think about if the Lord is in heaven, Jesus is in heaven, physically, he rose from the dead, he went to heaven. How can he be here in a mass, right? Because that was the question. How could somebody so brilliant like Luther say that Jesus, the risen Jesus, his actual body, was somehow in more places than one? That's the question, and these terminologies help us to understand it. I am just going to get underway with Catholic view here, and then we're going to come back next time, and we're going to expound all the rest of the stuff, okay? So hang there with me. Transubstantiation. So I'm gonna read a verse to you, just to kind of set the stage here, okay? This is Matthew 26, couple of verses, 26, 27, 28. Now as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and after blessing it, broke it, and gave it to the disciples and said, take, eat, this is my body. Okay? This is my body. And he took the cup, when he had given thanks, he gave it to them saying, drink of it, all of you, For this is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many for the givenness of sins. But again, this is my blood. This is my body. This is my blood. So if you look at that and you put yourself in the mind of a person who's trying to square this on the surface of things and also be, I guess, I'm trying to think of the best term. Square it with Scripture and also have it make sense, okay? How can one do that? So here you get to the idea of this local versus illocal in these different ways that something can be present, okay? But what is believed to take place in transubstantiation? The bread and the wine are miraculously changed into the body and blood of Christ. Of course, When this happens, if you've ever been to a Catholic service, you sometimes hear a little bell ring, a blessing is given, and then this transformation is supposed to take place, right? Of course, an objective observer, you might stand there and cut this bread, you take the wine, well, looks like bread, looks like wine, tastes like bread, tastes like wine. What is the old saying, if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, right? This doesn't seem like anything other than bread and wine. Well, here is where they say there are two miracles that are taking place. One is this transformation into the bread and wine, and there is another miracle that takes place at the same time, and that is that these elements remain, for all objective appearances, as bread and wine. Two miracles for the price of one. That's transubstantiation. There is much more that could be said. Okay, so I'm trying to simplify things. OK, the other thing that I just want to leave you with, with respect to this transubstantiation, is that what happens during this time? This is kind of regarded as a sacrifice which takes place at every mass. This is a sacrifice that takes place at the mass through the actions of the priest. And so this is regarded as a sacrifice which the priest makes before God. And of course, this sacrament is regarded as something that would infuse grace into the believer. So Luther had a big problem with that. And he rejected that, and we're going to get into how he rejected that next time. But for now, it's 20 after, and we have to close up. So, thank you, and next time we will talk about, we will go through the various views of the Lord's Supper, including Calvin's view, and we're gonna talk about today's, our own understanding of the Lord's Supper. We're gonna go through our own confessions and standards, and see how those compared and contrasted with the teachings of those folks today. Because I think the Lord's Supper is a great mystery, right? It's a great mystery, and even to those of us who have the benefit of looking through All these folks having studied this and having presented us in a very clear way, even to us today, it's a great mystery. So let's take some time and understand that mystery a bit better and plumb those depths, and we'll talk about that, and then we'll get into some of the other teachings of John Calvin and of the Reformation. But let's close with prayer.