"Calvin" Tagged Sermons
Calvin did not invent a new religion; he rediscovered a Biblical Christianity that had been buried, expressed compactly in the five points that bear his name and in government by elders rather than by a single hierarchy. Church and state, on this same rediscovery, belong apart. ‘Orthodox’ simply means straight thinking, which is exactly what Matthew 16:28 is given here.
Four views of the Lord’s Supper get laid side by side here: Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Zwinglian, and Calvin’s own. Calvin took Zwingli’s memorial view and made it something richer, real communion with Christ by the Spirit rather than a bare symbol. The Table, on this account, is a true means of grace that unites believers to Christ himself.
Luke functions as the New Testament’s own theologian of repentance, a role this sermon argues the modern church has largely failed to recover in its teaching. Calvin’s own account of repentance gets drawn in as a corrective. The woman who anoints Christ’s feet in Luke 7 models exactly the encounter between real sinfulness and real holiness that proper repentance requires.