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What is Baptismal Efficacy in the Reformed Confessions: Calvin’s Legacy about?

Chapter Abstract: To round out the narrative of this book, this chapter examines the impact of Calvin’s doctrine of baptismal efficacy on the codification of Reformed theology in eight major statements of faith. Six are from the era of the great national confessions (c. 1555–70), which straddled the death of Calvin in 1564: the French [Gallican] Confession (1559), the Scots Confession (1560), the Belgic Confession (1561), the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), the Second Helvetic Confession (1566), and the Thirty-Nine Articles (1571). The other two are a well-known pair of English doctrinal statements from the mid-seventeenth century: the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646) and Westminster Larger Catechism (1647). The chapter concludes that most of these confessions display Calvinian features in their doctrines of baptismal efficacy. Only the Heidelberg Catechism and Second Helvetic Confession do not go beyond symbolic parallelism to symbolic instrumentalism—another indication of the theological diversity within early Reformed Protestantism.

Author

Lyle D. Bierma

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published

2021

Language

EN