Thomas Erastus, born Thomas Lüber in Baden,…
1572 CE
Thomas Erastus, born Thomas Lüber in Baden, Switzerland, and a student of philosophy and medicine for nine years, is invited in 1557 by the elector Otto Heinrich of the Palatinate to be professor of therapeutics in the new faculty of medicine at the University of Heidelberg, where he had quickly achieved a favorable reputation as a physician and a teacher.
As a supporter of the church reforms advocated by the Swiss theologian Huldrych Zwingli, Erastus has become closely associated with the introduction of Reformed Protestantism into the Palatinate during the electorate of Frederick III (1559–76).
In debates over the Eucharist, the sacrament deriving from the Lord's Supper, he has defended the Zwinglian view that Christ's body is present in the sacramental bread only symbolically, in contrast to Luther's view that his body is really present.
The central controversy in Erastus' life had come to a head after he had opposed efforts by Calvinists in the Palatinate, notably Caspar Olevianus, to impose the system of church discipline that had been established by John Calvin at Geneva and elsewhere.
When, in 1568, a set of theses had been presented at Heidelberg by the English Puritan George Withers, who had affirmed both the presbyterian system of church government (assemblies of elected representatives) and the practice of excommunication, Erastus had drawn up one hundred theses (later reduced to seventy-five) to refute him.
Erastus maintains that excommunication is unscriptural, that the sacraments should not be withheld from anyone genuinely wishing to receive them, and that in a Christian society—and Erastus explicitly limits his argument in this manner—the punishment of sins is in the hands of the civil magistrates.
Because the Calvinists have the support of the elector, however, the presbyterian system had been established in 1570 by electoral decree.
For his opposition to the new order and also for alleged tendencies away from the doctrine of the Trinity toward Unitarianism, Erastus had been excommunicated for two years.
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