Wittenberg calvinizans: The Involvement of Melanchthon, Peucer, and Eber in the Bremen Sacramentarian Controversy, 1560

JANSE "Ich will ihn pro damnato halten" (I wish to regard him as damned), were the words Luther used to an unsuspecting Melanchthon in order to pillory the Strasbourg reformer Martin Bucer in August 1544.2 The statement was a reaction to the un-Lutheran paragraph on the Lord's Supper in Bucer's Cologne Church Order of 1543. 3 The fact that Luther's furious outburst revealed unconsciously and indirectly the heterodoxy of Bucer's co-author -Melanchthon himself -knocked the ground from under Melanchthon's feet, it is true, 4 but it established a historical fact: the Wittenberg Faculty of Theology did not have a homogeneous doctrine of the Lord's Supper.5 An earlier version of this article was presented as a paper at the 1995 Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, San Francisco, California, October 26, 1995.Travel for this paper was supported by the Stichting Leids Universiteits-Fonds.I am