Milk for babes: Erasmus and Calvin on the Problem of Christian Eloquence

Abstract

This article examines how Erasmus and Calvin received Paul’s rejection of human eloquence in Christian teaching, and how this rejection forms their understanding of the relationship between language and revelation. It consists of a close reading of Erasmus’s and Calvin’s exegetical works on 1 Corinthians in order, first, to understand their reception of Paul’s negative assessment of human rhetoric, and second, their exhortations to employ a more appropriately Christian rhetoric. It is concluded that W. Bouwsma was correct in suggesting that one ought to imagine Erasmus and Calvin as practitioners of a similar theological methodology, a theologia rhetorica. Charles Trinkhaus first employed this heuristic category to describe certain theological and methodological tendencies among Italian humanist theologians that separates them from their scholastic contemporaries.