guarding against the perceived excesses he found in late medieval individualized
piety. Significantly in the Lord’s Supper the dynamic importance of experience and
enjoyment can be seen in Calvin. He confesses, “[n]ow, if anyone should ask me how
this takes place [i.e. Christ’s true presence in the Supper], I shall not be ashamed to
confess that it is a secret too lofty for either my mind to comprehend or my words to
declare. And, to speak more plainly, I rather experience than understand it.”^225
Bishop Edward Reynolds is representative of some Puritans who combined their
teaching of spiritual marriage with the Lord’s Supper.^226 The necessity of grace as the
means for salvation and spiritual marriage is another common conviction of both
Bernard and Calvin. Further, embedded in the above discussion, all of these writers
would agree that betrothal to spiritual marriage occurs on earth and its consummation
must wait until heaven.
The previous examination of the importance of faith and love discovered that
the gap between Bernard and Calvin was not as wide as some might initially assume.
The Puritans and other Reformed descendants continued to develop a more affective
understanding of faith as well as the more intimate dance between faith and love. The
Nadere Reformatie of the late sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries were direct
descendents of Calvin as were the Puritans of England and New England. Arie de
Reuver in his excellent study on Dutch Pietism concludes, “[t]heir mysticism is one
with that which is drenched in the scriptural word that by means of the secret
operation of the Holy Spirit brings about a gracious and highly real faith-encounter
and a loving fellowship with God in Christ--both marked by hope.”^227
225
226 Calvin, Institutes, 4.17.32.^
227 Reynolds, de Reuver, Meditations on the Lords Last SupperSweet Communion, 284..^