Erastus, Thomas definition of Erastus, Thomas in the Free Online Encyclopedia.

Erastus, Thomas, 1524–83, Swiss Protestant theologian, a physician, whose original name was Lüber, Lieber, or Liebler. As a follower of Huldreich Zwingli Zwingli, Huldreich or Ulrich (h
..... Click the link for more information. , he supported the Swiss leader's view of the Lord's Supper Lord's Supper, Protestant rite commemorating the Last Supper. In the Reformation the leaders generally rejected the traditional belief in the sacrament as a sacrifice and as an invisible miracle of the actual changing of the bread and wine into the body and blood of
..... Click the link for more information. at the conferences of Heidelberg (1560) and Maulbronn (1564) and in a book (1565). In spite of his vigorous opposition to the Calvinist doctrine, Presbyterian church discipline and government were introduced in Heidelberg in 1570. In 1574, Erastus was excommunicated by the Heidelberg consistory, but a year later the edict was removed. Much controversy has arisen over his treatise, Explicatio, written in 1568 and posthumously published in 1589. It declares that excommunication is not a divine ordinance and that punishment of sins should be left to civil authorities. Erastus was motivated by his fear of the usurpation of temporal powers by the church. The term

Erastianism has come to represent approval of the dominance of civil authority in all punitive measures and, by extension, complete dominance of the state over the church, though Erastus himself never held such an extreme view. Erastianism achieved its definitive expression in the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes Hobbes, Thomas (hŏbz), 1588–1679, English philosopher, grad. Magdalen College, Oxford, 1608.
..... Click the link for more information. .

Bibliography

See E. Evans, Erastianism (1931).