Robert Kolb That readers find many similarities between a Reformed or Calvinistic presentation on baptism and a Lutheran discussion of this “sacrament of the covenant of grace” should not be surprising. John Calvin often expressed his debt to the Wittenberg Reformers Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon. He used Luther’s catechisms and Melanchthon’s dogmatic textbook, the Loci communes theologici, in constructing his initial editions of his monumental Institutes of the Christian