ERASTUS, THOMAS (15 24-1583 ), German-Swiss theo logian, whose surname was Luber, Lieber or Liebler, was born of poor parents on Sept. 7, 1524, probably at Baden, Aargau, Switzer land. His adopted name survives in the word "Erastian." He was physician to the count of Henneberg, Saxe-Meiningen, and in 1558 held the same post with the elector-palatine, Otto Heinrich, being at the same time professor of medicine at Heidelberg. His patron's successor, Frederick III., made him (1559) a privy councillor and member of the church consistory. In theology he followed Zwingli, and at the sacramentarian conferences of Heidelberg (156o) and Maulbronn (1564) he advocated the Zwinglian doctrine of the Holy Communion, replying (1565) to the counter arguments of the Lutheran, Johann Marbach, of Strasbourg. He ineffectually resisted the efforts of the Calvinists, led by Caspar Olevianus, to introduce the Presbyterian polity and discipline, which were estab lished at Heidelberg in 15 70, on the Genevan model. One of the first acts of the new church system was to excommunicate Erastus on a charge of Socianianism, founded on his correspondence with Transylvania. The ban was not removed till 1575. In 158o Erastus returned to Basel, where in 1583 he was made professor of ethics. He died on Dec. 31, 1583.
His name is permanently associated with a posthumous publica tion, written in 1568. Its immediate occasion was the disputation at Heidelberg (1568) for the doctorate of theology by George Wither or Withers, an English Puritan (subsequently archdeacon of Colchester), silenced (1565) at Bury St. Edmunds by Arch bishop Parker. Withers had proposed a disputation against vest ments, which the university would not allow; his thesis affirming the excommunicating power of the presbytery was sustained. Hence the Latin treatise of Erastus on excommunication, Expli catio, etc., published (1589) by Giacomo Castelvetri, who had married his widow. It consists of seventy-five Theses, followed by a Confirmatio in six books, and an appendix of letters to Erastus by Bullinger and Gualther, showing that his Theses, written in 1568, had been circulated in manuscript. An English translation of the Theses, with a brief life of Erastus (based on Melchior Adam's account), was issued in 1659, entitled The Nullity of Church Cen sures; it was reprinted as A Treatise of Excommunication (1682), and, as revised by Robert Lee, D.D., in 1844. The aim of the work is to show, on Scriptural grounds, that sins of professing Christians are to be punished by civil authority, and not by withholding of sacraments on the part of the clergy. In the Westminster Assem bly a party holding this view included Selden, Lightfoot, Coleman and Whitelocke, whose speech (1645) is appended to Lee's version of the Theses; but the opposite view, after much controversy, was carried, Lightfoot alone dissenting. "Erastianism" denotes the doctrine of the supremacy of the state in ecclesiastical causes; but the problem of the relations between church and state is one on which Erastus nowhere enters. The only direct reply made to the Explicatio was the Tractatus de very excommunicatione (1590) by Theodore Beza.
See A. Bonnard, Thomas Eraste et la discipline ecclesiastique (1894) ; Gass, in Allgemeine deutsche Biog. (1877) ; G. V. Lechler and R. Stahelin, in A. Hauck's Realencyklop. fur prot. Theol. u. Kirche (1898).