Johann Eck

Here Pipkin introduces an important theme of the book: Hubmaier's life and ministry involved complex falling-out relationships with important figures of the period such as Johann Eck, Johannes Faber, and Huldrych Zwingli.

We are then shown how the Catholic apologist Johann Eck, keen to forestall any recourse to Augustine by Protestant scholars, filtered Augustine's visible, hierarchical Church wielding authority over Scripture through the anticonciliarist tracts of Juan de Torquemada.

It then compares the interpretation of Augustine's doctrine of the church in works by four fourteenth- or fifteenth-century theologians with that of sixteenth-century Roman Catholic (Johann Eck and Georg Witzel) and Calvinist (John Calvin and Theodore Beza) construals of the Father's ecclesiology.