To be without Christ is to be without the possibility for salvation; for reconciliation with the living God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Jesus Christ is the ‘point of contact’ between God and humanity; He is the mediator; the high priest that the Aaronic and Levitic priesthoods could only foreshadow; He is the Melchizedekian priest of the tribe of Judah with no genealogy, other than being the Word of the Father. It is this canonical reality that paves the way to the census road to Bethlehem, and finally to the via Delarosa. Jesus Christ, He is the scapegoat, and the Passover Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. ‘In Christ’ the crescendo of all the ages is given the resounding boom of the Father’s thunderous voice that simply states: ‘this is my beloved Son, hear Him.’ He alone bears the weight of all the governments of the world; who alone is wonderful; who by Him all things hold together in the seen and unseen reality of the Triune God’s cosmos which serves as the theater of His beatific glory.

John Calvin understood how central Jesus is to the whole plenitude of God’s economy. Calvin maintained that Christ embodies both God’s justification and sanctification for us in Himself. He further understood that without union with Christ by faith alone we could never hope to be freed from the squalor of our sin-soaked existences; that without Christ there is no elevation to the holiness God requires in order for us to be participants in the fellowship of His perichoretic life of filial bliss. And so, Calvin wrote the following:

From what has been discussed previously, we clearly see how people are devoid and stripped of all good, and how they lack all that pertains to their salvation. That is why, if a person wants something to help him in his need, he must go outside himself and seek his help elsewhere. Morevoer, we explained that our Lord presents Himself freely to us in His Son Jesus Christ, offering us in Him all happiness in place of our misery, all abundance in place of our poverty, and opening to us in Him all His heavenly treasures and riches so that all our faith may look to His very dear Son, all our expectation may be in Him and all our hope may rest on Him. This is a secret, a hidden philosophy which cannot be understood by syllogisms; but those people understand it whose eyes our Lord has opened in order that in His light they may see clearly. We are taught by faith to know that all the good we need and which we lack in ourselves is in God and in His Son our Lord Jesus Christ, in whom the Father has established all the fullness of His blessings and abundance so that we may draw everything from there as from a very full fountain. Now it remains for us to seek in Him and, by prayers, ask from Him what we have learned is there. For otherwise to know God as the Master, Author, and Giver of all good who invites us to ask them from Him, and four us not to address Him, not to ask anything from Him, would not benefit us at all. It would be as if someone disdained and left buried and hidden under the earth a treasure about which he had been told. So we must now treat more fully this point about which we have previously spoken only incidentally and in passing.[1]

Embedded in Calvin’s thinking is what we (as Evangelical Calvinists), along with Thomas Torrance and Karl Barth, have called a ‘doctrine of the vicarious humanity of Christ.’ It is the idea that all God’s Grace for us is actualized and embodied in the singular person of Jesus Christ. Calvin, at an early stage (relative to Barth’s and Torrance’s development of it latterly) presses what he calls unio cum Christo (or union with Christ); and what he more pointedly identifies as the duplex gratia (or double grace) of salvation that, again, is found in the extra (outside) life of God for us in Jesus Christ. The key aspect, of course, is to be found in union with Christ. If He remains outside of us, and we Him, then the salvation He is does us no good, it only remains an abstraction that has objectivity to it, but no subjectivity as we might remain in a state of carnality and in the deadness of our sins; apart from what Christ has won.

In order to understand and develop this doctrine further, a doctrine I think we see in Calvin’s own thinking, let’s turn to Thomas Torrance and allow him to explicate just how soteriologically rich this christological reality is; particularly as it finds its repose in a theology proper of Triune proportion:

We have to do here with a two-fold movement of mediation, from above to below and from below to above, in God’s gracious condescension to be one with us, and his saving assumption of us to be one with himself, for as God and Man, the one Mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ ministers to us both the things of God to man, and the things of man to God. This has to be understood as the self-giving movement of God in Christ to us in our sinful and alienated existence where we live at enmity to God, and therefore as a movement in which the revealing of God to us takes place only through a reconciling of us to God. The incarnation of the eternal Word and Son of God is to be understood, therefore, in an essentially soteriological way. Divine revelation  and atoning reconciliation take place inseparably together in the life and work of the incarnate Son of God in whose one Person the hypostatic union between his divine and human natures is actualised through an atoning union between God and man that reaches from his birth of the Virgin Mary throughout his vicarious human life and ministry to his death and resurrection. It was of this intervening activity of Christ in our place that St Paul wrote to the Corinthians: ‘You know the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ who though he was rich yet for our sakes became poor that you through his poverty might be rich.

We may express this two-fold movement of revelation and reconciliation in another way by saying two things.

a) Since the Father-Son relation subsists eternally within the Communion of the Holy Trinity we must think of the incarnation of the Son as falling within the eternal Life and Being of God, although, of course, the incarnation was not a timeless event like the generation of the Son from the Being of the Father, but must be regarded as new even for God, for the Son of God was not eternally Man any more than the Father was eternally Creator.

b) Correspondingly, since in Jesus Christ the eternal Son of God became man without ceasing to be God, the atoning reconciliation of man to God must be regarded as falling within the incarnate life of the Mediator in whose one Person the hypostatic union and the atoning union interpenetrate one another.[2]

There is too much depth to unpack all of the implications offered by TF Torrance in the space we have, but suffice it to say: that within this frame of understanding, salvation is first and foremost understood not from forensic categories, but from relational ones. For Calvin, for TFT, for Barth, the ground of salvation has always been one that has been generated from within the processions of God’s life as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; a genuinely personalist rubric for thinking salvation. These are heavy things; glorious realities; and doxological posits that we must continue to ponder with God’s help.

[1] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion: 1541 French Edition, trans. by Elsie Anne McKee (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009), 458.

[2] Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons (London: Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 2016), 144.