A beautiful passage from Calvin’s French Institutes. It is clearly inspired by Irenaeus, and wonderful exchange theology.

For the words of the Lord are: “This cup is the new testament in my blood” (Lk. 22 [20]; 1 Cor. 11 [25]), that is, a mark and witness of a promise. Wherever there is a promise, faith has a basis on which to rest and by which to give itself happiness and comfort. Our souls can receive from this sacrament a great sweetness and fruit of consolation in recognizing that Jesus Christ is so incorporated into us and we into Him that we can cal all that is His “ours,” and all that is our we can call “His.” Therefore we dare to promise ourselves with assurance that eternal life is ours, and that we cannot fail to reach the kingdom of heaven any more than Jesus Christ Himself can. And on the other hand, we cannot be damned by our sins any more than He can, because they are no longer ours but His. Not that any fault is imputed to Him, but because He has constituted Himself as debtor for us and has acted as the good debt-payer. This is the exchange which He has made with us by His infinite goodness: that in receiving our poverty He has transferred to us His riches; in bearing our weakness He has confirmed us in His power; in taking our mortality, He has made His immortality ours; in coming down to the earth He has opened a way to heaven; in making Himself Son of man, He has made us children of God.[1]

See Irenaeus, “Preface,” in Against Heresies, book 5, where he writes: “The Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, who did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself.” And the Apostle Paul who inspired both Irenaeus and Calvin famously writes: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you through His poverty might become rich” (II Cor 8.9). In my view there is not richer reality than what Calvin, Irenaeus, and the Apostle Paul point us to in the reality of what God in Christ has accomplished for us; that is, that God became human, that we, by grace, not nature, might become God as sons and daughters of His who are partakers of His triune life as we are participants in the mediating life of Jesus Christ.

By the way, the passage from Calvin is taken from his section on the Lord’s Supper. Holy Communion has got to be the most profound act Christians can participate in as participants of the body of Christ. It bears witness to the reality that Calvin speaks to: of God become man, that we might become who He is by way of the adoption of holy Grace. This is the sort of theology I revel and get lost in all my days. When I stray from this, I stray from the reason for thinking theologically at all. Soli Deo Gloria.

[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), 546-47.