Category Archives: John Calvin

A ‘Metaphysical Christ’ Simply Will Not Do

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A purely alien Christ, a Christ over our heads, a “metaphysical Christ,” simply will not do. Karl Barth knew this, as did John Calvin:

The real advance has obviously been made when we come to the INSTITUTIO of 1559, in which unio cum Christo [union with Christ] has become the common denominator under which Calvin tried to range his whole doctrine of the appropriation of the salvation achieved and revealed in Christ. For now in the Third Book, before he can speak of faith, of conversion and renewal, of the vita hominis christiani, of abnegatio nostri as its sum, of the necessary bearing of the cross, of the relation between this and the future life, then — and only then — of justification, of Christian freedom and prayer, of eternal election as the ulitmate presupposition of the whole, and finally of the future resurrection, according to the view attained in 1559 he has first to make it plain how it can come about at all that what God has done for us in Christ, as declared in the Second Book, can apply to us and be effective for us. The answer given in the noteworthy opening chapter of the Third Book is to the effect that it comes about through the arcana operatio Spiritus, which consists in the fact that Christ Himself, intead of being extra nos, outside the man separated from Him and therefore irrelevant to us, becomes ours and takes up His abode in us, we for our part being implanted into Him (Rom. 11:17) and putting Him on (Gal. 3:27).[1]

[1] Karl Barth CD 4.3.2, 550-51 cited by Charles Partee, The Theology of John Calvin, 195.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux as the Patron Saint of Luther and Calvin, Not Thomas

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A friend just reminded, once again, of the role that St. Bernard of Clairvaux played in the formation of both Martin Luther’s and John Calvin’s theology, respectively; the latter quoted or alluded to Clairvaux in his Institutes more than any other author. It was this spiritual, even mystical tradition that stood in the background to the foremost of these magisterial Protestant Reformers; it wasn’t Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle. I am bringing this up within the ambit of my last post with reference to the retrieval work being done by people like Matthew Barrett and Craig Carter, for the Baptists. When they retrieve the Great Tradition, they ought to nuance their approach such that the historical theology they are said to be retrieving entails the variety of ideational trails present within the theologizing of history’s various and respective thinkers; this includes lines of tradition that are at odds with the mood, and even material offering of someone like Thomas Aquinas. And yet, for some reason, these folks have fixated on Aquinas, and his Aristotelian heritage.

Here is a sampling of Clairvaux; pay attention to what he is saying about God and knowledge of God. Reflect on whether he sounds like a speculative theologian like Aquinas, or if he sounds more like an Athanasius who is committed to a kataphatic and revelational theology of God’s Word.

Once God was incomprehensible and inaccessible, invisible and entirely unthinkable. But now he wanted to be seen, he wanted to be understood, he wanted to be known. How was this done, you ask? God lay in a manger and lay on the Virgin’s breast. He preached on a mountain, prayed through the night, and hung on a cross. He lay pale in death, was free among the dead, and was master of hell. He rose on the third day, showed the apostles the signs of victory where nails once were, and ascended before their eyes to the inner recesses of heaven. . . . When I think on any of these things, I am thinking of God, and in all these things he is now my God.[1]

This is not the theology of Aquinas. Here is Aquinas’ way to God:

. . . the proposition that “God exists” is self evident in itself, for, as we shall see later, its subject and predicate are identical, since God is his own existence. But, because what it is to be God is not evident to us, the proposition is not self-evident to us, and needs to be made evident. This is done by means of things which, though less evident in themselves, are nevertheless more evident to us, by means, namely of God’s effects.[2]

Aquinas is an apophatic theologian who reasons his way to God (see his Prima Pars) discursively through reflection on the ostensibly given vestiges of God in the created order. His is not a committed theology of the Word that is contingent on God’s intensive Self-revelation in the manger, but one that arises from a latent capacity within humanity to think God from a created grace infused into the elect’s accidents of human being. In other words, for Aquinas, to think God does not require the Word of God, per se, it instead is an ecclesiologically based knowledge of God as the Church’s supposition within a hierarchical chain of being, as that finds its primal orientation in its first cause, God, ostensibly supplies the theoretical bases for the Christian, such as Aquinas, to think God in abstraction from God’s Self-revealed Word in Jesus Christ, as that is attested to in Holy Scripture.

What Barrett, Carter, Sytsma et al. are doing, whether that be on the Baptist or Presbyterian side of the coin, is a repristination effort. It would be one thing if they were engaging in a constructive dialogue with the past, allowing the kerygma, the risen Christ as God’s Word to regulate said discussion; but they aren’t! Instead, they are engaging in a just is, which is another way to say, in a natural theological approach to Church History, and said history’s ideas. They are simply presuming that just because there is such an amorphous thing known as the Great Tradition, that just because it has been seemingly allowed to develop, that God must have been providentially supervening in this development, such that it now has His imprimatur stamped on it as a reality from Him. And so, in the final analysis, what is being done, ironically, is a species of the theology being retrieved itself. It ostensibly imbibes a natural theology, as that is uncritically received as the just is mode of theological endeavor, only to find a theologian like Thomas Aquinas, the theologian of natural theology, and sees in him a patron saint of a long lost orthodoxy. And yet how ironic! Thomas Aquinas is a Roman Catholic theologian who thinks God from a theory of ecclesial authority that is itself funded not by a robust theology of the Word, but by a commitment to a philosophical notional construction of God known as the actus purus (pure being) tradition, in regard to thinking God and everything following.

I am here to help apply the brakes. I am a committed Protestant and Reformed Christian who maintains that a robust theology of the Word, that the ‘Scripture Principle’ ought to fund how a Protestant Christian does Protestant theology. To take on the baggage of Thomas’ synthesis of Aristotle, even if some Post Reformed orthodox theologians did this, is neither safe nor sound. And yet these various theologians are engaging in just this practice, and, apparently, unwittingly foisting Catholic theological categories upon their various students, and whomever will listen to their rallying cries on the highways and byways. I would simply ask you to reconsider the way they are taking you, and ask if maybe, just maybe, there isn’t a thread of Protestant historical development that doesn’t repose upon Thomas’ synthesis. There is; and that is exactly why this blog and our books came to exist. That is, to alert people to an alternative and genuinely Protestant, and dare I say, Christian way to think God. To think God in the way that we saw Bernard of Clairvaux thinking God earlier in this article. Both Luther and Calvin had Clairvaux’s christological concentration when it came to thinking God, and this is most surely at odds with Thomas’ synthesis and the repristinational effort currently underway by those noted (and others not).

 

[1] Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermo in nativitate Beatae Mariae: de Aquaducto, ed. J. Leclerq and H. Rochais, S. Bernardi Opera 5 (Rome: Cistercienses, 1968), 11 cited by Michael Allen in, Justification.

[2] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 7

The Absence of Communion with God as the Status of the World: Sin as Hell

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Being born into sin is akin to being born into hell. The Apostle Paul writes: “And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.” Being spiritually dead, which of course is what Paul is referring to, has both spiritual and bodily consequences; ultimately, the final consequence is “for men to die once, but after this the judgment . . . .” Even while being born into a mode of “hell” the person, by God’s grace, has the opportunity to experience new life, the resurrected, ascended life in Jesus Christ: “ so Christ was offered once to bear the sins of many. To those who eagerly wait for Him He will appear a second time, apart from sin, for salvation.” But for those who insist on persisting in the original life they were born into, this hope finally slips through their fingers, and what once was escapable becomes the consummate or actualized realization in the eschatological life of final judgment.

John Calvin, according to Julie Canlis, emphasized the idea of being in sin, as being in hell. He saw this as the experience, indeed, the objective status of all humanity who are intent on living in the ruptured state they fell into as they were first conceived in sin in their mothers’ wombs.

This situation is nothing short of hell on earth, a qualitative state of misery and alienation. Fallen humanity is alienated from the Word — its source of life — and hence lives in a state of death.:

We must also see what is the cause of death, namely alienation from God. Thence, it follows, that under the name of death is comprehended all those miseries in which Adam involved himself by his defection; for as soon as he revolted from God, the fountain of life, he was cast down from his former state, in order that he might perceive the life of man without God to be wretched and lost, and therefore differing nothing from death.

William Bouwsma has opened our eyes in new ways to the relation between the culture of fear in which Calvin lived, and to his own fears of the “abyss” and “labyrinth.” What perhaps needs more attention is how Calvin specifically describes the Fall as a fall into fear. Calvin says that creation is designed so that humanity should see the goodness of God and “from it pass over to eternal life and perfect felicity.” Instead, “[a]fter man’s rebellion, our eyes — wherever they turn — encounter God’s curse” (II.6.i). This new state of sin is the grand inversion. We now misinterpret those very things “by which he would draw us to himself”; “so greatly are we are variance with him, that, regarding him as adverse to us, we, in our turn, flee from his presence.” Broken communion brings not just alienation but terror. “But who might reach to him? Any one of Adam’s children? No, like their father, all of them were terrified at the sight of God [Gen. 3:8]” (II.12.i). Hell becomes not so much location as condition, occurring not at life’s end but throughout every moment lived out of communion.[1]

For Calvin, as Canlis treated prior to our reading, sin wasn’t as much forensic loss, but relational, communion with God that was lost. As such, when sin is understood in these terms, as the primary frame, the antidote to escaping the hellish existence of communion lost is, indeed, God’s presence for us, in the world, in the resurrected person, Jesus Christ. He exculpates fallen humanity from its chalice of hell — the status of being born into sin — by becoming hell for us. In this impoverished status, the enhypostatic humanity of God delves into the fires of the abyss, what we inhabit daily as sinners, and from the inner-recesses of this lagoon of blackness, he sets us on the new ground of the Heavenly Kingdom as that is given foundation in the resurrected blood flowing through the veins of God’s elect humanity for the world in Jesus Christ. As Canlis underscores elsewhere, for Calvin, salvation from the consequences of sin, or hell, comes for the person as they are participatio Christi (in participation with Christ). He alone is the human who inhabits eternity bodily, and in this ascended life for us (pro nobis), it is here where alienation from God, and thus hell, is vanquished by the parousia of Christ (presence of Christ), both now, by the Holy Spirit’s ministry of koinonial presencing Christ’s body for us, and in the eschaton, by the Holy Spirit’s ministry of realized presencing of Christ’s body for us as we come to finally see and touch the body of Christ; not just in the Eucharistic anticipation, but in the fulsome and glorified beatific vision of the blessed Lord in all His immortal ineffability, even as that is concretized in the continuous bearing of His scars for us.

The Evangel is that while we ‘who were dead in trespasses and sins’ no longer must abide such obstinacy and alienation from God. We no longer must inhabit the ravishes of hell and the destroyed life this world knows, and can only know, as it loves the darkness rather than the light. Calvin’s message, as a kerygmatic message, is not one of final loss and palpable gloom, but his is a message of the Good News! The world, insofar as we properly understand God’s election for the world in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ, no longer is one defined by hell, but heaven. Heaven is the great reversal the sinful human heart could never, and would never imagine, simply because it lives in an alienated status of self-love and dis-communion with the living God. This is why, in order for humanity to become the humanity it was originally created for, must be gifted to it ecstatically from the Father’s Right Hand. This is the imago Dei from whence genuine humanity was created; from the humanity of God, that God freely chose as He first chose to be human for the world in the particular humanity of the man from Nazareth (Deus incarnandus). This is the hope and the longing fulfilled for a sinful humanity that said humanity needs. And so we proclaim that Jesus is Lord!

[1] Julie Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder: A Spiritual Theology Of Ascent And Ascension (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2010), loc 942, 946, 952.

What Does it Mean to be Human in John Calvin’s Theology?

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What does it mean to be human coram Deo (before God)? According to St. Paul to be human is to be ‘in Christ,’ it is to be an image of the imago Dei (cf. Col. 1.15) for us, who is the Christ. Therefore, by implication, to not be ‘in Christ,’ subjectively, is to not be living out what it means to be human by way of God’s order. Understanding this should help people understand why the world looks the way it does; why people live lives that appear more animalistic rather than familial; why there is evil among people, among us all, rather than an inherent righteousness. It is because after the fall humanity was plunged into, at best, a sub-humanity, wherein the elevated status God has deigned for us, in Christ, cannot be achieved left to our own devices. If we are going to live genuinely human lives, we must do so from the only genuine human there is before God: viz. Jesus Christ. According to Julie Canlis, John Calvin held to the same notion:

This is the typical move for Calvin, who takes the focus off humanity in se and instead brings all under communion. T. F. Torrance observes: “In such a dynamic conception of man’s relation to God as the Reformers envisaged, there are only two directions attributable to human existence: toward God, or away from him. . . .” One might add to that observation that life in the Garden is characterized not only by right “direction” toward the Word, but living by the Word — seeking all good things in him, not merely from him. Here it is crucial to remember that Calvin’s emphasis on participation is not an end in itself but is in service of intimacy and a world that has been designed specifically so that everything draws us to God. “Direct communication with God was the source of life to Adam.” On a deeper level, it is a fundamental characteristic of a world in which the person to whom we are drawn is also the one in whom we exist. Nothing can be had independently of him; everything is to be had in and with him.[1]

Torrance’s summary of Calvin’s doctrine of humanity gets at the kernel of what I believe fits with, in particular, the Pauline corpus in regard to a theological anthropology. For Paul et al. what it means to be human is to be toward God rather than away from Him. And yet we all are born dead in our trespasses and sins; we are all born ‘away from God.’ This is our impossible (to overcome) lot in life. And yet the Grace of God! Because God has freely chosen to be God for us in Jesus Christ, it is through His anhypostatic reality made enhypostatic that we now have a center in God to live from; and it is this center, as the ‘anchor of our souls’ that turns us toward Him, thus making the impossible possible, and actualized in Christ for us. This is the eternal hope of God for us, and He has invited us into His banqueting table just as Christ alone is God’s banqueting table for us. Because we are simul Justus et peccator (simultaneously justified and sinner), we will have moments where we are less human than other times. But praise the Lord, we have an Advocate with the Father, and in His advocation we have the capacity to be genuinely human afresh anew, just as His mercies are new every morning; great is His faithfulness.

[1] Julie Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder: A Spiritual Theology Of Ascent and Ascension (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2010), loc 801, 807.

The Unprovable Faith Contra the Visible Religion

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Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the people of old received their commendation. By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible. -Hebrews 11:1-3 

For John Calvin biblical faith functions as knowledge of God. He develops this locus in his so-called duplex cognitio Dei (two-fold knowledge of God). Karl Barth and Thomas Torrance follow this notion of faith, respectively, in what can be called an analogia fidei, or analogy of faith. For Barth and Torrance this signifies the relationship that obtains between God and humanity in Jesus Christ. Christ comes, and by His Spirit anointed faith, He presents the only accurate way for a person to have knowledge of God. For Barth and Torrance, respectively, this is grounded in the bond of trust that the Son has always already had in the Father, and the trust that the Father has had in the Son by the Spirit. It is in this relationis (relation) of faith that as the person comes to participate in the life of God through the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ, that a person finally and truly comes to have a genuine knowledge of God. The key here is that this knowledge is the real deal, and not contingent upon anything or anyone else other than God. In this frame God reveals God, and that is the end of it.

John Webster, while not necessarily providing a full-throated explication of Calvin’s, Barth’s, or Torrance’s notion of faith, presents a development of faith that is in keeping with what we have been sketching thusly. He writes:

There’s no immediate vision; there’s no point, not even in faith itself, at which the barrier between us and God is dismantled and we are face to face with God. What there is now—all there is now—is hope, not sight.

Because of this, faith is contested. It’s contested by those who don’t share our faith, and we ourselves contest it. We often feel dismayed by the fact that what we have believed in is so frustratingly intangible, invisible, apparently so far out of our reach. So often it seems as if faith is hanging in mid-air, insecure, ungrounded, utterly perilous and exposed. Now, because faith it seems suspended in nothingness, we often try to replace it with something else. We look for tangible reassurances. Rather than hope, we want possession; rather than things glimpsed in the half-light of faith (1 Corinthians 13:12), we want something we can see clearly and unambiguously. And so we build up a great array of tangible substitutes for the God whom we encounter in faith. Sometimes we place a great deal of weight on arguments and ideas, looking to them to provide some sort of reliable, uncontested ground for faith. At other times, we look to experience of God; very often we’re tempted to think that experience will give us a sort of direct route to God which will shortcut all the ambiguities and hesitations of the life of faith.

Of course arguments and experiences have their place, but they are not gods. They may not substitute for the God who is known in faith. And the trouble with these tangible reassurances is that they threaten to do just that: They are a flight from faith. They seem, of course, to be quite the opposite—a way of confirming faith, a way of proving to ourselves that what we trust in faith really is real and trustworthy. But in fact they’re a spurning of God; they’re a refusal to have God on God’s terms. They turn their backs on the way in which God encounters us and instead look for something different, something better, something without the apparent fragility and vulnerability of faith. They don’t want to see something from afar; they want to see it clearly, here and now. They don’t want to live in the land of promise; they want to arrive, to be in the city.

To want those things is enmity with God. It’s to want God on our terms, and therefore not to want God. Or, we might say, it’s to want a different god from the God who really encounters us. It’s to replace God with an idol, and so to commit the great sin of religion. Religion is sin when it makes God into something which we can handle. Whether we handle God through graven images or theological ideas or liturgy and music or ecstatic experience doesn’t really matter. It’s all idolatry, all a flight from the city which God builds, all a way of saying that God as God isn’t good enough, and that if God is to be worth trusting he’ll have to conform to our expectations and needs. None of us is exempt; all of us have to realize that religion always carries with it the danger that we will make God into the likeness of something on earth, and in doing so we will lose faith, and lose God.1

Webster assumes on the faith as knowledge of God tradition, and applies that in a certain significant direction. Some might say this sounds like fideism (V so-called evidentialism), but that would miss precisely the point that Webster is pressing. Webster premises that the concrete ground of faith is extra nos (outside of us), and of course the ground is God Himself. As is clear from Webster, faith, genuinely Christian faith, is of the sort that is not self-generated or self-sustained; indeed, for the Christian, faith, according to Webster, is a reality that comes to us in the presence of Christ. This makes faith, as he emphasizes, both vulnerable and fragile; a reality that we cannot possess, but that possesses us instead. As Webster rightly notes, it is just at the point that we attempt to rip faith asunder from the heavens and take it for ourselves that we, like Micah, make an idol out of a reality that does not rightly belong to us (cf. Judges 17.1-6).

I think that what Webster is describing finds its best fund as we ground knowledge of God in the vicarious faith of Christ for us. It is only at this point that a notion of faith ceases from being an abstract floaty thing up yonder, and becomes grounded in the dusty flesh and deep red blood of Jesus Christ. When we come to realize, as the Apostle Paul did, that Jesus is the genuine ‘Mediator between God and humanity,’ it is just at this point that we will come to have a right understanding of faith’s concreteness; a concreteness not of our own assertion.

1 John Webster, Confronted by Grace: Meditations of a Theologian, edited by Daniel Bush and Brannon Ellis (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2014), 122-23 kindle. 

 

The ‘Double Salvation’ of the French Calvin: Participation with Christ as the Locus Classicus of Calvinian Soteriology

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John Calvin is an important figure for Protestant theology. If we can move past all the polemics that are associated (usually, wrongly) with his name, and actually engage with his theological offering; what the reader will find is a rich storehouse of theological reflection that is highly Christ concentrated. That’s what I intend to do with this post; I want the reader to be turned onto an aspect of Calvin’s soteriology that has enriched me greatly since the first time I was exposed to it. I am referring to what Calvin calls Double Grace (DUPLEX GRATIA). It is this soteriological frame, that for Calvin, is deeply grounded in a Christological focus; to the point that when reading his development of it, at points, you might mistake him for Karl Barth or Thomas Torrance. In this teaching Calvin thinks both justification and sanctification from nowhere else but the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. For Calvin, in order for salvation to inhere for the person, he/she must be in participation with Christ’s humanity by the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit. In order for eternal life to obtain for the individual, that person must be in union with Christ (unio cum Christo); since Christ alone has won the salvation of God in the work He accomplished through incarnation and atonement. This conceptuality, by the way, is a locus classicus for what we are attempting to offer with our notion of Evangelical Calvinism.

Here Calvin in his 1541 French edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion explains what he means when referring to ‘double grace.’

It seems to me that I have previously explained carefully enough how it is that there remains to people only one refuge for salvation, which is faith, because by the law they are all cursed. I believe that I have also sufficiently discussed what faith is and what graces of God it communicates to people and what fruit it produces in them. Now the summary was that by faith we receive and possess Jesus Christ as He is presented to us by God’s goodness, and that in participating in Him we have a double grace. The first grace is that when we are reconciled to God by His innocence, instead of having a Judge in heaven to condemn us we have a very merciful Father there. The second grace is that we are sanctified by His Spirit to meditate on and practice holiness and innocence of life. Now as for regeneration, which is the second grace, I have said what seemed to me necessary. Justification was more lightly touched upon, because we had to understand what the good works of the saints are, which is a part of the question we must treat next.[1]

Of significance, per my impression, is the way Calvin thinks of these ‘two graces’ as embodied in Jesus Christ first. So, if we were to think this in terms of an ordo salutis (‘order of salvation’), we might think of it in this way: 1) Justification and Sanctification first obtain in Christ’s life for us, and 2) Justification and Sanctification second obtain for all those, who by faith, are in participation with Christ and His humanity for us. To frame salvation from this accent gives it a decidedly filial feeling, such that other sorts of theories of salvation, the ones that have juridical or forensic frames, are put into relief; or out to pasture where they should be. Not wanting to overread Calvin here, I wouldn’t want to make it sound like Calvin was a crypto-Barthian, but I do think the personalist and even existential conceptions present in Barth’s soteriology can be found in Calvin—to a degree. In order to illustrate this ‘feeling,’ in regard to the filial sort of salvation Calvin is offering, let me share from him further. Here you will notice the sharp emphasis Calvin lays on being in Christ; I take this to be a further development of his duplex gratia as that is given form in Christological repose.

Now in speaking of the righteousness of faith scripture leads us to quite another place; that is, it teaches us to turn our attention away from our works to regard only God’s mercy and the perfect holiness of Christ. For it shows us this order of justification: that from the beginning God receives the sinner by His pure and free goodness, not considering anything in him by which He is moved to mercy except the sinner’s misery, since He sees him completely stripped and empty of good works; and that is why He finds in Himself the reason for doing him good. Then He touches the sinner with a feeling of His goodness so that, distrusting everything he has, he may put the whole sum of his salvation in the mercy which God gives him. That is the feeling of faith, by which a person enters into possession of his salvation: when he recognizes by the teaching of the gospel that he is reconciled to God because, having obtained the remission of his sins, he is justified by means of Christ’s righteousness. Although he is regenerated by God’s Spirit, he does not rest on the good works which he does, but is reassured that his perpetual righteousness consists in Christ’s righteousness alone. When all these things have been examined in detail, what we believe about this matter will be easily explained. They are better digested if we put them in a different order than we have proposed them; but one can scarcely fail to grasp these matters provided that they are recounted in order in such a way that everything is well understood.[2]

What we have in Calvin is a robust, and I’d argue, Pauline development of what an ‘in Christ’ theory of salvation entails. The focus, for Calvin, unlike so much later ‘Calvinist’ and ‘Puritan’ theology, is not primarily on the recipient of salvation, but on the ‘cosmic’ Christ. Let me qualify this: when reading Calvin we can certainly find conceptual matter that sounds like what developed later in ‘Calvinism’ and the sort of ‘practical syllogism’ soteriology that the Puritans (like William Perkins) developed. But, I’d contend, and have here, that Calvin tends to contradict his Christ conditioned superstructural foundation when he presents us with a hidden decree of reprobation and ‘temporary faith.’

In the main Calvin is a richly and profoundly Christ funded theologian who seeks to find Christ in just about every nook and cranny conceivable; particularly when that comes to a doctrine of salvation. He isn’t a Barth or Torrance, come on, he lived in the 16th century; but in an antecedent form, under the theological conceptual pressures he inhabited, he (along with Luther) is as close as we might get to what latterly developed under the Barthian regimen of theological endeavor. I commend Calvin’s double grace soteriology to you; one that is decidedly grounded in the singular person of Jesus Christ.

[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), 318 [emboldening mine].

[2] Ibid., 320-21 [emboldening mine].

*Repost.

How John Calvin Found Comfort in the Providence of God in the Midst of His Suffering and Own Frailty: With Reference to DSRCT and COVID-19

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Sickness, disease, suffering, death, and evil, among other such trifles, are all things that Christians have a capacity to face, before and because of God, with an utter sense of hope and sober trust. Often evil, and all of its attendant realities (including human suffering!), is used as a scalpel to cut God to pieces; leaving him as nothing more than a corpse that the modern person can look at with a kind of perverted joy, and yet somber realization that all they are left with is themselves (they’d have it no other way).

John Calvin, pre-modern as he was, was no stranger to human suffering, sickness, and disease. Indeed, as W. Allen Hogge, M.D. and Charles Partee detail in their contribution to our Evangelical Calvinism: Volume 2 book, through their chapter entitled Calvin’s Awful Health and God’s Awesome Providence, we come to see, with some precision, the scope of suffering that Calvin endured; particularly with regard to his physical health. We see how Calvin dealt with his fragile constitution, coram Deo, by intertwining his theological framework with his interpretation of his own predicament as a broken and ill person. We see how Calvin’s doctrine[s] of predestination, election, Divine Providence, so on and so forth informed the way he attempted to deal with the ostensible problem of suffering, disease, and the brokenness with which he was so familiar.

In an attempt to provide some good context on how Calvin dealt with all of this theologically, I thought I would appeal (at some extensive length) to Hogge’s and Partee’s writing on the matter; and then offer some reflections of my own in light of Calvin’s approach to suffering. I thought I would tie my own experiences of dealing with severe depression, anxiety, doubt of God, and diagnosis of a terminal and incurable cancer into Calvin’s own approach when it comes to God’s Providence and care in these instances. So at length here is a section from Hogge’s and Partee’s chapter (I’m thinking this is actually a section that Partee wrote):

An Alternative Conclusion

Granted the erstwhile power of Calvin’s exposition of God’s almighty providence, this once shining heirloom is tarnished for many in recent generations. If God is the author of everything and evil is clearly something, then simple logic seems to dictate the conclusion that God is responsible for evil. In other words in the light of his strong affirmation of God’s providence, Calvin’s equally strong denial that God is the author of evil is not as convincing as once it was. Obviously, the sweeping philosophical conundrum of the origin and existence of evil (of which physical illness is a painfully personal example) has exercised serious reflection from the beginning with no satisfactory end in sight. Therefore, if a completely satisfactory resolution is unlikely, at least Calvin’s conclusion can be gently modified by his own suggestion.

Among the alternative possibilities for resolution, Calvin did not for a moment consider that God might be limited in nature (as in process theology) or self-limited by choice (as in Emil Brunner)83 or that God’s interest in “soul-making” requires the existence of evil.84 The regnancy of God is unquestioned. Calvin believed all things are governed by God including human free will. We are to understand “that on both sides the will is in God’s power, either to bend the hearts of men to humanity, or to harden those which were naturally tender.”85 In a bold metaphor Calvin even claims that God fights against us with his left hand and for us with his right hand.86 In both events we are in God’s hands.

Two modern, major, and massive theological acquisitions have provoked a climate change of opinion that Calvin could not have anticipated and which require integration into the family heritage. First, a particularly contentious debate over Calvin’s doctrine of Scripture continues to roil his descendants. There is, of course, no gainsaying that Calvin did not feel the impact of the Critical Historical Method, and, while his response to this development cannot be predicted, its adoption by most mainstream biblical scholars today means that the distinction between human and divine in Scripture is less adamantine than Calvin thought. Thus, a biblical citation no longer closes a discussion but opens it to furtherdevelopment.87

The second wider and deeper change concerns the role of reason. The dream of reason in Western intellectual culture stretched from Plato to Spinoza, but the famous wake-up call which sounded from David Hume alarming Immanuel Kant and rousing him from his dogmatic slumbers, leads to the claim that “The Copernican revolution brought about by Kant was the most important single turning point in the history of philosophy.”88 If so, it is now impossible for Western theologians to ignore Kant’s strictures on pure reason to make room for deep faith. Additionally, the necessity and universality of reason has been challenged by anthropological studies of differing cultures and gender studies within the same culture. Moreover, the developing scientific study of the human and animal brain modifies the confidence of Hamlet’s appeal to “godlike reason” (Hamlet IV.4.38).

Calvin’s epistemological reliance on Scripture and reason is an immense and complicated subject on its own.89 He believed the Bible was the divine Word of God but he also noted its human elements. Likewise, Calvin both praised and blamed reason. “Reason is proper to our nature; it distinguishes us from brute beasts.”90 At the same time, because of sin human reason is not able to understand God nor God’s relation to humanity. 91 Therefore, “Christian philosophy bids reason give way to, submit, and subject itself to, the Holy Spirit.”92 Still at the end of the day, although Calvin rejects “speculation,”93 he thinks there must be a reason for the existence of illnesses, even if we do not know exactly what it is. Among his explanations, Calvin offers the punishment of human sin, God’s hidden will, the malignancy of Satan and the demons, and the evil will of other human beings. According to Calvin, the proper human response to this situation is faith, humility, patience, and so on. Nevertheless, the variety of these explanations does not challenge Calvin’s basic confidence that the divine intellect has its reasons even though they are hidden from us.

An alternative category of “mysteries beyond reason” is sometimes employed by Calvin and should be noted. That is, Calvin affirms many divine things that humans do not, and cannot, know. For example, he admits the existence of sin as “adventitious”94 meaning it has no rational explanation. Calvin did not, but he might have, applied this category to disease suggesting that while medicine seeks to describe “what” and “how,” theology cannot explain its “why.” This situation has some affinity with Kant’s distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal realm leading to the concept of “antinomy”—a category impervious to pure, but not to practical, reason. If then we humans can recognize and treat the penultimate and medical causes of disease, we might admit that we do not understand the “reason” for illness and are not obligated to insist ultimately and theologically that there is one. One might leave the painful puzzle to reason and the trustful victory to faith.

Many contemporary students of Calvin’s theology, both clerical and medical, cannot with best mind and good conscience adopt the obvious conclusion that Calvin draws concerning the existence and meaning of disease. Still, seeking a life of faith, hope, and love, one can appreciate Calvin’s passionate conviction that in neither prosperity nor adversity are we separated from the love of God. Therefore, leaving the study of “material,” “efficient,” and “formal” causes to the scientific community, theologians might come full stop before the “final” causes of illness. Affirming in faith with Calvin God’s good creation and encompassing providence, the impenetrable mystery of assigning a “final cause” for disease might be approached with the modesty and humility which Calvin sometimes evinces.

Following this interlude of thundering silence, theology could resume with the glorious theme of hope in life everlasting and abundant where, delivered from pain and death, all tears are dried, all sorrows past, the lame walk, the deaf hear, the blind see, lepers are cleansed—the dead being raised up made alive in Christ.[1]

Following Hogge’s and Partee’s treatment of Calvin, we can see that Calvin himself, because of his historical location, would defy the modern attempt to peer into the ‘abyss’ of God’s secret council when it comes to trying to understand the ‘cause’ of evil, sickness, and disease. But precisely because of Calvin’s location, theologically, he will consistently defer to God’s sovereign hand of providence in the affairs of this world order, and all of us ensconced within it. So while he will not attempt to speculate or press in the type of rationalist ways that moderns might want to; at the same time he rests and trusts in the reality that God is providentially in control of sickness and disease. He doesn’t have the type of scientific acumen that moderns have ostensibly developed, but he rests in the always abiding reality of God’s almighty ability to succor the needs of all of us frail and indolent humans as we inhabit a world of contingencies and ailments not of our own making, per se.

As modern and now “post-modern” people we want more scientifically derived answers than Calvin can offer us. When we get sick, when we suffer immeasurable diseases and anxieties in our apparently cold and chaotic world, we look to the lab-coats to offer us a cure-for-what-ails-us. But for anyone, particularly those of us, who like Calvin, abide in a deep union with God in Jesus Christ, we will most consistently end up right where pre-modern Calvin always ended up; we will repose in God’s faithful care to never leave us or forsake us; we will rest in the reality that God is both sovereign, and that he providentially walks with us through the valley of the shadow of death, even more than we realize.

When I was diagnosed with desmoplastic small round cell tumor sarcoma (DSRCT), an incurable and terminal cancer for which there is no known treatment, I ended up right where Calvin ended up; I had to simply rest and trust in God’s providential and loving care. I did due diligence, in regard to pursuing all known treatment avenues, both traditionally and alternatively, but at the end of the day, and in every instance, I had to rest in the reality that God was in control. Like Calvin, as Hogge and Partee highlight, I had to find assurance and hope in the fact that the God who I couldn’t control was in control, indeed, of my every waning anxiety and fear; that he was in control of the chaos (the cancer) inside of my body that wanted to consume me like a voracious monster. I did find rest and hope in God’s providential care; not in the abstract, but as God broke into my life moment by moment, every moment of everyday during that season.

While sickness, disease, suffering, evil, and the like might not have an easy answer—as far as causation—what we can rest in, like Calvin did, is the fact that we know the One who is in control; who is in control of what might even look like absolute chaos and destruction upon us. We can rest in the fact that, in Christ, we are in union with an indestructible life that death couldn’t even hold down. This is my comfort in life, even now. I rest in the fact that God in Christ gives me every breath that I breathe, literally; the same breath that the risen Son of God rose with on that Easter morning.

Addendum COVID-19

The above is a repost, but I think it is highly pertinent right now! I am trying to work through all of the complexities of this currently; it’s hard to do with all the noise out there, and in my own head. A medical doctor I just came in contact with, Andrew Doan, alerted me to an important article on the numbers revolving around COVID19. I’ve been skeptical, up to this point, of the seemingly drastic measures being taken to squelch this virus; but as I’ve read them, the measures seem justified to me at this point. When the statistical projections are made, as the article linked demonstrates, the numbers coming back from the impact of COVID19 are quite alarming. If we take the measures we are taking now, and maybe more stringent ones, it seems, we can bring this virus to a quicker and less deadly termination for the lives of many of the most vulnerable. I cannot, in good faith, argue for the most vulnerable in the womb of the their mothers, and not equally fight for the most vulnerable among us now. Consistency urges that our response to COVID19 promotes a culture that responds with equal ferocity when it comes to other viruses, and the abortion industry; that we fight these things, and create an infrastructure that makes death and destruction, at least to the level that we have a modicum of control, less rather than more.

We are facing hard times as a people. May Christians, as Calvin did, bear witness to the providential control of God’s goodness in the midst of the most tumultuous moments of our lives. May the death of death be on display in our lives, as the resurrection power of God in Christ is borne witness to as we bear witness to the life of Christ as the ground and grammar of all that is lovely. Maranatha

[1] W. Allen Hogge, M.D. and Charles Partee, “Calvin’s Awful Health and God’s Awesome Providence,” in Myk Habets and Bobby Grow, eds., Evangelical Calvinism: Volume 2: Dogmatics&Devotion (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications an Imprint of Wipf&Stock Publishers, 2017), 285-88.

On Being a Genuine Lover of Jesus

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John Calvin has been referred to by Charles Partee as a ‘confessional theologian,’ meaning that Calvin’s style of theologizing would fit the cadence of Scripture’s narratival flow and offering rather than the systematic’s or analytic’s theological syllogisms and deductions. In his final section of the French version of his Institutes (1541) we can get a sense of how Calvin himself was self-conscious of his disposition as a theological thinker; one for the Church. Even as we are noticing that, what I really want to highlight is the material point Calvin is emphasizing in regard to the reality (or not) of the Christian life.

I will want to agree with Calvin even though it might seem like what he writes militates against certain things I have written over the past many years. When we read along with Calvin you should notice how he emphasizes what being a genuine Christian entails. Some might associate what he is writing with something like John MacArthur’s ‘Lordship salvation,’ but I don’t think those sorts of idiosyncratic trappings (JMac’s) need to attend this discussion. What Calvin is pressing is what I take to be Gospel 101 stuff; that is: that a genuine Christian, one who professes Christ, will seek to live a life of obedience to their Lord, as named. In other words, and Barth agrees with this, the Gospel itself demands obedience to God in Jesus Christ. Not a legalistic obedience, but one birthed as akin to the relationality that we see in a son to his father, or of a daughter to her mother. An obedience that is shaped by a devotio Christi (devotion to Christ), such that one’s passion for Christ, one’s love for Christ compels them unto love and good works (cf. II Cor 5.14). It isn’t that this must be understood as PROVING one’s salvation, but instead we can think of this obedience as the organic flow of the life blood that comes from Immanuel’s veins into ours. When rebellion is present in the professing Christian’s life, as the characteristic, rather than obedience, then it is right to wonder whether or not the professor is an actual possessor of eternal life or not. Surely, it is possible to live in seasons of rebellion towards God, even for the Christian, indeed God is mercifully longsuffering with us all. But the Christian will ultimately be sensitive to the wooing of the Father, and repent; and then repent again, and again.

Calvin writes:

Let those who think that it is only the philosophers who have well and duly discussed moral teaching show me in their books a tradition as good as that which I have just recounted! When they want with all their power to exhort someone to virtue, they adduce nothing else but that we should live as is appropriate for our nature. Scripture leads us to a much better fountain of exhortation when it not only commands us to relate all our life to God who is its author but, after having warned us that we have degenerated from the true origin of our creation, it adds that Christ, reconciling us to God His Father, is given to us as an example of innocence; His image ought to be represented in our life (Rom. 6). Could anything more emphatic or efficacious be said? Particularly, what more could one ask? For if God adopts us as His children on condition that the image of Christ may appear in our life, if we do not devote ourselves to righteousness and holiness we not only abandon our Creator with a very negligent disloyalty, but we also renounce Him as our Savior.[1]

Further:

Here I must address those who, although they have nothing of Christ except the name, nevertheless want to be considered Christians. But how boldly they glory in having His holy name! — since the only person who has any acquaintance with Him is the one who has rightly learned from the word of the gospel. Now St. Paul denies that a person has received right acquaintance and knowledge unless “he has learned to strip off the old person who is depraved with disordered desires, in order to put on Christ” (Eph. 4 [22, 24]). So it is clear that such people falsely claim the knowledge of Christ and greatly insult Him, whatever lovely babble they may have on their lips. For the gospel is not a teaching of the tongue but of life, and it ought not to be grasped only by understanding and in memory like the other disciplines, but it should possess the entire soul and have its seat in the depth of the heart; otherwise it has not been properly accepted. Therefore, either let them cease to boast of being what they are not, to the disgrace of God, or let them show themselves Christ’s disciples.[2]

Some might say this sounds like a latent reference to the so-called practical syllogism, and others as a reference to the latterly developed doctrine of perseverance of the saints; but I don’t think this has to be framed those ways at all.

If someone names the name of Christ, then His life ought to be present at some level in theirs; as theirs. If someone says they love Jesus, but then consciously turn around and rebel against Him[3] as the Word of God, then their love, at best, is suspect, and at worst is absent completely. With much of American evangelicalism clutched in the grasp of moralistic therapeutic deism, or in the image of a different Jesus who looks more like the desires of the professors than the One who came in the womb of Mary, it is likely that many so-called Christians have been duped and deluded into thinking they are something they are not. This is a concerning matter to me, and one that hits close to home. May God have mercy on us all!

[1] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion: 1541 French Edition, trans. by Elsie Anne McKee (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009), 282-83.

[2] Ibid., 683-84.

[3] When I say ‘rebel’ I mean that the ‘Christian’s’ life becomes characterized by this rebellion. How long this characterization must be present in order to be suspect about someone’s eternal destiny and present relationship with Christ is not up to us to determine; that is Christ’s determination. Nevertheless, we are bound to call each other unto love and good works, and challenge our brothers and sisters to keep pressing into the holiness of Christ, as we see the day approaching. I am not the judge, nor are you, of someone’s eternal destiny; but we are to bear witness to ourselves and others of what the Life of Christ looks like; this is the call we have, to the rebellious and obedient among us.

The ‘Double Salvation’ of the French Calvin: Participation with Christ as the Locus Classicus of Calvinian Soteriology

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John Calvin is an important figure for Protestant theology. If we can move past all the polemics that are associated (usually, wrongly) with his name, and actually engage with his theological offering; what the reader will find is a rich storehouse of theological reflection that is highly Christ concentrated. That’s what I intend to do with this post; I want the reader to be turned onto an aspect of Calvin’s soteriology that has enriched me greatly since the first time I was exposed to it. I am referring to what Calvin calls Double Grace (DUPLEX GRATIA). It is this soteriological frame, that for Calvin, is deeply grounded in a Christological focus; to the point that when reading his development of it, at points, you might mistake him for Karl Barth or Thomas Torrance. In this teaching Calvin thinks both justification and sanctification from nowhere else but the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. For Calvin, in order for salvation to inhere for the person, he/she must be in participation with Christ’s humanity by the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit. In order for eternal life to obtain for the individual, that person must be in union with Christ (unio cum Christo); since Christ alone has won the salvation of God in the work He accomplished through incarnation and atonement. This conceptuality, by the way, is a locus classicus for what we are attempting to offer with our notion of Evangelical Calvinism.

Here Calvin in his 1541 French edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion explains what he means when referring to ‘double grace.’

It seems to me that I have previously explained carefully enough how it is that there remains to people only one refuge for salvation, which is faith, because by the law they are all cursed. I believe that I have also sufficiently discussed what faith is and what graces of God it communicates to people and what fruit it produces in them. Now the summary was that by faith we receive and possess Jesus Christ as He is presented to us by God’s goodness, and that in participating in Him we have a double grace. The first grace is that when we are reconciled to God by His innocence, instead of having a Judge in heaven to condemn us we have a very merciful Father there. The second grace is that we are sanctified by His Spirit to meditate on and practice holiness and innocence of life. Now as for regeneration, which is the second grace, I have said what seemed to me necessary. Justification was more lightly touched upon, because we had to understand what the good works of the saints are, which is a part of the question we must treat next.[1]

Of significance, per my impression, is the way Calvin thinks of these ‘two graces’ as embodied in Jesus Christ first. So, if we were to think this in terms of an ordo salutis (‘order of salvation’), we might think of it in this way: 1) Justification and Sanctification first obtain in Christ’s life for us, and 2) Justification and Sanctification second obtain for all those, who by faith, are in participation with Christ and His humanity for us. To frame salvation from this accent gives it a decidedly filial feeling, such that other sorts of theories of salvation, the ones that have juridical or forensic frames, are put into relief; or out to pasture where they should be. Not wanting to overread Calvin here, I wouldn’t want to make it sound like Calvin was a crypto-Barthian, but I do think the personalist and even existential conceptions present in Barth’s soteriology can be found in Calvin—to a degree. In order to illustrate this ‘feeling,’ in regard to the filial sort of salvation Calvin is offering, let me share from him further. Here you will notice the sharp emphasis Calvin lays on being in Christ; I take this to be a further development of his duplex gratia as that is given form in Christological repose.

Now in speaking of the righteousness of faith scripture leads us to quite another place; that is, it teaches us to turn our attention away from our works to regard only God’s mercy and the perfect holiness of Christ. For it shows us this order of justification: that from the beginning God receives the sinner by His pure and free goodness, not considering anything in him by which He is moved to mercy except the sinner’s misery, since He sees him completely stripped and empty of good works; and that is why He finds in Himself the reason for doing him good. Then He touches the sinner with a feeling of His goodness so that, distrusting everything he has, he may put the whole sum of his salvation in the mercy which God gives him. That is the feeling of faith, by which a person enters into possession of his salvation: when he recognizes by the teaching of the gospel that he is reconciled to God because, having obtained the remission of his sins, he is justified by means of Christ’s righteousness. Although he is regenerated by God’s Spirit, he does not rest on the good works which he does, but is reassured that his perpetual righteousness consists in Christ’s righteousness alone. When all these things have been examined in detail, what we believe about this matter will be easily explained. They are better digested if we put them in a different order than we have proposed them; but one can scarcely fail to grasp these matters provided that they are recounted in order in such a way that everything is well understood.[2]

What we have in Calvin is a robust, and I’d argue, Pauline development of what an ‘in Christ’ theory of salvation entails. The focus, for Calvin, unlike so much later ‘Calvinist’ and ‘Puritan’ theology, is not primarily on the recipient of salvation, but on the ‘cosmic’ Christ. Let me qualify this: when reading Calvin we can certainly find conceptual matter that sounds like what developed later in ‘Calvinism’ and the sort of ‘practical syllogism’ soteriology that the Puritans (like William Perkins) developed. But, I’d contend, and have here, that Calvin tends to contradict his Christ conditioned superstructural foundation when he presents us with a hidden decree of reprobation and ‘temporary faith.’

In the main Calvin is a richly and profoundly Christ funded theologian who seeks to find Christ in just about every nook and cranny conceivable; particularly when that comes to a doctrine of salvation. He isn’t a Barth or Torrance, come on, he lived in the 16th century; but in an antecedent form, under the theological conceptual pressures he inhabited, he (along with Luther) is as close as we might get to what latterly developed under the Barthian regimen of theological endeavor. I commend Calvin’s double grace soteriology to you; one that is decidedly grounded in the singular person of Jesus Christ.

[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), 318 [emboldening mine].

[2] Ibid., 320-21 [emboldening mine].

*Repost.

John Calvin’s Gospel of Wonderful Exchange Inspired by Irenaeus

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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.