Category Archives: John Calvin

A Low Protestant Churchman’s Reception of the Sacraments of the Church: Given Way by Calvin

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I come from a low evangelical church context. This means that words like ‘sacrament’ are not used much, if ever. Nevertheless, many in the baptistic context do refer to the word: sacrament. For the longest time I had a real problem grasping what a sacrament is; even up until recently. People who use this language just typically use it, as if it’s an understood, in regard to what it entails. But in reality, I am not totally convinced that even people who use this language, and who are situated in ecclesial contexts that have high sacramentology, actually understand what it entails. At base, a sacrament of the Church is a physical sign that points the believer to Christ and the triune reality. But often, and even traditionally, it has come to be more than that. In contexts like Roman Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy, for example, sacraments, like the eucharist, baptism, and other like components confer salvific grace upon those who partake of these sacraments. In fact, in these ecclesial contexts the sacraments are the only way for salvific grace to be dispensed for the seekers of God and His eternal life.

As a Protestant I am going to clearly have problems with the sectarian way that Catholics and the Orthodox view the sacraments of the Church. But I am wondering if there is a way that as a radical Protestant, I can constructively receive a sacramentology that has been properly denuded and reified by a concretization in Christ alone? In my view, John Calvin offers a way forward for a healthy Protestant understanding of the sacraments (I am referring to the eucharist and baptism, in the main, and I’ll add in the Word of God aka as Holy Scripture). Let us read along with Calvin as he critiques the Catholic understanding of the sacraments, and offers his alternative Christ concentrated perspective instead (a long quote):

Now in the sacraments this ought to be the chief consideration, that they are to serve our faith toward God. The second consideration is that they are to testify our confession before people. In accordance with this last reason, the analogies noted above are good and indeed suitable.

On the other hand, we must be warned that as these of whom we have been speaking destroy the efficaciousness of the sacraments and abolish their use, there are also on the other hand those who ascribe to the sacraments some secret powers which one never reads were given to them by God. By this error the simple and the ignorant are deceived and tricked when they are taught to seek God’s gifts and graces where they can never find them, and bit by bit are turned and drawn away from Him to follow purely vain things.

For the schools of the sophists have determined with one accord that the sacraments of the new law, that is, those which the Christian church uses now, justify and confer grace, if we do not put any obstacles of mortal sin in the way. We cannot adequately declare how dangerous this opinion is; and it is even more so because for so many long years it has been accepted, to the great detriment of the church, and it still continues in a quite large part of the world. Certainly it is obviously diabolic. For since it promises righteousness without faith it casts consciences into confusion and damnation. Moreover, setting the sacrament as the cause of righteousness, it ties and entangles the human mind in the superstition that righteousness rests on a corporeal thing rather than on God, since the human understanding is naturally very much more inclined toward the earth than it ought to be. It would be desirable if we did not have such great experience of these two vices — much less do we need great proof of them!

What is a sacrament taken without faith, except the destruction of the church? Nothing should be expected except in virtue of the promise which announces God’s wrath to the unbelievers no less than it presents His grace to the faithful, therefore the one who thinks he can receive from the sacraments a different good than that which he receives by faith as it is presented to him in the word, greatly deceives himself. From this also the rest can be inferred: confidence of salvation does not depend on participation in the sacraments, as if righteousness were established there. We known righteousness is located in Jesus Christ alone, and communicated to us not less by the preaching of the gospel than by the testimony of the sacraments, and it can exist entirely without that sacramental testimony. In this way what St. Augustine says is trustworthy: “The visible sign often appears without the invisible sanctification, and the sanctification without the visible sign.”

Therefore let us be certain that the sacraments have no other office than God’s word, which is to offer and present Jesus Christ to us, and in Him the treasures of His heavenly grace. They do not serve or profit at all except to those who take and receive them by faith. Besides, we must be on guard not to fall into another error close to this one from reading that the early church fathers, in order to increase the value of the sacraments, have spoken of them with such honor that we may think that some secret power is annexed and affixed to them — to the point that imagining that the graces of the Holy Spirit are distributed and administered in them as the wine is given in a cup or glass. Instead the whole office of the sacraments is only to testify to us and confirm for us God’s good will and favor to us, and they profit nothing beyond that it the Holy Spirit does not come — the Spirit who opens our minds and hearts and makes us able to receive the testimony. In this also God’s different and distinct graces clearly appear.[1]

We could tail off into a discussion of substance metaphysics, and how Calvin is ostensibly critiquing that when he refers to ‘wine of the glass or cup,’ but we won’t. For our purposes it is good to simply focus on how Calvin thinks of the sacraments as helpful witnesses to the risen Christ who stands beyond and behind them. To think of sacraments as salvific gateways, according to Calvin, is to distort them by artificially elevating them to levels that Christ alone, should, and does indeed have.

If we think of the sacraments from a Christ concentrated frame, as Calvin does, then we can have an expansive understanding of sacramentology in the main. If we think of creation as finding its res or reality, indeed, its telos or purpose in and from Christ alone, we can have a sacramental view of all of reality. Indeed, we ought to see an intensification of the sacraments that Christ ordained for His Church, but this shouldn’t diminish the fact that even the elementary parts of the sacraments, juice and water, are indeed part of the created order. And this is the point, these ‘signs’ are creaturely redeemed elements that bear witness to the greater reality that stands behind them: the blood and water of Jesus’s broken, baptized, and raised body. These signs bear witness to the fact of new creation, of the recreation that apocalyptically obtained in the resurrected humanity of Jesus Christ. As we look at, as we taste, as we feel, as we smell, as we partake of these elementary pieces, we are pushed to do these things ‘in remembrance of Him, until He comes.’

This is the way I can operate with a sacramentology: only if the sacraments are properly and orderly situated in the reality they have been given by the risen Christ. It is when they are elevated to an altitude they shouldn’t have, because of an ecclesiology that hasn’t been prescribed (by Christ), that the language of ‘sacrament’ becomes something of an anathema for the low churchman’s Protestant ears. But this need not be the case.

 

[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), 502-04 [emphasis mine].

The Weight of God’s Glory in the Vicarious Humanity of Jesus Christ: In the Theologies of John Calvin and Thomas Torrance

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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.

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].

Against Clericalism In High Churches and Low-Free Churches Alike: With Reference to Calvin’s Critique and A Local Church as Case Study

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Clericalism, it’s a problem. We might think this problem is reserved for high church governments like we find, in particular, in Roman Catholicism; its excesses were most pronounced during the mediaeval ecclesiopolitical period. But this problem isn’t limited to high churches; it is a severe problem in many low-church contexts as well. When I refer to clericalism I am referring to an inordinate power assumed by church bishops, pastors and others in roles of leadership. An inordinate power because it is a power, I will contend, that clerics have not been imbued with; they only presume it—this is why some church governments (like Episcopal) might seem more prone towards this abuse, given the well articulated and ordered hierarchy such structures have. But, again, the phenomenon of ‘clericalism’ is not limited to these highly structured and ordered churches. For some reason, I’d suggest ‘carnality,’ even low-Free-churches, such as Baptists, non-Denominational, and other such churches also have the problem of clericalism attending them. For the rest of this post we will address this problem: we will identify a particular church I currently am aware of (through very personal connections) that is engaging in a rank clericalism; we will appeal to John Calvin’s argument against clericalism, and then draw him into discussion with some exegesis of Matthew 16 and 18 respectively.

The church my wife attended most of her growing up years, and my in-laws church (for 30+ years) up until a few months ago has had a dramatic split. They brought a younger pastor in from Dallas Theological Seminary a few years ago, who had an agenda all his own. Without getting into all the details (that I’m aware of), he attempted to spend money and “do ministry” that was way out of step with the core body of the church; and this church was pretty large. It took people awhile to get wise to what he was actually doing, but many finally did; and a rolling split started to happen. Within the last few months things have come to a head, and the core people of this church voted the whole elder board out; which was also a repudiation of the pastor himself. The elder board (the one voted out, save one) decided they needed to have another vote for an “interim” board until a permanent one could be voted on in a few months time. But prior to this vote these elders, under the direction of the pastor, struck folks like my in-laws from the membership roster so they couldn’t vote. Low and behold the elder board that was just voted out was voted back in as the “interim” (I’m using the scare quotes because it’s obvious that they have no designs of giving up their status and power in the church). Then this elder board, along with the pastor, sent out a mass email to the people of the church telling them that a divisive group of people had caused all the problems, and that they all needed to repent and submit to the eldership and pastor as their spiritual authorities. The destruction and bleeding continues as I write this. This is “clericalism” in a low-church context. Viz. The idea that these men are imbued with a spiritual authority simply because of the office they inhabit. But this is demonic, and wrong. By the way, the church I am referring to is a Conservative Baptist Church in Olympia, Washington.

John Calvin was quite aware of clericalism in his 16th century Western European context; of course his experience of that was indeed, with the Roman Catholic church. Needless to say, Calvin had thoughts on this issue. We will read along with Calvin as he addresses the problem of clericalism, and then note how that is related to the dominical teaching found in Matthew. Calvin writes at length:

Now we must see what is the power of the keys, in which the “confessionists” place all the strength of their kingdom. “Were the keys, then,” they say, “given without reason? Would He have said: ‘Everything that you have loosed on earth will be loosed in heaven’ without reason? Do we then make Christ’s word without effect?” I answer that there are two passages where the Lord testifies that what His people will have bound or loosed on earth will bound and loosed in heaven. Although these passages have different meanings, they are improperly confused by the ignorance of these wild boars (as they are accustomed to do in everything). One passage is in St. John, where when Christ is sending his apostles to preach He breathes on them and says: “Receive the Holy Spirit; anyone’s sins which you pardon will be pardoned, and anyone’s sins which you retain will be retained” (Jn. 20[22-23]). The keys of the kingdom of heaven which had previously been promised to St. Peter are now given to him along with the other apostles, and nothing was promised to him which he did not receive here equally with all the others. It had been said to him: “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 16[19]). Here it is said to all the apostles that they should preach the gospel, which is to open the door of the heavenly kingdom to those who will seek access to the Father through Christ, and to close and bar it to those who turn away from this path. It had been said to him: “All that you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and all that you loose will be loosed.” Here it is said to all of them in common: “Those whose sins you pardon will be pardoned and those whose sins you retain will be retained.” To bind, then, is to retain the sins; to loose is to pardon them. Certainly, by the remission of sins consciences are delivered from true chains, and on the other hand by the retention of sins they are tightly bound. I will give an interpretation of this passage which is not too subtle or constrained or forced, but simple, true, and suitable.

This commandment to remit and retain sins, and the promise made to St. Peter to bind and loose, ought not to be related to any other end than the ministry of the word which, when our Lord ordained it for His apostles, He likewise committed to them the office of binding and loosing. For what is the summary of the gospel but that all of us, being slaves of sin and death, are delivered and brought over from sin and death by the redemption which is in Jesus Christ? On the contrary, that those who do not recognize and receive Christ as their Liberator and Redeemer are condemned to eternal prison? In giving His apostles this embassy to carry to all the nations on earth, and to show that it is His own, coming from and ordained by Him, our Lord honored it with this beautiful testimony — and it was a unique comfort to the apostles as well as the hearers to whom this embassy should be carried.

It was appropriate certainly that the apostles have a great and firm assurance about their preaching, when they had not only to undertake and carry it out with countless labors, cares, work, and dangers, but finally to seal it with their own blood. There was reason, then, for them to have the certainty that this preaching was not futile or empty but full of power. In such afflictions, difficulties, and dangers it was also necessary that they be assured that they were doing God’s work in order that, when all the world was opposing and going against them, they might know that God was for them; and that when they did not have Christ, the author of their teaching, with them on earth, they might understand that He was in heaven in order to confirm the truth of their preaching. On the other hand, it was necessary that it be very certainly testified to the hearers that this teaching was not the word of the apostles but of God Himself, and that it was not a voice born on earth but coming from heaven. For these things could not be in human power, that is, the remission of sins, the promise of eternal life, the message of salvation. So Christ testified that in the gospel preaching there was nothing of the apostles except the ministry; that it was He who spoke and promised everything by their mouths, as by instruments; that the remission of sins which they proclaimed was God’s true promise and the damnation which they made known was God’s certain judgment. Now this witness was given for all time and remains still firm for us, to make us certain and assured that the word of the gospel, by whomever it is preached, is the very speech of God, published from His throne, written in the book of life, passed, ratified and confirmed in heaven. So we understand that the power of the keys is simply the preaching of the gospel, and indeed it is not so much power as ministry, as far as the human part goes. For Christ has not properly given this power to people but to His word of which He has made people ministers.[1]

All of that to say that the power that clerics often assume in the name of being a cleric is ill-founded. As Calvin rightly points out, as he refers us to the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels, the cleric has no special power or authority over his brothers and sisters in Christ. He might have a different office than them, but the only ‘power’ he has is ministerial; and it is only even ministerial insofar that he proclaims and bears witness to the Gospel reality of God, which indeed is the Power. Do you see what this implies? It ought to teach us that no pastor, bishop, or elder has the place to usurp an authority over the body of Christ that goes beyond the Gospel itself. The pastor can hold people accountable to the reality and implications of the Gospel; he can expound upon and explain what those are. But the moment he appeals to some sort of inherent power or authority over others in the name of Christ, it is at that moment that the others have the authority to call him to account.

In the case of our example: When a majority of ‘the others’ have come to the conclusion that the elders and pastor have gone beyond the Gospel reality in their leadership roles, and they have called them to account; then it is the responsibility of the elders and pastor, in our case, to recognize that as the voice of God; it is their responsibility to respond responsibly, and step-down. Do you see the irony of this? The pastor, the elders, and other church ‘leaders’ do not have any greater authority or place before God than the ‘people’ of the church do; indeed, they are all just the people of the Church. The only one who has the sort of authority that the “clericalists” presume upon, as Calvin has so eloquently explicated for us, is Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the ‘Rock’ upon which the Church is built; not the clerics. Jesus Christ is the Power of God; not the clerics. So, in our scenario, these elders and pastor are out of line with the Gospel reality itself. They have been called to account by a majority of the church people, per the strictures of the Gospel itself, and as such ought to honor that witness to them.

As far as the exegesis of Matthew 16 and 18; Calvin has already started that argument, we will have to wait till later to fully get into that. But I will merely assert here that if we read Matthew 16 and 18 in the original language, and pay careful attention to the grammar therein, as Calvin has done, then we will arrive at the very same conclusion that Calvin has about ‘authority’ or power in the Church of Jesus Christ. We will come to realize that there is only a relative and more certain authority given to the Church catholic, only insofar that the Church more accurately bears witness to her reality in Jesus Christ. The moment the Church, or church leaders go beyond that witness, they no longer have any sort of authoritative reality to communicate; indeed, they have now placed themselves under the witness of others, as they collectively, or even individually in many cases, call the leadership back to their first love—if in fact they had this first love to begin with.

 

[1] John Calvin, Institutes Of The Christian Religion: 1541 French Edition, trans. by Elsie Anne McKee (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009), 293-95 [emboldening mine].

God’s Transcendence as the Point of Communion and Compassion: Calvin’s Theology Per Canlis

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I don’t have a lot of time to write anything, but I wanted to share this really good word from Julie Canlis (by the way, she is a contributor to our first volume Evangelical Calvinism book). Here she is writing on Calvin’s thinking on Divine transcendence. You will notice that she is taking aim at the late medieval potentia theology, most notably associated with Nominalism. You will also notice that as she parses this in Calvin’s theology, what comes through is his emphasis upon a relational/communal understanding of God’s transcendence in a God-world relation.

Calvin fights for God’s transcendence not due to some abstract Nominalist principle but for the purpose of communion. God’s transcendence is not God’s imprisonment over (and thus out of) the world, but rather his freedom to be present to the world. While God’s transcendence is often hailed as the most distinctive mark of Reformed theology, this transcendence — if it is to follow Calvin — must not mean external relationship to the world but the absolute freedom with which God stands in relationship to his creatures. It establishes the radical noncontinuity of grace and the world. It certainly does not establish that grace and the world have nothing to do with each other! Instead, he offered the possibility of a new way to ground the Creator-creature relationship. Although it does not look promising to begin with the ontological divide between Creator and creature, it is only when this is established that participation is possible. This is Calvin’s genius and what is most often misunderstood about his theo-logical program. For we must remember that Calvin believed that it is not the divine perspective but the sinful human one to regard this ontological divide as a fearful separation. From the human perspective, “we are nothing,” but from the divine perspective, “how magnified”! (III.2.25).[1]

I thought this was a good word on Calvin’s understanding of transcendence; particularly as that is contrasted with potentia theology. Here, from the outset, in Calvin, according to Canlis, we have an example of how transcendence could (and should!) be thought from relational and ultimately Christological vistas.

I still don’t think people are really appreciating how significant insights like this are. The way we think God determines everything else following. It determines whether or not we have compassion on a wayward soul at point of death or not; it determines how we view people in general. If our view of God is wrong it could well lead us into the trap of our ‘love growing cold.’ In Calvin’s theology, per Canlis, we are not thinking God in terms of abstract and dualistic powers; instead we are thinking him in terms of divine presence and communal warmth—even and precisely at the point that we are thinking of His transcendence.

 

[1] Julie Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder: A Spiritual Theology Of Ascent And Ascension (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2010), 723, 728 loc.

The Patristic Rather than the Protestant, Calvin: Calvin’s Doctrine of Theosis and Ontological Salvation in Con-versation With Irenaeus

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It might be said that John Calvin was something of a theologian born out of time. When you read him, particularly the French version of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, what you will find is someone who sounds more like a Patristic theologian more than one who worked in and post late medieval theology. His Christocentric emphasis, I think, leads him to sound like maybe an Athanasius or Irenaeus; he offers insights about the eternal life of salvation that operate from the catholicity borne out by ecumenical councils like the niceno-constantinopolitano-chalcedony offered towards the orthodox grammar and thought of the Church since.

More materially, Calvin’s thinking sounds almost exactly like Irenaeus’s idea of theosis, and how it took God become human in Christ for humanity to become sons of God, by the adoption of grace, and thus participants in the eternal triune life of God. Note Irenaeus, and then Calvin following:

But again, those who assert that He was simply a mere man, begotten by Joseph, remaining in the bondage of the old disobedience, are in a state of death having been not as yet joined to the Word of God the Father, nor receiving liberty through the Son, as He does Himself declare: If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed. John 8:36 But, being ignorant of Him who from the Virgin is Emmanuel, they are deprived of His gift, which is eternal life; Romans 6:23 and not receiving the incorruptible Word, they remain in mortal flesh, and are debtors to death, not obtaining the antidote of life. To whom the Word says, mentioning His own gift of grace: I said, You are all the sons of the Highest, and gods; but you shall die like men. He speaks undoubtedly these words to those who have not received the gift of adoption, but who despise the incarnation of the pure generation of the Word of God, defraud human nature of promotion into God, and prove themselves ungrateful to the Word of God, who became flesh for them. For it was for this end that the Word of God was made man, and He who was the Son of God became the Son of man, that man, having been taken into the Word, and receiving the adoption, might become the son of God. For by no other means could we have attained to incorruptibility and immortality, unless we had been united to incorruptibility and immortality. But how could we be joined to incorruptibility and immortality, unless, first, incorruptibility and immortality had become that which we also are, so that the corruptible might be swallowed up by incorruptibility, and the mortal by immortality, that we might receive the adoption of sons?[1]

And Calvin:

What we have said will be clearer if we consider that the office of Mediator is not a common thing — that is; to restore us to God’s grace in such a way that we are made His children, we who were the children of people; to make us heirs of the heavenly kingdom, we who were heirs of hell. Who could have done that unless the Son of God had been made Son of man and had taken our condition so as to transfer to us what was His properly by nature, making it ours by grace? So we have confidence that we are God’s children, having the guarantee that the natural Son of God took a body from our body, flesh from our flesh, bone from our bone, to be united with us. What was properly ours, He accepted in his person in order that what was properly His might belong to us, and thus He had in common with us that He was Son of God and Son of man. For this reason we hope that the heavenly inheritance is ours, because the unique Son of God who completely deserves it, has adopted us as His brothers. Now if we are His brothers, we are His co-heirs.[2]

In context, both Irenaeus and Calvin are writing against people who are attempting to denigrate the full divinity of the Son. Both thinkers identify the necessity of full divinity in Christ in order for ultimate salvation and eternal life to obtain. Interestingly, particularly with reference to Calvin, what we see is an inkling toward what we freely call theosis or divinization in the Patristic writers like Irenaeus. What is significant to me, in this regard, is that Calvin has an ontological understanding of salvation operative in and underwriting his thinking on salvation; contra the steep forensic or declarative understanding of salvation we end up seeing the scholastic Reformed or Post Reformed orthodox theologians of the Protestant period in the 16th and 17th centuries develop. This continues to be an underappreciated reality in Calvin, particularly by those who would like to read him into the Post Reformed orthodox period.

Thomas Torrance picks up on this theosis motif in Calvin’s thinking and rightly brings Calvin into the ontological frame when developing his own constructive doctrine of salvation. Again, this is rebuffed by people like Richard Muller et al. who want to read Calvin away from divinization salvific grammar, and instead see him fitting into the juridical models developed in the Post Reformation period. I think Torrance is right to align Calvin more with the Patristic Fathers rather than with the Post Reformed orthodox Fathers. I commend the aforementioned from Calvin as evidence in that direction. I also present it to you as further evidence that Calvin was someone born out of time; that he often sounds more like the Patristics than the Protestants, so to speak.

[1] Irenaeus, Against Heresies: Book III, Chpt. 19 [Emphasis mine].

[2] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion: 1541 French Edition, trans. by Elsie Anne McKee (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009), 223-24 [Emphasis mine].

The Word of God as the CentralDogma for Protestant Theology

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For me, a theology of the Word is definitive for what it means to be a Protestant Christian; as such, I think our theologies ought to be conditioned by their reposition upon the Word of God. There seems to be some slide in this area among Protestant retrievers; i.e. the guys and gals who are in the process of developing a ‘Reformed Catholicity’ among other nomenclature. As Protestants we should have a de jure or principled commitment to Holy Scripture and its reality in Jesus Christ as the primal initiative for all things theological and praxis. The Word of God ought to be the centraldogma of all that Protestant theology entails and is characterized by, such that when people read a Protestant theology they are thrust back, not upon the church, but Scripture, and its reality in Christ. I think this was a central motivation for the magisterial reformers, and is why we ended up with a sola scriptura. But, as Protestants, in our zeal to ‘recover’ the Great Tradition of the Church, we are seemingly being seduced back into the scholastic tradition-building tradition; and the ecclesial authority attendant with that, thus losing the actual authority of Scripture. As Protestants we say all else, in regard to a theory of authority, is subordinate to Holy Scripture; but in practice, and theological endeavor, I see something else happening.

John Calvin offers a good word on Scripture’s special place for his type of Protestant theology. In the following he is in early discussion on his concept of knowledge of God, and how he sees God’s Word as the special place that the ‘children of God’ are given to have an accurate, and thus non-idolatrous, knowledge of God. The moment we digress into Trad-itional knowledge of God, at least as our regulative authority, we have crossed over into speculative rather than revealed knowledge of God. As one of the early pre-post-Reformed orthodox Reformed theologians, Calvin understood this, in regard to the character that a Word-based theology ought to have for his Protestant brethren and sistren. He writes:

Since it is evident that God used His word with those whom He wanted to instruct fruitfully, because He saw that His form and image which He had imprinted in the edifice of the world was not sufficient, we must walk by this path if we desire with a good heart rightly to contemplate His truth. We must, I say, return to the word in which God is shown very well and painted as if living by His works, when these are considered no according to perversity of our judgment but according to the rule of the eternal truth. If we turn away from this word, no matter how quickly we go, we will never arrive at the goal because we are not running in the path. For we must take into account that the light of God which the apostle calls “inaccessible” is for us like a labyrinth to lose us unless we are led through it by the directing of the word, so that it is better for us to limp along in this path than to run quickly outside of it. That is why David, having recounted how the glory of God is preached by the heavens, the works of His hands proclaimed by the firmament, His glory manifested by the well-ordered succession of day and night, then comes down to the commemoration of His word (Ps. 19[1]). “The law of the Lord,” he says, “is without blemish, converting the soul; the testimony of the Lord is true, giving wisdom to the lowly; the righteousness of the Lord is right, rejoicing the hearts; the precept of the Lord is clear, enlightening the eyes” (Ps. 19[7-8]). By this he signifies that the teaching by creatures is universal to all, but the instruction by the word is specific to the children of God.[1]

We can understand Calvin better as we place the above quote into his teaching on the twofold knowledge of God,[2] more broadly; but for our purposes, what is important to highlight is the centrality the Word of God has for Calvin at a base level. For the Protestant there is an aversion to speculation about God, and “Godness,” just at the point that we (as Protestants) are committed to what God has revealed of Himself to and for us in Christ as attested to by the canon that Holy Scripture is.

As I broach this issue, in regard to the material and formal sufficiency of God’s Word, what you might also be alerted to is why I have chosen to go the way I have, in regard to the tradition I have, in Reformed theology. I think to be catholic, in the best sense, is to be committed to the rule of Faith, who is Scripture’s reality, Jesus Christ. I know that many believe that to be genuinely catholic these days, means to one degree or the other, that we tie ourselves into the Tradition of the Church. But I think prior to that, and more decisive than that, what it really means to be catholic is to be tied into the humanity of God in Jesus Christ; how can we be more catholic than that?[3]

[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), 37.

[2] From the quote we can also pickup Calvin’s notional thinking on the sensus Divinitatis, but again, for our purposes we are focused on the Word in this post.

[3] There are many related and underwriting threads just waiting to be pulled upon in regard to my question here, like: 1) theory of authority, 2) theory of revelation, 3) ecclesiological theory in general, 4) how we think catholicity vis-à-vis progressive historical developments etc.

Knowledge of God and His Holiness Brings Knowledge of Self: Learning How to Live a Counter-Cultural Life from the Culture of Heaven

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I have been thinking lately about how easily we, as Christians, are seduced into the ways of the ‘world’; even when we are vigilantly attempting to live sanctified lives unto God. It is seemingly impossible to not be enculturated, at some level, to the point that our guard is taken down and the world system then seeps into the pores of our lives such that we become blind to the stark reality of God’s otherness and holiness; the holiness that He requires us to live into: ‘Be Holy as I am Holy.’ So what’s our hope? Can we have a daily knowledge of God which keeps us from being sucked into the ‘ways of the world,’ such that we have the capacity to not just resist, but discern the various snares set for us by the enemy of our souls?

John Calvin in the very opening of his Institute of the Christian Religion famously offers his thoughts on knowledge of God and knowledge of self. I think his words are a helpful way to think about our position before God, and how it is that we come to have a genuine knowledge of ourselves; just as we come to have a genuine knowledge of God through union with Christ. I want to suggest that it is as we inhabit this frame, on a daily basis, that we will come to have the proper perspective for doing ‘battle’ in a world system that seeks, at every turn, to take us captive to do its will rather than God’s. Calvin writes (in the 1541, French version of his Institute):

For this pride is rooted in all of us, that it always seems to us that we are just and truthful, wise and holy, unless we are convicted by clear evidence of our unrighteousness, lies, madness, and uncleanness. For we are not convinced if we look only at ourselves and not equally at the Lord, who is the unique rule and standard to which this judgment must be conformed. For since we are all naturally inclined to hypocrisy, an empty appearance of righteousness quite satisfies us instead of the truth; and since there is nothing at all around us which is not greatly contaminated, what is a little less dirty is received by us as very pure, so long as we are happy with the limits of our humanity which is completely polluted. Just as the eye which looks at nothing but black-colored things judges something that is a poor white color, or even half-gray, to be the whitest thing in the world. It is also possible to understand better how much we are deceived in our measure of the powers of the soul, by an analogy from physical sight. For if in broad daylight we look down at the earth, or if we look at the things around us, we think that our vision is very good and clear. But when we lift our eyes directly to the sun, the power which was evident on the earth is confounded and blinded by such a great light, so that we are obliged to admit that the good vision with which we look at earthly things is very weak when we look at the sun. The same thing happens when we measure our spiritual abilities. For as long as we do not consider more than earthly matters we are very pleased with our own righteousness, wisdom, and virtue, and flatter and praise ourselves, and thus come close to considering ourselves half divine. But if we once direct our thought to the Lord and recognize the perfection of His righteousness, wisdom, and power (the rule and standard by which we must measure), what pleased us before under the guise of righteousness will appear dirtied with very great wickedness; what deceived us so wondrously under the guise of wisdom will appear to be extreme madness; what had the appearance of power will be shown to be miserable weakness: so it is when what seemed most perfect in us is compared with God’s purity.[1]

Calvin’s thought here is a prescient word for our current moment in world history. As Christians, in the main, we have firmly planted our feet on the slippery slope of cultural appropriation to the point that genuine encounter with the living God has become fleeting; instead we typically end up encountering self-projections who we have conflated with divinity.

Some may read these words from Calvin, and read: Legalism or nomism. But if that’s the conclusion then Calvin’s point is only proven, not repudiated. Christians are so afraid of being legalists, that they’ve lost sight of the demand of God to be holy as He is Holy. Christians, unfortunately, have wrongly read legalism and God’s holiness and purity together; but this couldn’t be further from the reality. Legalism is a man-made standard, the very standard Calvin is attempting to marginalize and undercut, that elevates human-centered wisdom and righteousness to divine status, and then, if at all, attempts to live up to this artificial standard to achieve favor before God and men. But this is all wrong, as Calvin so insightfully identifies. God’s holiness is sui generis, it is of another sort; another world even. God’s holiness is set apart by His eternal Life as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in interpenetrative union. This is the knowledge that sets us free to see ourselves as we are; this is the knowledge that undoes our artificial systems of right and wrong. It is a knowledge of God that sets us free to see the world as it is, as God sees it for us in Christ; a world that, in God’s economy has come to have a cruciform shape, such that to think God rightly first requires a daily reckoning of ourselves dead to sin and alive to God in and from Christ.

It is possible to maneuver the terrain of the current world system as a Christian, and not be fully sublimated by the seductive siren calls of its minions of “light.” But it requires the sort of knowledge Calvin alerts us to. It requires a daily battle that we ourselves have no strength to fight; so it requires that we actively recognize our passive posture before God, with the hope that He, in His mercy, will supply us with the grace sufficient for us to see as He sees. It seems that, by-and-large, the church, even the so called evangelical churches, is failing at this in radical ways. If we are going to be ‘saved’ we must have to do with the real and living God, not with a god who is a manifest destiny of our own making. This is the challenge that Calvin leaves us with: Are we going to battle to seek God while He may be found; are we going to wake up each morning, and reckon ourselves dead to sin and alive to Christ? It is only in this Spirit empowered mode of living coram Deo that the Christian will have the resource to be an ‘overcomer’ rather than someone overcome by this world system.

[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), 24.

The Calvinian Turn to Jesus Christ Versus the Catholic Turn to the Vicar: A Rationale for the Evangelical Calvinist Via

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John Calvin provided for a Protestantly Reformed turn towards a genuinely Christocentric theology of the Word, that prior (except in lineaments found in some Patristics and then in Martin Luther) was hard to find; particularly in the mediaeval context within which Calvin found himself, even if that was of the late variety. In the modern period when we read someone like Karl Barth and Thomas Torrance, and then compare that with a reading of John Calvin, what stands out is the way that Barth/Torrance followed Calvin’s ‘turn,’ but only in even more radical or theo-logically conclusive ways. This is something I don’t think current Protestants who are attempting to retrieve the ‘classical’ past appreciate very much; viz. this turn that Calvin helped initiate (along with Luther), a radical turn to a genuine theology of the Word in Jesus Christ—a turn to a christocentric approach to theological endeavor versus the theocentric that reigned supreme in the Tridentine.

Julie Canlis—as we once again refer to her magisterial work, Calvin’s Ladder—helps us appreciate this Calvinian turn as she contrasts that with the Aquinasian approach (you’ll see her reference the structure of Thomas’s Summa Theologiae and how that materially illustrates her point). She writes:

A comparison of Aquinas and Calvin reveals that, while Calvin picks up on this scholastic scheme, he also fundamentally alters it. Pushing beyond Wyatt’s insight, we discover that it no longer is the story of humanity’s ascent to God by grace (Aquinas), or of the soul’s ascent (Augustine), but of Christ’s ascent. Calvin refuses to tack Christ as a tertia pars onto the Plotinian circle of creation’s procession from and return to God. Instead, Christ breaks open the circle and grafts it onto himself. For Calvin, the figure of Christ has shattered any scheme that begins with creation and allows creation to be considered apart from Christ, through whom it was made and to whom it is directed. In subtly shifting Aquinas’s exitus- reditus scheme from anthropology to Christ, Calvin challenges Aquinas’s attempt at theocentrism as not going far enough. It is not Christ who fits into the procrustean bed of anthropology but we who are fitted to Christ and his ascent. In him and by his Spirit, we ascend to the Father.[1]

She is certainly right to recognize that Calvin operated in the milieu of his own period; how could he not? But, as Canlis also helps us see, Calvin was a constructive and ingenious Christian thinker propelled by his newfound Protest-ant faith; a faith given direction and shape by a principled commitment to the Word rather than to the Church as his ultimate authority. Within this complex Calvin was ingressed into a new world that had the imaginary to think the church from Christ rather than Christ from the church; as such, he was able to make the turn that others prior couldn’t.

I would suggest that Barth and Torrance picked up on this turn in Calvin, and as I noted previously, radicalized it further; to its rightful conclusion even. Both Barth and Torrance, and us Evangelical Calvinists, are genuinely Calvinian in the sense that we operate not just in the spirit, but the letter of Calvin’s turn to Jesus Christ as the centraldogma of all that is viable in theological endeavor. I think our counterparts in other tributaries of the Reformed faith, in their zeal to recover the ‘catholic faith’ have unfortunately overlooked the sort of Christ conditioned notion of God that Calvin (and Luther) did not. As Evangelical Calvinists we attempt to move and breath in this Christ concentrated spirit, with the result that all our theologizing is principially and intensively Christ pressured. We think this is the right trajectory to be on since Jesus himself seemed to take this approach when engaging with Holy Scripture (cf. Jn 5.39; etc.).

[1] Julie Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder: A Spiritual Theology of Ascent and Ascension(Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2010), Loc. 493, 498.

Election Was Barth’s Hook: Contra the Five Point Calvinists and the Absolutum Decretum

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What initially attracted me to Karl Barth and Thomas Torrance? It really was a matter of theological utility, and need. I lived in a nut, and I needed it cracked; they cracked it for me with integrity and theological acumen. That was the hook for me. What am I referring to; what’s the nut? Election/Reprobation/Predestination. Some people simply want to ignore these words, and the concepts they symbolize, because they would claim they aren’t biblical words (but neither is the Trinity). So for those of us who don’t want to live with our heads in the theological sands we feel compelled to deal with the material language like election represent. For me, growing up as an evangelical, a Conservative Baptist to boot, my inculcation in this area was to live in a mode that some call: Calmanian. You see what’s being done there? The smooshing together of the words Calvinist and Arminian; this was the smooshy world I lived in all the way through seminary. I freely chose to reject the idea that God in Christ only died for a limited elect group of people (the “U” in the TULIP: ‘Unconditional Election’ and the “L” ‘Limited Atonement’); indeed, I have always found that idea reprehensible and at severe odds with who I’ve always understood God to be as Triune love. I could never stomach the idea, and still can’t, that God only ultimately loves certain people that He chooses to love based on an ad hoc choice that He makes for reasons known only to Him. I find this reprehensible because I don’t find it cohering with who God has revealed Himself to be in Jesus Christ; never have!

Barth, and Torrance following, offered a way out for me; but not in the negative way that might sound. In other words, what I found in them, with there intensive concentration on Jesus Christ, was a way to think about election-reprobation in and from what Hunsinger calls the ‘Chalcedonian Pattern’ (in reference to Barth’s theology). In the spirit of Athanasius, Barth and Torrance, both take the categories of election-reprobation and ground them principally in Jesus Christ; they see Him as both the electing God, and the elected human. In His free choice to be elected human, by virtue of His electing work, he assumes the reprobate status of what it means to be human (post-lapse). When we think about election-reprobation alongside Barth-Torrance we start thinking in terms of what has been called the mirifica commutatio (‘wonderful exchange’), or in the more Pauline terms of ‘by His poverty we’ve been made rich’ (cf. II Cor. 8.9). So the focus for Barth and Torrance is on a concrete humanity versus the abstract and individualistic conception of humanity we find in the so called absolutum decretum funding five point soteriology. In other words, for Barth and Torrance, Jesus is archetypal humanity, the ‘firstborn from the dead’ (cf. Col. 1.15-18), the ‘new creation’ (cf. II Cor. 5.17); by virtue of this status it is not possible to connive any other ontology or concept of humanity except by thinking that through the resurrected/recreated humanity of Jesus Christ. Interestingly, this isn’t just in Barth-Torrance, Calvin’s union with Christ (unio cum Christo) and double grace (duplex gratia) concepts are inchoate seeds that finally led to what Barth ultimately developed (see Pierre Maury’s influence on Barth’s aha moment in regard to his reformulation of election — Maury can be seen as a stepping stone between Calvin and Barth).

Some people are troubled by this schema for election-reprobation because of the theory of causation and the metaphysics they have imbibed (that produced the absolutum decretum), but that’s their problem. If people want to conflate a foreign ideological framework with kerygmatic reality, and then petitio principii (circular) argue that anyone who disagrees with them is disagreeing with the Gospel and its implications has deeper problems they ought to attend to; like an inability to critically engage with their own theological methodology. In other words, the Calvinist is very concerned, with reference to Barth’s reformulation, with how someone will finally come to the point that they need Jesus; i.e. given their totally depraved state. Given their options, in the metaphysics they live in, all they have available to them is a world that either emphasizes God’s choice, or the human choice. But that’s not the only alternative (in regard to thinking about causality); and Torrance’s work with Einstein’s theory of relativity and Maxwell’s field theory, helps to illustrate, by engagement with what Torrance calls ‘social-coefficients’ (what Barth might call ‘secular parables’ and some Patristics might call Logoi) how things are more dynamic in the warp and woof of the fabric of contingent/created reality vis-à-vis God.

Let me leave us with a good quote from Barth:

How can we have assurance in respect of our own election except by the Word of God? And how can even the Word of God give us assurance on this point if this Word, if this Jesus Christ, is not really the electing God, not the election itself, not our election, but only an elected means whereby the electing God—electing elsewhere and in some other way—executes that which he has decreed concerning those whom He has—elsewhere and in some other way—elected? The fact that Calvin in particular not only did not answer but did not even perceive this question is the decisive objection which we have to bring against his whole doctrine of predestination. The electing God of Calvin is a Deus nudus absconditus.[1]

I develop all of this further in my personal chapter for our last Evangelical Calvinism book; which you can read via google books here.

I don’t know if you hang around in Calvinist circles (like I do!), but it’s interesting, they hardly ever talk about this doctrine. There is good reason why! Roger Olson, the evangelical Arminian, often refers to the Calvinist God as a monster, precisely because of their doctrine of election-reprobation. But Olson, ironically, works in and from the same theological material, and the same basic metaphysic that the Calvinists do; he doesn’t offer a viable alternative.

[1] Karl Barth, CD II/2, 111.