Sonnet for Calvin's Institutes 1.1-3

Duplex Cognitio Dei

When I consider all the ways of man,

His blesséd pow'rs, or heaven's sun and show'rs,

Or that ill state of ruin that makes him wan,

And call to God for help in lowly hours;

When eye is cast beyond the earthly haze,

And pierces through the starry heights above,

To rest on beauty, burning blind its gaze,

And falters before glory's weighty oeuvre,

Then shall a man, his God and self behold

Aright in truth: that righteousness, so pure;

That wisdom, keen; that virtue, ever bold,

That light in fullest light, none can endure,

Till he undone shall be by doom and death,

And born anew by Holy Spirit's breath.

The Gradual Incarnation, or, From Advent to Advent to Advent.

There is a curious trajectory in the Genesis narrative. In the Garden, God's intimacy with man was unimpeded and full; God could walk amongst his vicegerents and observe their works; He could bring the animals before the man and watch him name them according to their kind. After the Fall, however, Holy God must be separated from the man. Man is put out of the Garden and his nakedness is clothed with the skin of a sacrificial offering. 

With each new evil, it seems as if the rift between God and man grows beyond repair. Cain slaughters Abel and must not only be exiled from the Garden, but must wander detached from the land and from his relations. Even as Lamech draws many wives to himself, he sunders life from those who offend him, signifying in his wrath the state into which he is himself plunged by his rebellious autonomy. By the time of the Flood, the rift is complete, and every intent of every thought of man is only evil continually. 

Yet in the midst of the increasingly wide gap between God and man, there is a gradual movement towards intimate presence. God visits Eve in her grief and provide a life where there was death. The moment is somewhat fleeting, but it is sure. We even get the glimpse of God's desire to receive man into His fellowship again, for Enoch, who walked with God, was taken from the earth--out of corruption and into the Lord's presence. Noah is visited by God, and not only the man, but his whole family and a host of animals--Noah's name was itself a prophetic hope that relief from the curse upon the rift between man and the earth would come. When God promises never again to flood the earth, it is not a message of grandfatherly leniency ("no matter what you do, I won't punish you THAT badly again"), but of promised presence, as if to say, "I will never let you go so far from me again that such measures are necessary." It is the promise of His presence where the world before the Flood was a picture of a world utterly devoid of God's restraining and embracing Spirit.

Abraham, the father of nations, is also an answer to the Flood, and to Babel. The cleansing and scattering are sundering man, but in Abraham the nations are gathered together under the promise of God's abiding presence. God reassures Abraham of His continued presence, even so far as to be his shield in battle--a protection not before offered to man. God moves closer to man; he is more visible in the incarnate affairs of man's life.

Abraham's own relation to the promised seed goes from decreasing to increasing intimacy. Sarai is barren, but Abraham has provisions, albeit at a remove. Eliezer, a servant of Abraham out of Damascus, is his first recourse. Too far removed. The next recourse is to his concubine, Hagar, and the son of their union, Ishmael. Too far removed. From the flesh of Abraham and from the flesh of his flesh, Sarah, shall the promised son come into being.

The entire history of Israel could be made an image, the approach of the King from His distant throne into the presence of His people. With each step comes more power and influence in the affairs of His people, until it is such that when the Risen Lord returns to His distant throne the Spirit of His Presence pervades His People; His blood courses through His Body, His flesh envelopes His Body; and each summons is met with the nourishing invigoration of this intimate communion, so bountiful in its provision that it overflows wherever His Body stretches its limbs and ambulates about His Kingdom.

There is no turning back, no reversals, no Floods or sunderings left to happen. The Body is only just realizing what it is like to live without the separation caused by sin; to live in the liberating life of the One Who sundered Himself in death, Who scattered Himself in Resurrection, and Who will Gather Himself (that is, His Body) in due time.

For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Calvin's prefatory remarks on the Trinity and the Incarnation as the Paradigm of Divine Accommodation

In the opening section of Calvin's chapter on the Trinity (Book 1, chapter 13), he claims that two doctrines set forth in Scripture concerning God's being protect against both the dreams of the vulgar and the subtleties of profane philosophy.

One doctrine is the immensity of God and the other is the spirituality of God. The immensity of God curbs the human mind's natural inclination to measure by our senses, while the spirituality keeps us mindful that God cannot be equated with physical analogies (of which he says more a bit later). It seems as well that the immensity of God prevents human intellect from imagining that it can, by increasing knowledge of God, gain mastery over Him or circumscribe His limits.

Rather, knowledge of God, so far from enabling man to exert power over the object of knowledge, transforms the man into a fuller, or more perfect iteration of his nature. That is to say, since God has made man as His image, and insofar as Christ is the express image of God, as man grows in his knowledge of God, he also grows up into a more complete image of Christ.

Additionally, Calvin speaks of God's accommodation toward man, particularly in the language of Scripture's descriptions of God. While described as having hands, eyes, fingers, and so on, God is not essentially possessed of any of these physical aspects, but rather these physical descriptions as "lisps" as a nurse to a babe. God accommodates the immensity of His nature to man by describing Himself in  terms of the physical, sensate elements by which man experiences much of his own existence.

One could ask what undergirds the doctrine of accommodation, or rather, whether the language of Scripture is the only relevant aspect of God's accommodation. The response could easily be that it is rather that the language of Scripture is an image of the Greater Accommodation God makes to man in the Incarnation of the Son of God. In making Himself known to man, God became a man, and in so doing has made it possible for man to become like God in a way that otherwise man could not.

It is a topic sometimes (and more frequently today, perhaps) speculated upon, whether Adam, had he not sinned, would have received eternal life, or whether he would have remained under a requirement of perpetual obedience, yet mutable (able to sin). Such speculations, it seems to me, miss the larger point. Adam could not have earned divinity except through union with the divine, and insofar as union with the divine is most fully manifest in the hypostatic union, the Incarnation is essential to the proper raising of man into his full nature. Only by the Eternal Son of God joining Himself to a human nature could human nature reach culmination.

Luther on "grace" and "gift"; with a homily on electing love

Between grace and gift there is this difference. Grace means properly God's favor, or the good-will God bears us, by which He is disposed to give us Christ and to pour into us the Holy Ghost, with His gifts. This is clear from chapter 5 [of Romans], where He speaks of "the grace and gift in Christ." The gifts and the Spirit increase in us every day, though they are not yet perfect, and there remain in us the evil lust and sin that war against the Spirit, as Paul says in Romans 7 and Galatians 5, and the quarrel between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent is foretold in Genesis 3. Nevertheless, grace does so much that we are accounted wholly righteous before God. For His grace is not divided or broken up, as are the gifts, but it takes us entirely into favor, for the sake of Christ our Intercessor and Mediator, and because of that the gifts are begun in us.

What follows is one part appreciation for Luther's quote, and many parts tangential appreciation for something a bit different.

Martin Luther provides a helpful distinction between grace, defined as God's favor, and gift, which is an expression (but not the entire expression) of that same favor. An analogous distinction could be made between Law, defined as God's order, and precept, which is the expression (but not the entire expression) of God's order.

Apart from being an excellent distinction between grace and gift, Luther's quotation provokes an interesting question: How is it that God's grace--the electing grace of which Luther speaks here--how is it that this grace is distributed equally and universally to all saints, whereas God's gifts are distributed unequally and particularly? The answer, I think, exhibits the harmony of unity and diversity, of the One and the Many. Grace is the unifying principle, the One Thing that binds all of God's redemptive activity toward Creation; and gift is the distributive principle, the Many Things that declare in innumerable ways the multi-faceted, varied character of God's redemptive activity toward Creation. The summary term for all of these details concerning grace and gift is Electing Love.

We have access to God's gifts by God's grace, and our access to God's grace is through our union with Christ, who is Himself the Elect Son of God, and the Elect Man of God, from before the foundation of the world.

There is a sense in which there are only two individuals considered in the decree of predestination and election. There is the First Man, Adam, in whom the decree of reprobation is represented (whether or not the individual man, Adam, is elect or reprobate; since Adam's own representation need not remain in himself, though it remains in those who follow from him by natural generation), and the Last Man, Christ, in whom the decree of redemption is represented (whether or not the individual man, Christ, requires redemption, since his own representative status does not depend upon--indeed, rather would be destroyed by--his own possession of the condition of sin).

Now it is quite true that every human being has been decreed unto reprobation or redemption, individually. However, one of the key issues that people have with election is that it occurs apart from any individual's own contribution (we might say, his own merit). How is it, it is asked, that any one person should be redeemed or reprobated apart from consideration of his or her own choices, which make up his or her identity? Must not the individual be free from any compulsion, so that, by one's own choosing, he or she may love the God who gave His Son to redeem man from sin?

The unquestioned assumption in the question is that one's own identity is something determined by one's own choices. This is the Existentialist philosophy of "Existence precedes Essence," or "I am what I do," or "I am that I choose." Rather, we should recognize that an individual's choices are a result of his or her identity, not a cause of it. An empirical examination does not seem to justify this claim, since we often discover that who we thought we were is different than what we think as a result of some choice or action. "I never though I could do X" seems to support the idea that my choices determine what I am. However, our identity is not made up of our self-knowledge, for, as the Apostle John declares, "we do not yet know what we will be" (1 Jn. 3:2). That our choices reveal to us an identity that heretofore was unknown does not prove that choice determines identity, but rather it shows the limitations of human knowledge. We may know ourselves truly, yet not completely--our identity is being shaped, but not by our choices.

What then shapes our individual identities, of which our choices are but partial revelations?

God's omnipotence entails that no power, indeed, not even the power of an individual human will, is constituted or made effectual apart from God's will. What I choose, what you choose, what anyone chooses according to the liberty of our highest affection, depends upon the exertion of God's power entirely. What I choose on the basis of, that is, my identity, rests entirely upon the favorable or disfavorable willing of God. God wills unto one's good, or one's ill, and the choices one makes reveal to himself and the world whether he or she has God's favor or not (though the full revelation of individuals is obscured in large part until the consummation of the Age and the Return of the Son in Judgment).

On what basis then does God constitute Those Favored and Those Unfavored?

Since it is God's will that constitutes these two groups, there is no higher standard to which God could appeal, no standard upon which He could examine whether to choose X for reprobation and Y for redemption. Since no individual human will can act upon from God prior determination of that will, it is by God's will alone that any subsequent will, wills. Therefore God's will alone factors in the equation. The choice, for God, is arbitrary without being capricious. That is, God is free to choose without doing injustice in however He chooses.

Despite the arbitrary nature of God's constituting the reprobate and the redeemed, there is another factor that liberates God from the charge of injustice, or even of unmitigated self-interest. The decree to elect and reprobate is not undirected, but has its end in the honoring of the Eternally Begotten Son. The Eternal Father desires to offer His Eternal Son an inheritance, therefore He elects unto the Son a people for Him to provide for, protect, and to glorify into His own image, just as the Eternal Son is the image of the Eternal Father. The Father is reproducing in giving His Son an inheritance what the Son will reproduce in His that inheritance--an honorable, glorifying imitation, which is the essence of divine love, which is the Holy Spirit (so much more could be said to unravel this seamless garment!).

The glorification of the Son, and consequently of the Father, is such that there must be an Enemy; an Enemy who possesses his own people to become an unholy imitation of his blasphemous nature. Such unholy anti-love is but the antithesis, the contrastive highlighting, of Divine Love. The darker the shadow of Satanic opposition, the brighter the light of the Son's glorification.

The failure to appreciate the beauty of election is not due to any lack of aesthetic sensibility or faculty of recognition--for in nature, in artistic imitation, the use and appreciation for contrast is so universal as to be an unmistakable principle of beauty, even when it is not considered the sum and whole. No painter can achieve plays of light apart from contrasts in darkness. No musician can achieve the heights of a major tone apart from the lows of a minor. There can be no "is" without there also being an "is not."

No, the rejection of God's electing love (which include reprobation) stems from the universal recognition of one's own status as one of the condemned. Each convict rails against the Just Judge, not because the convict can ultimately deny the justice of the verdict, or the power of the Judge to execute the sentence, but rather from the convict's own dissatisfaction that he, the convict, cannot be, himself, the Judge. That motive characterizes the "old man," "the flesh," the child of darkness, the Satanic being--a motive that can only accuse the Maker of All Things of not doing everything according to the command of the Made.

But to those who have been constituted in Christ, and have been realized as such in history (i.e. the Spirit of adoption has testified to their spirit that they are indeed, sons of God with the Son), there is all of joy and marvel at the beauty of God's electing Love--that He would include such lowly and dependent creatures in the glorification of the Most Exalted and Eternal Son! Had God wanted to, it would have been enough for Him to have allowed all humanity to enjoy the few years of pleasure on this most magnificent orb of joyous beauty--even that much would be more than we deserve as His enemies. Yet even the joys of earth were not enough an expression of the Love of Our Great God, who was neither so mean nor so impoverished as to keep even the most self-debasing and rebellious of His creatures from participating, after their own creaturely fashion, in the Divine nature.

Christian, what can you but do than exclaim, "Marvelous! Wonderful! All Too High and Lofty Design! O, Beauty and Love Immeasurable Great! Worthy, Worthy, O Most Worthy God; Holy Father, Holy Son, and Holy Spirit! Amen!"

Calvin's Keys

I'm working my way through a very interesting book on Calvin's exegesis called The School of God, written by Raymond Blacketer; a man who is apparently a student of Richard Muller. Like Muller, Blacketer pays close attention to Calvin's rhetorical education and in particular to how Calvin allowed that training to aid him in interpreting the Scriptures. In doing so, Calvin was following in a long train of Bible expositors tracing back to the early Church, and most famously Augustine.

One of the key ideas from classical rhetoric that Calvin and most of the other Reformers employed was the notion of commonplaces. Commonplaces are topics upon which, or around which collections of arguments or disputes collect and serve as a stockpile from which the orator can draw to make a persuasive case for some or another proposition. It was Melanchthon who brought the idea of commonplaces into the writing of Christian doctrine in his Loci Communes. Interesting, as we learn from Muller's book, The Unaccommodated Calvin, Melanchthon drew out his commonplaces from Scripture itself. Not Scripture as a whole, but rather Paul's epistle to the Romans, which follows the following topical order:

1. Sin
2. Law
3. Grace
4. The people of God and the call of the Gentiles
5. Predestination
6. Good works
7. Civil authority
8. Christian liberty
9. The problem of offense or scandal

These topics become one of the organizational structure by which Calvin organizes his Institutes in the 1539 edition onward (the original 1536 edition follows a catechism method adapted from Luther's Small Catechism). Thus, following Paul, Calvin and other Reformers used these commonplaces as interpretive keys to unlocking the major teachings of the Bible. They would organize the content, or testimony of Scripture under these heads in order the the preachers and teachers of the Church would know the overarching theological themes of Scripture.

It is also in Muller that we find Calvin's pedagogical division of labor. He did not attempt to write a comprehensive exposition of Scripture in his Institutes. Rather, in the interests of brevity, he sought to use the Institutes as a treatment of the common topics with some measure of disputation, but without a lengthy exegesis of Scripture. The Commentaries would be where Calvin would avoid delving into the disputed passages or common topics of doctrine, but would follow closely the thought of the Biblical writer, only occasionally delving into doctrinal extensions or disputations. In the sermons Calvin would depart from his attempts at brevity and engage in lengthy amplifications of his text in the form of direct applications to the congregation. He generally avoided disputation, and where he avoided numerous cross-referencing in the Commentaries, he indulged in them heavily in the sermons.

An exception to the division of labor occurs in Blacketer's analysis of Calvin's Harmony of Moses. Here Calvin arranges the materials of the last four books of the Pentateuch into an order more conducive to both doctrinal exposition and chronological narrative. The interpretive key for the harmony is the Decalogue, or Ten Commandments, which Calvin considers to be Scripture's own commonplaces for the doctrines and laws set forth in the Pentateuch. The Decalogue is a summary statement of God's Law from which all the ceremonial and civil laws of the Pentateuch are derived or deduced. Calvin goes to great lengths to categorize the laws according to their ceremonial or civic (or both) nature, commenting on the extent to which they are abrogated in the work of Christ, or by the limits of the historical context of Ancient Israel.

Blacketer points out that Calvin's Commentary in the Harmony does not follow the proposed brevity that Calvin claimed for himself. Blacketer's argument is that Calvin did not intend to use the doctrinal insights for a new edition of the Institutes, and so he saw fit to include them within the Commentary itself, despite having chastised Bucer for doing that very thing. Although this explanation seems plausible, it may also be necessary to consider the nature of the Harmony as such. Calvin is not merely attempting to follow the thought of Moses, but to improve upon its organization for the purposes of pedagogy for the Church. In such a case, Calvin is working both as Commentator AND as Expositor of the fundamental doctrines set forth by the text (i.e., the function of the Institutes). Calvin's Harmony may be more than a harmonizing the Pentateuch--it may also be harmonizing Commentary with the System of doctrine set forth in the commonplaces.

In any case, what is quite clear from Muller and Blacketer's scholarship is that the modern divide between systematic and biblical theology is foreign to the sixteenth century context. Such bifurcations, if there were even hints of them, are not matters of strict division of content, but rather a conscious division of labor suited to the pedagogical ease and needs of unlearned pastors and teachers in the Church. Calvin did not derive his dogmatics apart from his exegetical work in preparing commentaries and sermons for his congregation. Indeed, it was only because Calvin was constantly studying the Scriptures to exposit them for the congregation and for the future pastors and teachers that Calvin arrived at his dogmatic conclusions.

Finally, and the most important application to be taken, we should recognize that reading Scripture is of very little profit apart from understanding the doctrine that the Scripture displays. A corollary to understanding doctrine is that there must be a proper organization, method, or order of thought by which we can discern what Scripture teaches. For Calvin, the right order of teaching came via the classical rhetorical idea of commonplaces, which he saw applied by the Holy Spirit through Paul's ordering of the epistle to the Romans, and through Moses's development of the Law by means of the Ten Commandments. We should remember that rhetoric, like logic, though it was developed by the Ancient Greeks, is not inimical to Scripture, but is rather revealed in its pages to be the very means by which the Holy Spirit has chosen to reveal His thought to us. In that sense we may be humbled by God's choice to enlighten pagan minds to teach His holy saints about Himself. We may, like Augustine says, plunder the riches of Egypt to our profit, and to the glory of God.