by Sinclair B. Ferguson
The question of whether there is a central theme in John Calvin's theology has long been debated and will surely continue to be so. The options placed on the table of Calvin scholarship have varied from the now passé assumption that he was obsessed with predestination to more recent attempts to place Christology at the center and core. Insofar as Calvin was a remarkably sensitive biblical (and not a narrowly systematic) theologian, this diversity of perspective is not surprising. An analogous diversity of answers is found among contemporary biblical scholars when asked what the central motif of the Old Testament is. It was part of Calvin's wisdom that he did not commit himself to view biblical revelation through a single controlling principle.
This essay does not attempt to resolve these long standing issues, but simply pursues a motif which was certainly central to Calvin personally, as a Christian believer: Jesus Christ, God's incarnate Son, clothed in the garments of the gospel. With Paul he held that 'the knowledge of Christ so far surpasses everything else by its sublimity that, compared with it, there is nothing that is not contemptible.'
Calvin did not view this in isolation from the rest of his theology: the knowledge of God and his sovereignty, the wonder of his providence, the reliability of his revelation, and the importance of belonging to the Christian community. But his knowledge of the Person of Christ, and particularly his humanity seems, increasingly, to have played an important role in shaping his sense of the sheer privilege of belonging to the Lord. This, in turn, created the distinctive atmosphere of the Christian life which he himself sought to live as a 'practical Calvinist'.
Calvin's teaching on the work of Christ incarnate as Savior can be readily explored in three stages: the necessity of the incarnation; the precise nature of the incarnation; and the relationship between the incarnation and the atonement.
The Necessity of the Incarnation
In an arresting passage in the Institutes, Calvin distinguishes between the pre- and post-Fall mediation of Christ: 'Even if man had remained free from all stain, his condition would have been too lowly for him to reach God without a Mediator.' Now, however, that man has sinned and lapsed from the divine glory, there is (to express it technically) a consequent contingent necessity for the incarnation. It is consequent upon, yet not logically determined by the Fall. It is necessary insofar as God has determined to save fallen man. The incarnation has no a priori necessity attached to it (e.g. in the nature of God); rather it is a free action of God, determined by his own will. In this sense
Christ suffered by His appointment and not by necessity [i.e. of a logically a priori kind] because, being 'in the form of God' He could have escaped this necessity, but nevertheless He suffered 'through weakness' because He 'emptied himself'.
A Mediator adequate for man's needs, must be both divine and human. The atonement required can come only from man. But fallen man is disqualified from making atonement. God the Son incarnate is alone free from sin and able to offer himself as an atoning sacrifice.
Stylistically, Calvin delights to express this in a mode which illustrates a deep-seated pattern in his theological thinking, what Hermann Bauke called a complexio oppositorum. This pattern of thought is so deeply embedded in Calvin's thinking about Christ that it frequently surfaces even in the basic structure of his sentences, as the following characteristic statement indicates:
[Christ's] task was so to restore us to God's grace as to make
• of the children of men,
children of God;
• of the heirs of Gehenna,
heirs of the heavenly kingdom.
Who could have done this had not
• the self-same Son of God
become the Son of Man,
and had not
• so taken what was ours
as to impart … what was his to us,
and
• to make what was his by nature
ours by grace?
What is so significant here is the extent to which salvation, and consequently the confidence of faith, are derived from the fact that the antithesis/oppositeness between what we are and what Christ is has been turned through 180 degrees. Thus everything lacking in us is given to us by Christ, everything sinful in us is imputed to Christ, and all judgment merited by us is borne by Christ.
Faith unites us directly with Christ thus clothed in his gospel and relieves us instantaneously from condemnation. Faith properly exercised drinks deeply from these springs of grace and sees that Christ is not only perfectly equipped to become the Savior, but actually is my Savior.
Calvin seems instinctively to have recognized the proclivity (often unspoken) in the faithful to seek assurance apart from faith in Christ. There is a native tendency (and perversity) to ask: 'How can I enjoy assurance even if I am not exercising faith?' His answer is that it cannot be done. We cannot have the assurance that comes from Christ on a remoto Christo principle (Anselm) in which we place Christ in abeyance and rest on other grounds! Assurance is possible only through Christ; Christ is known and received only through faith. There is no alternative to this correlation. Assurance is, after all, the assurance of faith in Christ.
This helps to explain why Calvin devotes so much detailed attention to the way in which Christ has really taken our flesh and accomplished our redemption. He thereby portrays Christ as so perfectly suited to our need for salvation, that Christ so portrayed masters faith and brings the conviction that in Christ one cannot but be saved.
As we have noted, Calvin holds, with Anselm and others, that reparation in atonement must be made from among those who owe it (humanity); but humanity lacks the resources to do this. Since all have sinned and fallen short of the divine glory, what is due from below can now be effected only from outside of corrupt humanity. Thus an impasse is reached. But this insolvable dilemma is divinely resolved: the Son comes from above into our humanity to do for us what we cannot accomplish for ourselves.
In his exposition of the assumption of our humanity by the divine Logos, Calvin clearly stands on the shoulders of Athanasius in his conviction that the doctrine of the incarnation must be formulated soteriologically. Thus, in contrast to Osiander, he argues that unless Adam had fallen, the Son never would have become incarnate.
But the incarnation per se is not saving. While Calvin's theology reflects the most biblical elements of Eastern theology's stress on the healing of humanity through Christ, for him the redemption of man is not to be viewed as a transformation of our flesh by the mere fact of its assumption and resurrection by the Holy Son. The ultimate consummation of salvation (which will be seen in the healing of our flesh involved in the final resurrection glory) is grounded in Christ's obedience as incarnate. This obedience of the incarnate Christ is in the whole course of his life and in his atoning death—in what he experienced and accomplished in our flesh—not simply in the taking of and living in our flesh in and of itself.
The controlling principle of the work of Christ in Calvin's thought is the concept of exchange. In order to restore fallen man to sinless God, the Son must take what is ours (sin, guilt, bondage, condemnation, death) and deal with it in such a way that what was ours becomes his and what is his also becomes ours. But what does this involve?
Christ appeared in 'the name and the person of sinners' in order genuinely and righteously to accomplish what we could not do for ourselves:
That is why it is here narrated to us that not only our Lord Jesus Christ has been willing to suffer death and has offered Himself as a sacrifice to pacify the wrath of God His Father, but in order that He might be truly and wholly our pledge, He did not refuse to bear the agonies which are prepared for all those whose consciences rebuke them and who feel themselves guilty of eternal death and damnation before God. Let us note well, then, that the Son of God was not content merely to offer His flesh and blood and to subject them to death, but He willed in full measure to appear before the judgment seat of God His Father in the name and in the person of all sinners, being then ready to be condemned, inasmuch as he bore our burden.
Because Christ bears our name and our nature even the weakest believer may look to Christ and find assurance of grace and salvation in him. Here Calvin's exposition of the Gospels' testimony is profound and telling: Jesus' ministry reveals to us the humanity of a Savior who can be trusted, who understands and who is able to bring reassurance of the adequacy and fittingness of his grace. Much of what he does and experiences is intended to show us how near to us he came. The revelation of his frailty and weakness is all intended to assure us that he is one with us and has taken our place.
Calvin places great stress on the fact that the atonement was offered by Christ in his humanity:
We know that the two natures of Christ were so conformed in one person that each retained what was proper to it; in particular the Divinity was silent (quievit Divinitas) and made no assertion of itself whenever it was the business of the human nature to act alone in its own terms in fulfillment of the office of Mediator.
While this is stated explicitly in connection with Christ's confession of ignorance in Matthew 24:36, it is a principle which surfaces throughout Calvin's writings. True, were he not God, Christ could not have accomplished all that was necessary for reconciliation. Nevertheless, 'it is certain that he carried out all these acts according to his human nature.'10 Calvin regularly strikes an additional note in his comments on the Savior's life and work: Christ did not need to experience what he did. He did so to persuade us that he knows, understands and sympathizes with us in our weakness. He can be trusted to support us in our times of darkness:
It was not because the Son of God needed to experience it to become accustomed to the emotion of mercy, but because he could not persuade us that He is kind and ready to help us, unless he had been tested by our misfortunes.… Whenever, therefore, all kinds of evils press upon us, let this be our immediate consolation, that nothing befalls us which the Son of God has not experienced Himself, so that He can sympathize with us; and let us not doubt that He is with us in it as if He were distressed along with us.
In other words, the key to salvation and assurance lies in the extent to which the Son of God has come near to us in his incarnation, actually entering into our situation, tasting our experience from the inside, and exchanging his strength and confidence for our fears and frailties. This sense—that Christ enters into our life and bears the cursed condition from underneath, as it were, so that we may make the faith-discovery that all that is lacking in us is to be found in Christ—is nowhere in all Christian literature given more exquisite expression than in these words:
We see that our salvation and all its parts are comprehended in Christ (Acts 4:12). We should therefore take care not to derive the least portion of it from anywhere else. If we seek salvation, we are taught by the very name of Jesus that it is 'of him' (1 Cor. 1:30).… If we seek strength it lies in his dominion; if purity, in his conception; if gentleness, it appears in his birth. For by his birth he was made like us in all respects (Heb. 2:17) that he might learn to feel our pain (cf. Heb. 5:2) … in short, since rich store of every kind of good abounds in him, let us drink our fill from this fountain, and from no other.
But what, exactly, was involved in the Logos assuming our human nature?
The Nature of the Incarnation
The Son of God's motivation in assuming humanity was to redeem us. Calvin has shown that the precise way in which he assumes humanity brings Christ within trusting distance, as it were.
What, then, was the nature of the humanity the Logos assumed?
It was, first and foremost, our flesh he took in the Virgin Mary's womb. Calvin had no time for a theology without a genuine incarnation. Christ was genuinely conceived in the womb of Mary—she was not merely a conduit for a humanity forged in heaven (contra Menno Simons who taught that the Logos became man 'not of the womb, but in the womb' of Mary). He came near to us, says Calvin, 'indeed touches us, since he is our flesh'.15
Such flesh was like ours. In it Christ grew in wisdom and knowledge because, as a man, he was 'subject to ignorance' (albeit voluntarily, not necessarily like ourselves). Calvin thus starkly accepts what some of the Fathers had found so difficult to come to terms with: if the Logos really took human nature, then in that nature he experienced an innocent ignorance akin to that of Adam before the Fall. 'He freely took that which cannot be separated from human nature.' This included all the emotions and affections of our common humanity in its weakness and infirmity. Commenting on Jesus' response of inner groaning at the grave of Lazarus, Calvin notes:
When the Son of God put on our flesh He also of His own accord put on human feelings, so that he differed in nothing from His brethren, sin only excepted.… Our feelings are sinful because they rush on unrestrainedly and immoderately; but in Christ they were composed and regulated in obedience to God and were completely free from sin.
Christ is not 'an idle spectator' of the human condition, but a participant in it. Indeed so much is this the case, Calvin argues, that if we did not recognize the significance of Christ's humanity we would, like the Jews, find it an immense stumbling block that he took on a 'lowly and earthly body subject to many infirmities'.19 In a word, the Logos became real flesh. Thus Calvin comments on John 1:14 ('the Word became flesh …'):
This word [sarx] expresses his meaning more forcibly than if he had said that He was made man. He wanted to show to what a low and abject state the Son of God descended from the height of His heavenly glory for our sake. When Scripture speaks of man derogatorily it calls him 'flesh'. How great is the distance between the spiritual glory of the Word of God and the stinking filth of our flesh. Yet the Son of God stooped so low as to take to Himself that flesh addicted to so many wretchednesses.
Elsewhere Calvin can speak of Christ joining the infinite glory of God 'to our polluted flesh so that the two become one', and of the 'weakness' and 'abasement' of the flesh which the Son assumed.22 It had 'the appearance of being sinful' and 'a certain resemblance to our sinful nature'. He saves from within, underneath and surrounded by this humanity, flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone.
Undoubtedly the most striking exposition of this in Calvin appears in his understanding of the experience of our Lord in Gethsemane (which he thinks of as a village). Alongside, perhaps even beyond Christ's admission of ignorance, the nature of Christ's suffering in Gethsemane and the apparent ambivalence of his will had long been seen as an intractable difficulty for those who believed in his absolute divinity. Calvin summarizes the struggles of the church's theologians to come to terms with this. Since it 'seems to be below the dignity of Christ's divine glory that He was affected with panic and sorrow, many interpreters are vehemently concerned to find a way out.'
Calvin's response to these interpreters is illuminating: 'Their efforts were thoughtless and fruitless; if we are ashamed of His fear and sorrow, our redemption will trickle away and be lost.… Those who pretend the Son of God was immune from human passions do not truly and seriously acknowledge Him as man.'
In a sermon on Gethsemane, preached towards the end of his own life, Calvin justifies the theological coherence of his exegesis at this point on the grounds that men are creatures who experience affections that do not belong by rights to God. And in his Harmony of the Gospels he writes with similar vigor:
But within the capacity of a sane and unspoiled human nature, He was struck with fright and seized with anguish, and so compelled to shift (as it were) between the violent waves of trial from one prayer to another. This is the reason why He prays to be spared death, then holds Himself in check, submits Himself to the Father's command, and corrects and revokes the wish that had suddenly escaped Him.… This was no rehearsed prayer of Christ's, but the force and onset of grief wrung a cry from Him on the instant, which he at once went on to correct. The same vehemence took from Him any thoughts of the decree of heaven, so that for a moment He did not think how He was sent to be the Redeemer of the human race. Often heavy anxiety clouds the eyes from seeing everything at once.…
Yet,
As various musical sounds, different from each other, make no discord but compose a tuneful and sweet harmony, so in Christ there exists a remarkable example of balance between the wills of God and of man; they differ without conflict or contradiction.
The point of such quotations is not necessarily to defend every part of Calvin's exegesis, or the self-consistency of the whole as a theological construct, but to underline the seriousness with which he took the incarnation. For Calvin, Christ really can act for us because he is one with us, sin apart. We should not be alarmed to discover Christ's weakness, since the Savior held it in such check. But we should learn to recognize that the extent to which he is able to save us is correlative to the extent to which he became fully like us, while 'pure and free from all vice and stain' because of his sanctification by the Spirit in the womb of the virgin Mary at the moment of his generation.29
Incarnation and Atonement
The Son of God took our human nature in order to redeem us. It is axiomatic with Calvin that unless Christ is really one of us, united to us by a common nature, and that his human nature is identical to ours (sin apart), he cannot be our Savior. This explains his problem with the Lutheran doctrine of the ubiquity of the resurrected humanity of Christ (which lies behind the Lutheran view of the real presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper)—it no longer remains authentic humanity. The one who possesses it could not save us because he is not really one of us.
But the Son goes beyond assuming our nature; he also assumes our name and place, so that we see 'the person of a sinner and evildoer represented in Christ.' Commenting on Galatians 3:13, Calvin notes:
He took our place and thus became a sinner and subject to the curse, not in Himself indeed, but in us; yet in such a way that it was necessary for Him to act in our Name.
What Calvin additionally emphasizes, however, is that while Christ's saving work climaxes in his death and resurrection, this bearing of our name and nature is to be traced back to the very beginning of his life: 'from the time he took on the form of a servant, he began to pay the price of liberation in order to redeem us.' Again, 'How has Christ abolished sin, banished the separation between us and God, and acquired righteousness to render God favorable and kindly toward us? To this we can in general reply that he has achieved this for us by the whole course of his obedience.' His obedience is an obedience unto (even into) death, as well as in death.
But, in addition to this ongoing (active) obedience, Christ accomplished our salvation 'more exactly' on the cross when he bore the judgment curse of death as sin's wages. Here again we see him bearing the name and person of Adam. He brings this out in the remarkable way in which he treats the Gospel passion narrative as a theological as well as an historical drama. Christ is explicitly charged with the two great Adamic sin-crimes: blasphemy, in that he sought to be equal with God; and treason, in that he rebelled against his lawfully constituted authority. This is what it means for Christ to bear 'our person' as Calvin so often puts it. Taking the character of a sinner, he undergoes the just judgment of God against our sins. Repeatedly pronounced innocent before human tribunals—as he is before every tribunal in heaven and earth, yet he is executed as though he had the character of a sinner under the law of God. This is the ultimate explanation for his trembling in Gethsemane:
It was not simple horror of death, the passing away from the world, but the sight of the dread tribunal of God that came to Him, the Judge Himself armed with vengeance beyond understanding.… No wonder if death's fearful abyss tormented him grievously.… There is nothing more dreadful than to feel God as Judge, whose wrath is worse than all deaths. When the trial came on Christ in this form, that He was now against God and doomed to ruin, he was overcome with dread … as though under the wrath of God, He were cast into the labyrinth of evil.
But when Calvin has said that the life and death of Christ involved obedience and bearing the penalty of sin, he has not spoken his final word. That word has been spoken only when he has added that all this was pro nobis, for us. It was substitutionary (for us) as well as penal (for sin). Grasp this and we grasp both the wonder of God's love and receive the assurance of salvation. For Calvin, one cannot read the passion narrative without being confronted by the substitutionary nature of what is happening and by the soteriological implications it carries. Here, on the stage of History an exchange is being played out. Thus, in commenting on Matthew's passion narrative he highlights the fact that a theological transaction is taking place.
The powerful combination of chiasmic rhythm and contrasting statements underline the wonder of the great exchange involved in the work of atonement. First he comments on Christ being spat upon:
(A) The face of Christ,
(B) marred with spittle and blows
(A) has restored to us that image
(B) which sin had corrupted, indeed destroyed.
Calvin continues:
(A) Christ said nothing
(B) when the priests pressed Him from every side,
(A) in order to open our mouths by His silence.
(B) Hence the glorious freedom which Paul acclaims that
(A) we can call out with a full voice 'Abba, Father.'
(A) Thus He was
(B) reckoned worse than a thief,
(A) to
(B) bring us into the company of the angels.
(A) Whatever might be
(B) Pilate's purpose,
(B) God wishes
(C) his Son's innocence
(D) attested in this way,
(D) that it might be more clear
(C) that our sins
(D) were condemned in Him.
(A) So the
(B) ugliness
(C) He once endured on earth
(C) now wins us grace in heaven,
(B) and also restores the image of God,
(C) which had not only been polluted with the filth of sin,
(C) but almost effaced.
(A) So also
(B) God's inestimable mercy upon us shines out,
(C) in lowering
(C) His only-begotten Son to these depths,
(B) for our sake.
(A) God willed
(B) His Son to be stripped
(C) that we should appear freely, with the angels,
(B) in the garments of His righteousness and fullness of all good things,
(C) whereas formerly foul disgrace,
(B) in torn clothes,
(C) kept us away from the approach to the heavens.
(A) Christ Himself allows
(B) His raiment to be torn apart like booty
(C) to make us rich with the riches of His victory.
Here, for Calvin, is the solid ground on which salvation rests. In the fact that Christ has entered our life, shared our nature, taken our place, borne our sin, received our judgment lies the foundation of our justification and acceptance with God.
But in addition, the manner in which this is accomplished encourages assurance. For the manner in which he has made the exchange—so evidently taking our place, bearing our guilt, facing our judgment, dying our death, rising for our triumph in our flesh—assures us that what he has done is both for us and suited to our needs. For here, in the climactic display of Jesus' love (John 13:1ff) we are given the clearest demonstration of:
• The love of God for us in his not-spared Son. If he gives his Son for us, he will give to us everything necessary to effect the purposes for which he gave his Son. Calvin believes that this apostolic logic, and behind it the logic of God, is irrefutable.
• The forgiveness of sins. The fact that in the Gospels we see Christ bearing sins before our eyes—(as it were placarded before us, Galatians 3:1)—leaves us in no doubt that our guilt has been objectively removed, our judgment absorbed in Christ. The sense of guilt, and the uncertainty it fosters, must yield to this solvent.
• The hope of glory. The Innocent One who appears in silence before the earthly tribunal thereby accepts the condemnation of the heavenly one. His mouth is shut; he is held to be guilty before God (Rom. 3:19). Because of his silence before the divine tribunal, we will be able to say 'Abba, Father' there.
For Calvin, nothing is more relevant than this to being a practical Calvinist. For the most practical Calvinists will be those who know such trust in, love for, and assurance of, Jesus Christ. The assurance that he is their Savior sets them free to serve him in a life whose leitmotif is grace.
Against this background, it does not require vivid imagination to transport oneself to the congregation gathered in St Peter's Church, Geneva on Wednesday June 29, 1558. The asthmatic, disease-ridden Calvin, now some twenty minutes into his sermon, momentarily clears his throat, and makes his moving appeal:
Since then there is in us nothing but spiritual infection and leprosy
and that we are corrupt in our iniquities,
what shall we do?
What remedy is there?
Shall we go to seek help from the angels in Paradise?
Alas! They can do nothing for us.
No, we must come to our Lord Jesus Christ,
who was willing to be disfigured
from the top of His head even to the sole of His feet
and was a mass of wounds,
flogged with many stripes and crowned with thorns,
nailed and fastened to the cross and pierced through the side.
This is how we are healed;
here is our true medicine, with which we must be content,
and which we must embrace wholeheartedly,
knowing that otherwise we can never have inward peace
but must always be tormented and tortured to the extreme,
unless Jesus Christ comforts us and appeases God's wrath against us.
When we are certain of that,
we have cause to sing His praises,
instead of being capable of nothing but trembling and confusion.
Clair—greetings to you on your seventieth birthday! Thank you for twenty years of friendship in which I have learned much from you. I join my prayers with your many friends that the singing of Christ's praises (of which Calvin here speaks) may constantly mark your faith in Christ and your assurance of grace. May you have energy all your days to continue to live as a 'practical Calvinist' for the honour of Christ, in the power of the Spirit, to the glory of God and in the service of his church.
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From A Practical Calvinist: An Introduction to the Presbyterian & Reformed Heritage, Lillback, P. A. (Ed.). (2002).