John Calvin on How To Use Words: The Christian Life (II)

Chapter 4: Justification and Religious Identity

Broad and sweeping interpretations of medieval and reformation Christianity require generalization.  So it is no surprise that John Bossy characterizes the difference between Calvin and Luther in terms of a Lutheran emphasis on “justification by faith” and the Calvinist message “that the business of the Christian life was not reconciliation with God but obedience to his sovereign will.”  This chapter will show that the Calvinist message cannot be characterized as the substitution of “obedience” for “justification by faith.”  Whatever differences there are between Calvin and Luther will have to be articulated with more subtlety than that.  Far from being contrasting alternatives, obedience and justification together constitute the theological texture of an identity or imaginative sensibility Calvin was attempting to fashion in his readers.  As Chapter 3 focused on “sanctification,” this chapter explores Calvin’s use of the doctrinal language of “justification” in the construction of Reformed identity.  

By focusing on the social and cultural texture of the lives that Calvin attempts to fashion in his readers, I argue for the political significance of justification.  Such a claim will not be persuasive if one views justification as an abstract and isolated matter that has primarily to do with private matters of belief.   Another picture emerges, however, when one regards justification as theological shorthand for the way God remakes human lives into the patterns of praise and gratitude that reconnect them to their true happiness in the context of an idolatrous status quo.

Justification, Alternative Institutions, and the Crafting of Conscience 

(Institutes 3.1-5)

In what follows I offer a reading of Calvin’s treatment of justification with an eye to its political dimensions.  This angle of interpretation brings a variety of Calvin’s broader concerns to bear in this section of the Institutes and draws relevant connections between Calvin’s doctrinal rhetoric and the particular social dilemmas faced by those communities whose lives he was trying to shape by means of that theological rhetoric.

     

The theological and political significance of Calvin’s development of the doctrine of “justification” cannot be artificially limited to those few sections in Book III where Calvin turns explicitly to the theme.  The second major section of Book III provides Calvin’s discussion of the “faith” that unites believers to Christ.  Already in this discussion – hundreds of pages before we reach the explicit turn to the topic of “justification” – the significance of Calvin’s “justification by faith” rhetoric begins to emerge.  For Calvin, a clear and persuasive discussion of “faith” was a matter of urgency:

And we must scrutinize and investigate the true character of faith [germana fidei proprietas] with greater care and zeal because many are dangerously deluded today in this respect.  Indeed, most people, when they hear this term, understand nothing deeper than a common assent to the gospel history [vulgarem quendam evangelicae historiae assensum] (3.2.1/CR II.397-8).

This was as true in 1559 as when the claim was first penned in 1539.  Calvin refers here to a widespread “delusion [hallucinatio]” about the character of true “faith.”  The delusion was “dangerous” because it symbolized the labyrinth-like prison of Roman Catholicism in which much of Europe continued to be held, and from which his own Geneva was breaking free.  Calvin’s discussion of “faith” is a rhetorical appeal for a different kind of society throughout Europe than what currently existed – different lives in the rhythm of different religious practices, organized by different ecclesial institutions.  Calvin’s doctrinal rhetoric even includes an appeal to civil authorities who should begin to behave differently, even though he did not call for a revolutionary overthrow of established authorities in favor of new ones. Similar in function to the whole of Book III.1-5, the discussion of “faith” is in large part an attempt to fashion an alternative religious identity – for Geneva, for underground Reformed communities in France, and for as wide a swath of Europe as could hear the appeal.  What he sought was a religious imagination, one might say, “alternative” with respect to the dominant imaginative landscape in Europe.

     

The development of faith as a form of “knowledge” is meant to uproot and displace a notion of faith as an assent to the authority of the Roman Church.  “For faith consists in the knowledge [cognitione] of God and Christ, not in reverence for the Church” (3.2.3).  Calvin’s criticism of Catholic notions of “unformed [informis]” and “implicit [implicitae]” faith as inadequate is motivated by his attempt to fashion a lay populace that is knowledgeable, active, and responsible, as opposed to docile and demurring (see 3.2.2-5, 8-10).  The political significance of this attempt to foster lay activism in several spheres has been often noted.  The “faith” by which believers are justified results in a heightened sense of agency in the laity relative to ecclesial authorities, despite the oft-mentioned radical passivity which characterized Protestant notions of justification.  When Calvin adds in 1559 a reflection on the phenomenon of a temporary “faith” (i.e. faith that later disappears, 3.2.11-12), we can hear echoes of Calvin’s sadness that even some of his friends like Louis du Tillet and Pierre Caroli shunned the Reformed cause and eventually returned to the Catholic Church.  These two figures demonstrate the fluidity of religious identities at this period.  This phenomenon – the possibility of individuals and groups shifting back and forth between the Roman Church and the evangelical cause – helps explain the urgency of Calvin’s rhetorical attempts to bring into existence a Protestant Europe.  There were pockets of readers willing to be moved to action.  But it also shows the fragility of any advances for the Reformed cause.  In spite of Calvin’s continued appeal for the persecuted minority to endure and persevere, some Europeans flirted with reform and turned back; many more remained confidently Catholic.  

     

The latter part of Book 3.2 is devoted to a sort of mini-commentary on Calvin’s own definition of faith:

Now we shall possess a right definition of faith if we call it a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence toward us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit (3.2.7).

And then Calvin develops this definition by creating a vivid picture of the new Reformed “conscience” he sought to elicit in his readers: a conscience tempted but not conquered by anxiety and doubt (3.2.14-21).  The Christian conscience is subject to an appropriate fear of God that has its rightful place in a life both joyfully free and reverently obedient, but not to a debilitating worry about its status before God.  Eventually, the description of the “conscience” that emerges in the sections on justifying faith will have to be compared to Calvin’s comments about the significance of “conscience” in the practical and jurisdictional matters in Book IV.  Nevertheless, one can already detect that Calvin’s attempt to fashion a corporate conscience is meant to function as an alternative to a Roman Catholic conscience.  In discussing the way Catholic penitential theology makes contrition, confession, and satisfaction conditions for the attainment of forgiveness, Calvin highlights their damaging affect on the conscience.  “Unless this knowledge remains clear and sure, the conscience can have no rest at all, no peace with God, no assurance or security; but it continuously trembles, wavers, tosses is tormented and vexed, shakes, hates, and flees the sight of God” (3.4.2).  The material devoted to “sanctification” and “justification” is in large part simply a more thickly textured elaboration of the Reformed conscience that the entire Institutes attempts to create and shape.  The cultural need for this new kind of certainty should be viewed as an attempt to address the psychological difficulty involved in leaving the familiar rhythms of Catholic institutions and practices.      

     

Calvin’s discussion of “conscience” raises a particularly interesting question for my argument.  If Calvin’s notion of “conscience” refers primarily to the sealed off preserve of a private, religious interiority, it would appear that Calvin’s doctrinal rhetoric of “sanctification” and “justification” had little to do with the social arrangements and political conflicts that were so important to questions about religious identity for Calvin’s readers.  But such is not the case.  Calvin is acutely sensitive to the interplay between “conscience” and the rhythms and practices that shape and deform that conscience.  In fact, one aim of this chapter (and the previous one) is to highlight the practical and political significance of Calvin’s theological rhetoric.  So for example, Calvin’s discussion of “sanctification” cannot be isolated from his prescription for a community life regulated by a Consistory of pastors; nor can his discussion of “justification” be isolated from his call for a reform in the very rituals, rhythms, and practices that had long provided the familiar contours of European Christian identity or “conscience.”

     

Like Luther and the other Reformers, much of Calvin’s effort was devoted to criticizing the prevailing Catholic institutional mediation of the forgiveness of sins.  The opening sections of Book III serve to highlight the dynamics of this institutional mediation – the role of priests and the rites of confession, penance, and satisfaction.  In the middle of a discussion of penance written in 1536, Calvin pauses to remind his readers why resisting the Catholic sacramental system matters: “But I would have my readers note that this is no contention over the shadow of an ass, but that the most serious matter of all is under discussion: namely, forgiveness of sins” (3.4.2).  Before Calvin ever turns to an explicit treatment of the Christian life in terms of sanctification and justification, he creates a sharp boundary line between two different institutional arrangements with their respective theological assumptions and sets of practices, both of which claim to be dispensing God’s grace and forgiveness to God’s people.  

     

Calvin’s theological attention to the religious practices that give shape to Christian identity is evident throughout the Institutes, even if the practical dimension is worked out explicitly only in Book IV.  Yet one can see an anticipation of the correlation between theological commitments and practical prescriptions in the early sections of Book III.  There Calvin weds together an analysis of ideas like satisfaction and purgatory with the cluster of religious practices those beliefs support, like mandatory confession to priests, the buying and selling of indulgences, and the custom of praying for the dead (see especially 3.5).  The basic framework of this discussion was in place already in 1536.  It was not simply a matter of maintaining or abolishing an inconsequential religious practice; it was, for Calvin, a matter of deciding between two opposing visions of the appropriate kind of life before the God who creates and redeems.  It was a momentous decision between worship practices that honor God and prove to be an authentic expression of humanity’s liturgical orientation to God on the one hand, and the continuance of idolatrous practices that rob God of glory and distorts and frustrates genuine human flourishing.  

     

In Book II Calvin developed an account of how Christ merited God’s favor and how that merit is distributed to the community of those who participate in Christ by faith.  The distribution of Christ’s merits to God’s adopted children certainly flows through the channels of the Church gathered by the renewing Word of God, but it is not the “treasury of the church [thesaurum ecclesiae]” (3.5.2/CR II.491) owned by the papacy to be dispensed by broker-priests.  As early as 1539 Calvin posed the alternative between Catholic “merit” and the freely dispensed forgiveness (championed by the evangelical cause) in terms of market-place dynamics versus relations established by the free giving and receiving of gifts.  

Now indulgences flow from this doctrine of satisfaction . . . Men saw themselves openly and undisguisedly held up to ridicule by the pope and his bull-bearers, their souls’ salvation the object of lucrative trafficking [quaestuosas nundinationes], the price of salvation reckoned at a few coins [pauculis nummis salutis pretium taxari], nothing offered free of charge [nihil gratuitum prostare] (3.5.1/CR II.491).

Calvin’s description of Christ’s merits in Book II, and his subsequent description of how believers come to possess and enjoy those merits in Book III, can be read as the outworking of a particular kind of gift-relation, where the logic of salvation is more like human relations where goods and gifts circulate “free of charge” than it is like relations of buying and selling.   The doctrinal claim that faith and forgiveness are free gifts carries with it a principled resistance to any religious practices that appear to jeopardize that metaphorical – but very real – relation between God and the faithful.  In 3.5, Calvin argues that it is the mistaken theological notion of “satisfaction” that informs and makes possible the practice of indulgences and prayers for the dead.   

     

The Catholic ecclesial apparatus and its correlative practices are consistently represented as a form of bondage rather than a medium of grace and forgiveness:        

Now when that thing which God wished to be free [confession of sins to others] is prescribed as necessary to obtain pardon, I call it an utterly intolerable sacrilege, because there is no function more proper to God than the forgiveness of sins, wherein our salvation rests (3.4.24).  

Obligatory confession was a form of “tyranny” which “dashes miserable souls into despair rather than freeing them.  It “tangles, obscures, and corrupts” (ibid.).  In making confession necessary, Innocent III set a “trap” (3.4.7).  The “scholastic sophists,” Calvin wrote already in 1536, have muddied the simplicity of repentance and forgiveness: “there would be no easy way out if you were to immerse yourself even slightly in their slime” (3.4.1).

     

Calvin’s attempt to imagine an alternative vision of the Christian life was not by any means the simple erasure of the institutional mediation of grace and forgiveness.  Juxtaposed to the relentless critique of the Catholic sacramental system early in Book III is the affirmation of a different ecclesial framework.  Calvin added in 1539 that the practice of publicly confessing one’s sins is a “custom observed with good result in well-regulated churches: that every Lord’s Day the minister frames the formula of confession in his own and the people’s name, and by it he accuses all of wickedness and implores pardon from the Lord” (3.4.11).  The Strasbourg (1539) and Genevan (1542) liturgies for the confession of sins serve as examples of such “well-regulated” churches.  Moreover, Calvin singles out ordained ministers as God’s special remedy for those who need confession (3.4.12-13).  Here again we see that Calvin’s criticisms of priestly abuses of power did not result in a general principle of anti-clericalism or a low view of ministerial authority.  

     

Furthermore, Calvin’s prologue to Book III places the discussion of the Christian life within a broader analysis of social arrangements and relations of power.  His treatment of the “power of the keys” is not fully developed until 4.11-12, but it is raised early in Book III in order to draw a contrast between competing versions of “power [potestas].”  For Calvin, the “keys” refer to the ordained preaching of divine forgiveness as announced in the Word of God.  Calvin is not against a Church that exercises power; he is against a Church that does not practice a “good use of power [bonum usum]” (3.4.21 written 1536).  As an alternative to what he sees as a Catholic vision of power as an entity ontologically transferred to priests via ordination, Calvin begins to work out a functional criterion for the good use of “power,” i.e. whether the Church retains its dynamic relation to the forgiving Word of God and its appropriate existence in analogous relation to the God whose power is made known in a mercy that both forgives and forms.

     

Calvin makes the claim early in Book III that repentance is an attitude and an activity that characterizes the whole journey of the Christian life.  This claim is not fully worked out until the explicit treatment of sanctification and justification.  But earlier in Book III Calvin argues that his picture of the role of repentance demands an alternative institutional framework than what is currently on offer in much of Europe.  

But lacking any semblance or reason is the madness of those who, that they may begin from repentance, prescribe to their new converts certain days during which they must practice penance, and when these at length are over, admit them into communion of the grace of the gospel.  I am speaking of very many of the Anabaptists, especially those who marvelously exult in being considered spiritual and of their companions, the Jesuits, and like dregs.  Obviously, that giddy spirit brings forth such fruits that it limits to a paltry few days a repentance that for the Christian man ought to extend throughout his life (3.3.2, italics mine).

This statement about the Anabaptists was added in 1539, with the addition of the Jesuits included only in 1559.  Both groups represent, for Calvin, the constriction of a life-long pattern to a specified quadrant of life.  Early on, much of Calvin’s concern with the place of repentance in the Christian life was aimed at undercutting what he saw as the Anabaptist perfectionist tendency to downplay the power of sin in the ongoing life of the Christian community, hence downplaying the continuing need for repentance.  Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises were published in 1539 as Calvin published his first revision of his Institutes.  And in 1559 includes the Jesuits – surely he has Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises in mind - in those guilty of advocating repentance as an initial stage to be gotten over and beyond.  Such a reading of the Exercises – and hence the Jesuits – appears superficial in light of the practice actually advocated by Ignatius.  

     

For Calvin repentance is best expressed in the double dynamic of mortification and vivification, a dynamic that serves to connect, in an appropriately analogous way, Christ’s death and resurrection to the lives of believers in a way that emphasizes that the Christian life is an ongoing participation in Christ’s life (see 3.3.5-9).  Believers have a continual need for repentance not because God’s forgiveness is intermittent and sometimes absent, but because the “corruption of nature” that remains even for those who are forgiven require a continual dying to sin and turning to God (3.3.18).  The life of continual repentance cannot be lived in current social and ecclesial rhythms because those institutional frameworks do not reflect the way that Christian living is at bottom a continual participation in Christ’s dying and rising.

[W]e must strive toward repentance itself, devote ourselves to it throughout life, and pursue it to the very end if we would abide in Christ . . . the life of a Christian man is a continual effort and exercise in the mortification of the flesh, till it is utterly slain, and God’s Spirit reigns in us.  Therefore, I think he has profited greatly who has learned to be very much displeased with himself, not so as to stick fast in this mire and progress no farther, but rather to hasten to God and yearn for him in order that, having been engrafted into the life and death of Christ, he may give attention to continual repentance (3.3.20).

The fact that believers “abide in Christ” and have been “engrafted into the life and death of Christ” entails a sharing in Christ’s perfect righteousness, but it does not preclude the need for “continual repentance” as believers “hasten to God.”

     

Calvin’s rejection of the Catholic prescription of threefold character of penance – as contrition, confession and satisfaction – turns on a distinction between matters external and matters of the heart.  We learn from the prophets that 

outward uprightness of life [ externam vitae integritatem] is not the chief point of repentance, for God looks into men’s hearts . . . when we have to deal with God nothing is achieved unless we begin from the inner disposition of the heart . . . men must cleanse away secret filth in order that an altar may be erected to God in the heart itself (3.3.16/CR II.446-7).

Calvin is not against all forms of bodily discipline as prescribed by the Church Fathers.  Yet their use of outward exercises was prone to two basis errors.  First, their praise of “bodily discipline [corporalem disciplinam]” obscured the chief matter, which is the heart.  Second, the punishments inflicted were “somewhat more rigid than the gentleness of the church would call for” (3.3.16/CR II.446-7).  

     

Calvin even draws a distinction between patristic understandings of penance, which were inadequate, and the teachings of the “Scholastics,” which were worse.

For they [the Scholastics] are so doggedly set in outward exercises [externis exercitiis] that you gather nothing else from their huge volumes than that repentance is a discipline and austerity that serves partly to tame the flesh, partly to chastise and punish faults.  They are wonderfully silent concerning the inward renewal of the mind [interiori mentis renovatione], which bears with it true correction of life (3.4.1/CR II.456).

At stake here for Calvin is not a denigration of the body’s importance in the drama of salvation and faith.  (His concern for external and public forms of worship in his anti-nicodemite writings and his vision of the Consistory’s role in regulating external matters and social arrangements would be inexplicable otherwise).  Instead, Calvin is concerned to shine a light on questionable religious practices that he thinks are supported by inadequate views of sin’s power.  Calvin thought that a focus on disciplining the body tended to locate sin’s power primarily in the body, thereby functioning to protect the soul’s powers of knowing and willing from the corrupting power of sin.  Such a view greatly underestimates the grip sin has upon human life.  And the practice confession and repentance should correspond to the claim that sin’s power is located primarily in the soul and in its powers of reason and will.  

     

Calvin said a variety of things about body and soul, the internal and the external - almost always addressing pressing practical matters of the religious life.  With regard to prevalent cultural habits of penance and the view of sin that informed them, Calvin argues that true repentance is a renovation of the heart and not an outward matter.  Far from being a minimization or denigration of the significance of human bodies, it actually represents Calvin’s resistance to theological tendencies to identify the body as the primary locus of sin.

     

Like I have said, Calvin’s comments on “justifying faith” should be read in concert with Calvin’s prescriptions for a set of practices providing an alternative institutional landscape for the Christian life.  Consider his comments on baptism, understood not simply as a “doctrine” to be believed but as an identifying practice.  Those who rely on Jerome’s error that repentance is the “second plank after shipwreck” show themselves “never to have awakened from their brute stupor, to feel a thousandth part, or even less, of their faults” (3.4.1).  There might be other lines of argument against this view of repentance, but here it has to do with the depth of human sin and the fact that nothing other than the believers’ baptismal participation in Christ’s sacrifice could help.  When Calvin is arguing that Christ has provided full satisfaction for human sin, he criticizes the Catholic position by reference to baptism:

But such is their perversity, they say that both forgiveness of sins and reconciliation take place once for all when in Baptism we are received through Christ into the grace of God; that after Baptism we must rise up again through satisfactions; that the blood of Christ is of no avail, except in so far as it is dispensed through the keys of the church (3.4.26).

This view underestimates the power of baptism to unite believers to Christ’s full satisfaction, and thus mis-describes the proper role of repentance and the ecclesial mediation of grace.  Here the principal line of argument is that a withered picture of baptismal identity results from an inadequate grasp of Christ’s saving work and our participation in it through baptism.  Though baptism was only one among many significant practices of faith, it again makes clear that Calvin’s attempt to fashion the lives of his readers required public re-distributions of institutional power.      

Sharing in Christ’s Righteousness – The Debate with Osiander (Institutes 3.11)

      

Having begun by emphasizing the institutional framework for Calvin’s doctrinal description of Christian living, we turn now to his treatment of justification proper.  The explicit treatment of justification begins with a broad introduction to important terms and to the place of justification within the broader theological project of the Institutes.  This material, written largely in 1539 and 1543, was retained in the 1559 edition and was followed by a sustained critical engagement with the Lutheran pastor and professor Andreas Osiander.  In spite of its importance, the doctrine of justification is a derivative teaching.  The broader Christian claim from which it derives is an understanding of the believer’s union with Christ in faith.  This union with Christ in faith results in a “double grace” – a sharing in Christ’s righteousness and in Christ’s obedience - traditionally referred to respectively under the terms “justification” and “sanctification.”  Justification comes second in the order of explication not because it is less important (after all, it is “the main hinge [praecipuum cardinem] on which religion turns”).  Rather, Calvin simply notes that it was “more to the point to understand first how little devoid of good works is the faith, through which alone we obtain free righteousness [gratuitam iustitiam] by the mercy of God” (3.11.1/CR II.533).

     

By the 1530’s the Lutheran insistence on justification by faith was targeted by Catholic leaders as an ethically and socially irresponsible form of religion, and was used by those Calvin refers to as “libertines” to support an anti-nomian approach to the religious life.  Calvin’s ordering of the two terms, then, is meant to undercut the charge that the difference between Catholics and Protestants can be characterized in terms of a responsible and loving as opposed to an irresponsible and self-interested form of the religious life.  The ordering also functions to criticize the anti-nomian failure to recognize that the life of “faith” is a life of obedient conformity to the moral law and the patterning of Christ’s own life.  Yet Calvin is adamant that this or any other ordering is not a commentary on the relative “importance” of the two terms.  Any such judgment is conceptually impossible when one takes into account that both terms are required to express the complex richness of the benefits that accrue to believers in their being united to Christ in faith.  

     

Just as in the sphere of Creation God the Father is most fundamentally the “Fountain” of all good gifts, so too in the sphere of redemption Jesus Christ is for Calvin the “fountain” of every good sinful humanity lacks.  Here Calvin picks up the “fountain” imagery used of God the Father’s relating to all creatures and uses it to describe the way God relates to humanity after the fall into sin.  This Christological imagery grounds the claim that salvation is primarily a sharing in the benefits of Christ by sharing in Christ himself, of which “sanctification” and “justification” are derivative effects.  So while the distinction between the terms is paramount, their order of explication is simply a matter of Calvin’s accommodating his treatment to his readers’ needs and his opponents’ criticisms.

     

Calvin defines justification in terms of its legal usage in Scripture insofar as it refers to the event of being vindicated in the courtroom of divine judgment.  To be justified, then, is something like a defendant’s being declared innocent in court, a life-giving sentence in face of the charge that the defendant is in fact a sinner and thereby worthy of divine wrath and vengeance.  While it is conceptually possible for human creatures to be “righteous” in and through their own perfect working out of God’s law, no such “justification by works” in fact takes place because of a universal human participation in sin.  Thus, the only actually existing possibility of vindication before the divine judgment is to be “clothed” in another’s perfect righteousness, to have the divine judge count Christ’s righteousness as one’s own.  This possibility is what distinguishes “justification by faith” from “justification by works.”  

Therefore, we explain justification simply as the acceptance with which God receives us into his favor as righteous men.  And we say that it consists in the remission of sins and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness (3.11.2).

Clearly the notion of God’s acceptance and favoring of sinners has to do with their being allowed to share in Christ’s righteousness.  Yet it is the nature of this sharing that proved so vexing during the sixteenth century debates.  By 1543 Calvin had begun to elaborate on these themes by showing how they provided a guide for reading Scripture rightly (see 3.1.3-4).  And by 1559, Calvin found it fruitful to explain the nature of this sharing in Christ’s righteousness by critically engaging what he took to be a mistaken understanding of that sharing.

     

In the early 1550’s Andreas Osiander – Lutheran pastor at Nuremberg until 1549 and then theological professor at Koenigsberg - wrote a series of treatises which worried Calvin on a number of fronts.  Since all of Osiander’s Lutheran colleagues lined up against him as early as 1550, and Osiander had died in 1552, it is fair to say that Calvin’s engagement with him in 1559 qualifies as whipping a dead horse.  There is very little generosity evident in Calvin’s interpretation of Osiander’s position, even though Calvin admits a number of times that Osiander’s theology is dangerous in spite of good intentions on Osiander’s part. In Calvin’s defense, scholarly studies of Osiander offer a variety of interpretations of Osiander’s thought, often widely diverging.  What does seem clear is that Calvin misrepresented Osiander considerably.  But even confining ourselves to Calvin’s (questionable) perception of Osiander’s thought, we can view this polemic as yet one more window onto what Calvin took to be the heart of the Christian faith.  More to the point for my purposes, Calvin’s engagement with Osiander in the 1559 edition illumines the theological vision of salvation Calvin saw as jeopardized when the Creator/creature distinction is not sufficiently respected. 

     

The primary conflict between Calvin and Osiander concerns the controversial term, “essential righteousness [essentialis iustitiae].”  All parties agreed that Scripture itself testifies to a oneness or unity between Christ and the believer.  The quarrel, then, concerned the nature or character of that union.  Calvin contends that Osiander is deceived in that “he does not observe the bond of this unity [unitatis vinculum] . . . For we hold ourselves to be united with Christ by the secret power of his Spirit [cum Christo uniri arcana spiritus eius virtute]” (3.11.5).  By appealing to a Trinitarian model whereby the Spirit unites believers with Christ in whom they enjoy the favor of the Father, Calvin tries to conceptually preserve the ontological divide between God and human creatures even while testifying to their unity in faith.  Calvin uses a contrasting set of images to depict Osiander as blurring and transgressing this ontological divide between creatures and their triune Creator.  Osiander desires to “transfuse the essence of God into men [essentiam Dei in homines transfundere].”  “He says that we are one with Christ [nos unum esse cum Christo].  We agree.  But we deny that Christ’s essence is mixed with our own [misceri Christi essentiam cum nostra].”  Not content with the righteousness acquired for believers “by Christ’s obedience and sacrificial death,” Osiander “pretends that we are substantially righteous in God [substantialiter in Deo iustos] by the infusion [infusa] both of his essence and of his quality.”  Osiander’s writings suggest a “mixture of substances [substantialem mixtionem] by which God – transfusing himself into us, as it were – makes us part of himself [Deus se in nos transfundens quasi partem sui faciat].”

     

Calvin sees a world of difference between his own position that it is “through the power of the Holy Spirit that we grow together [coalescamus] with Christ,” and Osiander’s position that Christ’s essence is “mingled [misceatur]” with ours.  Theologically speaking, Calvin wants a doctrinal picture of participation in Christ that emphasizes unity [unum] and a genuine togetherness [coalesco] but that avoids images of uncreated and created essences transfused into one another, mixed or infused together, of divine and human substances being mingled.  It is highly unlikely that Osiander’s understanding of “essential righteousness” entailed any such “mingling,” but the mere fact that Calvin was hypersensitive to such issues is suggestive of his most cherished convictions.

     

Why is Calvin so worried about an exaggerated mystic oneness in Osiander?  The first clue is Calvin’s repeated effort to emphasize the Trinitarian economy of salvation.  When Calvin developed a doctrine of the Trinity in Book I, he showed little concern to speculate about the eternal intra-divine relations of the triune God.  While it is true that Calvin stands in a theological tradition in which salvation is understood as a creaturely sharing in the divine life, it is also true that Calvin offers very little reflection on the inner dynamics of that divine life apart from God’s relating to the world.  But Calvin does suggest a pattern of relations that obtains both in God’s eternal triune life as well as in God’s relations to the world.  Just as God the Father is the fountain of all good things that circulate between the three Trinitarian persons, so too the triune God as a whole relates to creatures as the fountain of all good things.  This clarifies how a human sharing in the drama of salvation is a real participation in God’s own life.  The engagement with Osiander suggests that reflection on the Trinitarian economy of salvation was central to Calvin’s concerns.  Calvin agrees with Osiander that what indwells believers is not only Christ, but the Spirit and the Father as well.  This follows from the traditional claim that all three divine “persons” are active in all of God’s relations to the world, even if there is a differentiated order that holds in differing spheres of action.  But Osiander did not rightly picture the “manner of the indwelling – namely, that the Father and Spirit are in Christ, and even as the fullness of deity dwells in him, so in him we possess the whole of deity” (3.11.5).  

     

Doctrinally speaking, Book III is an exploration of how the Spirit joins believers to Christ and his benefits.  Thus, focusing on the kind of “identity” that emerges from this particular material is an investigation of theological identity in terms of soteriological themes (meaning that God the Redeemer is taken as the explicit theme and not merely God as Creator).  This doctrinal specificity informs and influences the way Calvin wants to understand the indwelling of the divine in human lives.  The differentiated ordering of divine persons is emphasized in order to highlight that it is precisely in the union with Christ that believers are united to the triune divine life.  Calvin takes Osiander as ignoring this differentiation within the believer’s union with God.  Because the character of the joining of sinful humanity with the triune divine life is primarily a saving union whereby Christ’s righteousness is imputed to the believer, Calvin sees the task as guarding the specificity of Christ the Mediator.

     

Although Calvin engages Osiander on a number of points, the tone of the engagement is governed by the fact that, having described justification as a sharing in Christ’s righteousness by faith, Calvin proceeds to point out how Osiander’s alternative construal of the sharing would undermine this “hinge” of Christian faith.  Consider Calvin’s argument with Osiander that the “Christ” to whom believers are united in faith is not merely the Eternal Word, the Second Trinitarian Person, but the incarnation of the Son of God in the flesh of Jesus.  Given that Calvin and Osiander both agree with the Chalcedonian claim that Jesus Christ was and is both fully divine and fully human, the question can be raised whether it is the divine or the human nature primarily in view when Scripture teaches that Christ is the true righteousness of believers.  Calvin’s desire to tether the economy of salvation tightly to the Scriptural narrative results in his insistence that it is in the incarnate Word that humanity finds righteousness.  

For even though God alone is the source of righteousness, and we are righteous only by participation in him [eius participatione sumus iusti], yet, because we have been estranged from his righteousness by unhappy disagreement [infilici dissiduo], we must have recourse to this lower remedy that Christ may justify us by the power of his death and resurrection (3.11.8/CR II.539).

Calvin points out that if Christ justifies by virtue of a human sharing in his divine nature only, then that sharing in divine righteousness will be an undifferentiated sharing, a sharing in a righteousness that “will not be peculiar to Christ but common with the Father and the Spirit, inasmuch as the righteousness of one differs not from the righteousness of the other” (3.11.8).  

     

Yet here is where Calvin’s description of the mystical union between God and believers parts ways not only with Osiander but also with much of the previous theological tradition.  For Calvin, the union of believers with God is not a union of things like each other, drawn together by a powerful attraction or similarity.  Rather, it is a union of sinful humanity with the divine life whose purity and holiness mark a radical difference and dissimilarity between divine and human life.  Here the question of the mystical union presses beyond the question of how to relate the Infinite and the finite.  It becomes, in addition, a question about how the infinitely holy can be joined to what is not only finite but also sinful.  The situation of human sin is the “unhappy disagreement” of human estrangement from God’s righteousness.  This dire plight requires a “lower remedy,” a remedy worked out by the Word’s taking on flesh and living a particular life that culminated in death and resurrection.  The union can take place only when sinful humanity is afforded the opportunity of sharing in the excess of righteousness obtained by Jesus Christ for their benefit.

     “Therefore [Christ] does this for us not according to his divine nature but in accordance with the dispensation [dispensationis] enjoined upon him” (3.11.8).  While Calvin agrees with Osiander that only God can save humanity, he presses the point that God does all of this saving work in the life of Christ “according to his human nature” (3.11.9).  Citing Scriptural testimony regarding the incarnational character of God’s saving mission, Calvin concludes, “Paul has established the source [fontem] of righteousness in the flesh [carne] of Christ alone” (3.11.9/CR II.540).  

     

Calvin’s treatment of justification began with an explanation of the term as part of a forensic economy of metaphors, a term that gets its most basic meaning in terms of courtroom imagery of defendants before a judge.  Calvin’s decision by 1559 to move quickly to a debate with Osiander regarding the nature of believer’s union with Christ suggests that Calvin was sensitive to the accusation that the Protestant emphasis on “justification by faith” meant that it is primarily faith that saves.  Such a charge would turn Calvin’s intentions on end, suggesting that, at bottom, the reconciliation of humanity with God was an achievement of human effort and thus as uncertain and unstable as that human effort itself.  To guard against this error, Calvin argues that “justification by faith” is simply another way of describing the mode of the human sharing in the divine life, the “mystical union.”  Faith does not justify; it just receives the Christ who justifies.  If the drama of salvation can be pictured as God offering a gift to the world, then Jesus Christ is the gift and “faith” simply refers to the human posture of receiving it.  Faith is the empty vessel that seeks to be filled with the grace of Christ (3.11.7).  By faith

Christ is made ours.  Therefore, that joining together of Head and members, that indwelling of Christ in our hearts [habitatio Christi in cordibus nostris] – in short, that mystical union [mystica unio] – are accorded by us the highest degree of importance, so that Christ, having been made ours, makes us sharers [consortes] with him in the gifts with which he has been endowed (3.11.10/CR II.540).

This emphasis on humanity’s inclusion in a divine economy of gifts calls into question the adequacy of the legal and forensic character of justification.  To be justified refers to the way humanity comes to share in Christ’s flesh, becoming members of his body.  Calvin himself admits that the “imputation” metaphor says much too little about the union with Christ in which believers come to share in his righteousness.  “We do not, therefore, contemplate him outside of ourselves from afar in order that his righteousness may be imputed to us” (3.11.10).  Rather, engrafted into his body believers are made one with him.  What we have in Book III is a soteriological rendering of human identity that hinges primarily on images of participation and sharing in the life of the triune God.  While the typically Protestant forensic and legal metaphors function to clarify that this drama is sheer gift and that it is not contingent upon an ontologically understood conferral of grace, such metaphors cannot, by themselves, capture the way that Calvin figures human identity as a “mystical union.” 

     

Calvin’s sensitivity to charges about the merely extrinsic and forensic character of justification also need to be understood within the context of sixteenth century debates regarding eucharistic theory and practice.  Recalling the historical material from chapter 1, it is helpful to keep in mind the many ways in which eucharistic practice funded a rich and varied symbolic lens which organized the world and mapped the channels in which power operates.  In the sixteenth-century, theological wrangling about the mode of Christ’s presence in the Eucharistic elements was not merely a debate about arcane ecclesial practices.  Because the Eucharistic symbols served as a popular imaginative resource for the claims of political and ecclesial authorities to be sites and representatives of divine power, Reformed communities’ resistance to sacramental notions of transubstantiation cannot be separated from their resistance to institutional arrangements of power.  Calvin himself contributed to this cultural debate by pressing hard on the theological significance of the ontological boundary between Creator and creature.  Calvin polices this boundary in his description of the mystical union with God, as well as with regard to the Eucharistic sharing in Christ’s flesh.  Osiander “maliciously calls ‘Zwinglian’ all those who do not subscribe to his mad error of ‘essential righteousness’ because they do not hold the view that Christ is eaten in substance [substantialiter] in the Lord’s Supper” (3.11.10).  Calvin agrees with Osiander about the close connection between believers’ sharing in Christ’s righteousness and their sacramental sharing in the flesh of Christ (3.11.9).  But he argues that Osiander’s depiction of the mystical union, and correlatively his notion of Christ’s Eucharistic presence, “forces a gross mingling [crassam mixturam] of Christ with believers.”  Osiander’s insistence on “essential righteousness and essential indwelling of Christ” lead him to the view “that God pours himself into us as a gross mixture [ut crassa mixtura se eus in nos transfundat], just as he fancies a physical eating [carnalis manducatio] in the Lord’s Supper” (3.11.10/CR II.541).

     

The complexity of Calvin’s understanding of justification lay in his refusal to choose between forensic and union rhetoric as if they were mutually exclusive alternatives.  Their compatibility is rooted not in some kind of theoretical solution so much as in Calvin’s argument that both kinds of rhetoric attest to nonnegotiable features of the biblical picture of God’s saving relation with humanity.  In the previous paragraphs, I emphasized that the “union” rhetoric provided a feature of the Christian life left in doubt when the forensic rhetoric stands alone.  Defending a “mystical union,” a real participation in Christ was a way of guarding against the danger that salvation might appear as merely as extrinsic and that human faith would be made into the principle cause of human righteousness.  But the union rhetoric cannot make do without the forensic rhetoric either.  And here the issue for Calvin is protecting God’s activity of accepting sinners as a radical gift, unconditioned in any way by alleged obligations due to human merit and independent of any human performance in response.  Osiander’s criticism of forensic understandings of justification stems from his positive claim that justification results in the Christian being righteous and not just being reckoned righteous.  Calvin contends that the Scriptural language of divine pardon and divine accusation demand the position that the Christian is justified and therefore righteous “not intrinsically but by imputation” (3.11.11).  Covered by the righteousness of Christ, believers are “accounted righteous outside themselves” (3.11.11).  Calvin offers a doctrinal picture of a human sharing in Christ, where the sharing has a logic different from that of possession or ownership.

     

Here doctrinal and practical matters converge.  To Calvin, the identity of his readers - as God’s adopted children already forgiven and promised eternal life - hung in the balance.  Were the divine acceptance of sinners tied to believers possessing or owning a righteousness that properly belonged to them, their status as God’s beloved family would be under continual suspicion given the persistence of sin.  This is why Calvin’s project of crafting a picture of human life remade into the divine image hinges on understanding the differentiated unity of justification and regeneration.

But because it is very well known by experience that the traces of sin [reliquias peccati] always remain in the righteous, their justification must be very different from reformation into newness of life [reformantur in vitae novitatem].  For God so begins this second point in his elect, and progresses in it gradually, and sometimes slowly, throughout life, that they are always liable to the judgment of death before his tribunal.  But he does not justify in part but liberally [non ex parte, sed ut libere], so that they may appear in heaven as if endowed with the purity of Christ (3.11.11).

Calvin assumes that the persistence of sin in the lives of Christians means that no one could ever escape condemnation by the divine judge if their defense involves an appeal to the intrinsic character of their own lives.  Were one tempted to respond that God is merciful enough to overlook the puny offenses of finite creatures, or that God can appreciate even slight progress, one could do so only by speaking in wholly different theological grammar than Calvin’s own.  Because divine holiness and purity tolerate no imperfection in human obedience, Calvin sees it as a sign of divine mercy and grace that God’s acceptance of sinners is a calculation or exchange that is conceptually distinct from the transforming effects of grace in the life of the believer.  This is what allows Calvin to articulate the shape of the Christian life as a life of obligations and debts to God and neighbor, while simultaneously maintaining forgiveness and divine acceptance as pure gift.  That is, the gift of divine acceptance is in no way contingent upon one’s success or failure in the matter of obligations to God and others.

     

Calvin is seeking to craft within his readers a portrait of themselves as beneficiaries of their union with Christ in the bond of the Holy Spirit.  In light of that rhetorical goal, the doctrinal language of “regeneration” and “justification” is an attempt to provide an internal richness to that larger picture, to describe and elucidate with greater clarity the dynamics of that union.  One of the difficulties noticeable on the surface of Calvin’s texts is the struggle to carve out a space between what he takes to be erroneous extremes.  On one hand, Calvin’s theological discourse confirms and affirms their identity as the objects of God’s loving and merciful concern, a reality grounded in God’s redemptive activity in Jesus and in the way they have now been incorporated into this redemptive sphere by union with the risen Christ.  On the other hand, Calvin’s theological discourse relentlessly criticizes the dominant cultural options for how to live into the reality of divine grace and love.  On this side of the rhetoric, Calvin has to both forge a lively sense of God’s transforming presence to human life and to help his readers experience their lived gratitude, joy, and love as a response to a grace already fully given them.  All these concerns sometimes twist and pull Calvin’s discourse, creating a kind of tension or dissonance.  

     

Calvin’s basic goal is to find a way to translate into his readers’ imaginations the principle that “man is not righteous in himself but because the righteousness of Christ is communicated to him by imputation.”  And if the forensic metaphor of “imputation” is not fully clear, Calvin can put it another way, saying that “our righteousness is not in us but in Christ, that we possess it only because we are partakers [participes] in Christ; indeed, with him we possess [possidemus] all its riches” (3.11.23/CR II.552).  Notice the theological and anthropological complexity of this claim.  It is really “our” righteousness, but “ours” in such a way that it is not “in” us.  It is “ours” because we “possess” it, but here “possession” has to be taken in a highly unusual way.  One “possesses” the righteousness God rewards with eternal life only to the extent that one continually shares in the true source of that righteousness, “in” Christ.  There is no other kind of “possessing” than this “partaking.”  One might forgive Calvin’s audiences for failing to register the subtlety of such rhetoric, not only because it often came to them mediated by the teaching of their own Reformed pastors, but also because this feature of the gospel message requires an almost tortuous unraveling of metaphors.  

     

Shifting to the broader social significance of these claims, we can see that Calvin’s rhetoric functioned to order the imaginations of his readers.  If Calvin has convinced his readers that one’s having any righteousness at all is contingent upon one’s having Christ, then he has, in effect, shifted the imaginative focus from the quality of one’s own transformation to the question of whether one has been united to Christ in faith.  There is, even for Calvin, an appropriate form of introspection.  It is not always wrong to take self-inventory, to look at one’s own life for signs of God’s transforming power.  But the goal of such self-analysis is always the strengthening of faith that comes from the concrete signs that one really has been joined to Christ (and thus is a recipient of the always two-fold benefits of regeneration and justification).  Such an imaginative shift had social significance because the new Reformed consciousness was set in a new relationship to the dominant imaginative landscape of Catholic Europe with its thickly religious matrix of institutional authorities, social practices, and the sacred space and time etched into the daily rhythms of life.  Calvin’s emphasis upon human lives “partaking” in Christ’s life also suggests why the celebration of the Lord’s Supper was a powerful identifying symbol.

     

To return to one of my central arguments, this tension in Calvin’s discourse has to do largely with his attempt to narrate the drama of salvation for his readers in a way that was imaginatively compelling and creative at the level of social practice, all the while being careful to mark and preserve the boundary between Creator and creature.  In the same sense that the divine and human were joined in Christ without any “mingling” or confusion of the ontological divide, so too believers are joined to Christ and experience a real sharing in Christ’s life without any transgression of the border that marks God off from humanity as that glorious and loving power who alone is worthy of worship.

Justification and the Conscience (Institutes 3.12-13)

     

Approaching Calvin’s doctrinal rhetoric as an attempt to fashion and craft the conscience of his audiences has not been the standard approach for those working mainly in the field of historical theology.  But it resembles interpretive strategies practiced by literary theorists and those theologians who have learned from them.  Calvin’s sporadic mention of the conscience in the first chapter devoted explicitly to justification is followed by a chapter devoted to explicit treatment of justification and the conscience.  This chapter, written mostly in 1539, was retained in this position in 1559, suggesting that for Calvin the most natural move was from a doctrinal discussion of “justification” and “righteousness” right into an extended reflection on the character of human conscience evoked by and implied in that doctrinal discourse.  The effect on the reader is the creation of a novel self-understanding that occurs not simply by reflecting on who God is, but instead by actually experiencing the righteousness of God.  Here the reciprocity of knowing God and knowing oneself that structures Book I provides the continuing theological pattern.

     

Not unlike other sections of the Institutes, Calvin here attempts to make something happen in and through his textual discourse.  (It is in this sense that notions of “fashioning” or “crafting” the lives of his readers are relevant).  While rhetorical aims characterize the Institutes as a whole, I want to demonstrate how Calvin’s rhetorical goals shape the doctrinal discourse of “justification.”  He tries to shape the conscience of his audiences; he does not just “describe” some static thing called conscience.  After defining “justification” as a theological term, Calvin immediately carries the reader into the divine courtroom that had previously only been metaphor: “our discourse is concerned with the justice not of a human court but of a heavenly tribunal, lest we measure by our own small measure the integrity of works needed to satisfy the divine judgment” (3.12.1).  This transposition into the realm of the heavenly tribunal is meant to effect in the reader the removal of any attempt at self-acquittal.  Refused a hearing before other human judges, the reader is situated before the judgment of God that is “so perfect that nothing can be admitted except what is in every part whole and complete and undefiled by any corruption.”  In a 1559 addition to this section, Calvin even heightens the rhetorical effect by using Job’s righteousness to suggest that “even if someone satisfied the law, not even then could he stand the test of that righteousness which surpasses all understanding.”  The implications are startling – Calvin suggests that divine wrath and punishment falls not only upon the sinful but also perhaps even upon whatever is not itself divine.  Yet Calvin is quick to divert our attention from this possibility, adding that the reality of the human situation is that all have failed to obey the law in its fullness and thus have hope only in confessing their “nothingness.”  

     

Hauled before the divine tribunal, the reader encounters the bizarre and dizzying convolution of all their most dearly held convictions.  In this disorienting courtroom, the basic tenets of common sense turn out to be deceptive lies.  Calvin rhetorically evokes this effect on the reader by re-defining human valuations in terms of powerful and emotional imagery of the clean and the filthy, the glorious and the shameful.  Entrance to the heavenly court has the effect of startling awake those who mistakenly repose in a peaceful conscience, violently shaken awake from their illusion, “just as great riches heaped up in a dream vanish upon awakening.”

But they who seriously, and as in God’s sight, will seek after the true rule of righteousness, will certainly find that all human works, if judged according to their own worth, are nothing but filth and defilement.  And what is commonly reckoned righteousness is before God sheer iniquity; what is adjudged uprightness, pollution; what is accounted glory, ignominy (3.12.4).

If carried along by Calvin’s rhetoric, the reader experiences human life as a kind of drowsy obliviousness to the reality of divine judgement upon human sin, a distracted dreaming from which one is jolted awake in breathless confusion.  Trying to get one's bearings is futile, for one’s imaginative world has been reversed.  The worthwhile has become shit; the good has become sin; the clean is now pollution, pride becomes shame.  Despite the rhetorical excess of this particular passage, this is not all that Calvin has to say about the goodness of the human endeavor.  We are here in the rhetorical and doctrinal space of “justification.”  Failing to note this would mean that we had failed to follow Calvin’s own advice to make the right kinds of distinctions.  Outside the doctrinal space of justification, Calvin has quite different things to say about the capacities for goodness, truth, and beauty in the common human endeavor.

     

Calvin’s attention to the crafting of conscience results from his attention to the psychological-affective dimension of the theological claim regarding justification, namely, that God saves by gifting persons with a righteousness that is, properly speaking, not their own but Christ’s.  While much of Calvin’s effort is devoted to actually performing or bringing about the humiliation of the prideful conscience, this theme cannot be seen as exhaustive of his rhetorical aims.  It is true that Calvin creates a heightened sense of the inability of the sinner to contribute anything to the working out of salvation, and along those lines Calvin certainly tends to foreground the problem created by a prideful and arrogant inflation of human works and moral effort.  Yet close attention to the movement of Calvin’s text reveals that Calvin’s goals are more subtle than that.  Rather than offering a monolithic and homogenous reading of the sinful human community, Calvin attempts to write theology in such a way that God’s saving action can be seen from a variety of human attitudinal or moral standpoints.  First, the simple reminder that Calvin treats sanctification before justification should suffice to show that any characterizing of Calvin’s theology as a script for passivity, quietism, and the general avowal of agency and moral effort is a mistaken one.  Calvin begins to unpack the significance of the union with Christ in faith by constructing a lawful, patterned, ordered imagination in which human agency can flourish.  On this level, the ensuing justification rhetoric simply serves as a reminder that all such human agency and effort has its value solely in its constituting a song of praise and gratitude for a gift already fully and freely given and received.  Second, in 1559 Calvin concluded the section we have been discussing by moving away from pride to a consideration of sloth.  Calvin moves from addressing a complacency that stems from an arrogant self-satisfaction to a complacency that has more to do with a drowsy and inattentive forgetfulness of God.  “For many sinners are so drunk with the sweetness of their vices that they think not upon God’s judgment but lie dazed, as it were, in a sort of drowsiness, and do not aspire to the mercy offered to them.  Such sloth is no less to be shaken off than any confidence in ourselves is to be cast away . . .” (3.12.8).  So human despondence and lethargy are countered by divine grace as is overweening arrogance and pride.

     

Calvin’s extended treatment of “conscience” within the justification discourse is theologically interesting along yet another trajectory.  Not only does his crafting of conscience manifest the mutual reciprocity of knowing God and knowing oneself, but it also repeats in a new key the correlation between divine glory and human happiness that constitutes the melody of his doctrine of creation.  The repetition occurs “in a new key” because in justification Calvin addresses self-knowledge in light of the testimony that believers are united to Christ and his righteousness by the spiritual bond of faith, and not just in light of the testimony that creatures have their existence and all good things as gifts from the divine Father who is the fountain of all gifts.  Here the melodic pattern of the giving and receiving of gifts is sounded yet again, but in a slightly altered way.  The created gifts have here been incorporated in another cycle of divine gifts whereby sinners get exactly what is not reserved, where “righteousness” comes as a gift from beyond the orbit of human possibilities, invoking a gratitude shorn of all desire to make a worthy return.  Just as the Creator/creature relation was most fundamentally characterized in terms of divine love and human gratitude, an analogous dynamic appears within the doctrinal space of justification.  Human conscience before the presence of God continues to be, fundamentally, a peaceful, trustful happiness.  This is worth pointing out because one strand of Calvin interpretation has insisted on correlating divine glory, understood as a terrifying and inscrutable power, with a frightened and bewildered human conscience.

     

Calvin continues his crafting of conscience in 1539 with the following words.

Here, indeed, we are especially to note two things: namely, that the Lord’s glory should stand undiminished and, so to speak, in good repair, and that our consciences in the presence of his judgment should have peaceful rest and serene tranquility (3.13.1).

In what follows, Calvin unfolds the finer texture of these claims about divine glory and the human conscience.  In a way that echoes some of Calvin’s claims about the problem of idolatry, Calvin emphasizes here what Eire calls the “transaction” component of reverential acts.  Calvin takes Scripture as teaching that “God’s glory is somewhat diminished if man glories in himself.”  Or again, “whoever thinks that he has anything at all of his own rises up against God and casts a shadow upon his glory.”  Again, “we never truly glory in him unless we have utterly put off our own glory” (3.13.1-2).  Now this appears to be an odd claim on Calvin’s part (perhaps just mirroring an oddness in scripture itself).  How exactly is it that God’s glory can be “diminished,” or that human boasting can cast a “shadow” on God’s glory?  Are we not to think of God as the kind of life that cannot be metaphysically diminished by any conditions whatever?  Without questioning this intuition, Calvin assumes that what God desires in creating and maintaining a world is a continual reflection of divine goodness in the created realm, a reflection that does not diminish but in fact enhances the significance and dignity of human lives.  Nevertheless, Calvin can describe this divine desire for a creaturely “reflection” in terms of creaturely obligations to render God praise, such that to fail to fulfill such obligations can be characterized as an act of dishonoring God, a “diminishment” of God’s glory.  The vulnerability of God’s ontological perfections is not in question.  

     

The very possibility that obligations to honor God can be humanly freeing instead of tyrannical gains its plausibility from Calvin’s liturgical anthropology.  Human lives lived in love for God and neighbor, in the hopes of expressing gratitude to God by sharing God’s gifts with others in need, this life just is Calvin’s definition of happiness; this is what life looks like when it reflects God’s glory.  Calvin can say that “the elect are justified by the Lord to the end [finem] that they may glory in him and in no other” (3.13.2).  Calvin pictures human life as having its richness in its being a real participation in the divine life.  Living in such a way as to glorify God does not demean human goodness but instead defines human goodness in terms of its being a finite reflection of God’s own way of being.  In this way, human life is figured as a chorus of praise in which God’s creatures listen with joy to the sounds of the praise of God.  The biblical statement that believers are to “declare the excellencies of him who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light” (I Pet. 2:9) means, for Calvin, that “the sole praises of God may so resound in the ears of believers as to overwhelm in deep silence all arrogance of the flesh” (3.12.2).

     

Next, Calvin turns from the theme of divine glory to the correlative theme of a peaceful conscience.  Such a conscience becomes a real possibility only because God has offered humanity righteousness in the mode of sheer gift.

For to have faith is not to waver, to vary, to be borne up and down, to hesitate, to be held in suspense, to vacillate – finally, to despair!  Rather, to have faith is to strengthen the mind with constant assurance and perfect confidence [constanti certitudine ac solida securitate], to have a place to rest and plant your foot (3.13.3/CR II.562).

Scripture shows that God’s promises are not established [firmas] unless they are grasped with the full assurance of conscience [certa conscientiae fiducia].  Wherever there is doubt or uncertainty, it pronounces them void.  Again, it declares that these promises do nothing but vacillate and waver if they rest upon our own works.  Therefore, righteousness must either depart from us or works must not be brought into account, but faith alone must have place, whose nature it is to prick up the ears and close the eyes – that is, to be intent upon the promise alone and to turn thought away from all worth or merit of man (3.13.4/CR II.563).

This is Calvin’s articulation of what human life looks like when committed to the end of glorifying God, at least with respect to the “conscience.”  Zachman has explored this theme of the peaceful conscience that possesses “assurance”.  Two things need to be noted.  First, Calvin’s anthropology depends on delineating the relations between God and creatures as gift relations.  His treatment of the “conscience” is, on one level, merely a specification of this broader theological claim.  Second, the close connection between doctrine and practice is evident in Calvin’s treatment of conscience as well.  Because Calvin treats religion as a public matter involving forms of institutional power and visible religious practices, Calvin is attuned to how the interior is given shape by public religious practices.  Calvin concludes the reflection on the peaceful conscience by pointing out the difference it makes in the practice of prayer (3.13.5), a theme Calvin picks up later in the unfolding of justification.

     

Calvin’s discussion of prayer an existentially powerful piece of writing precisely because he brings together the doctrine of justification, its effects on conscience, and the resulting contours of the life of prayer.  When Calvin turns to the theme of prayer at the end of his treatment of justification, freedom, and the conscience, he is not turning to a new theme but looking again at those same theological claims through the lens of prayer.  The life of prayer described by Calvin cannot be seen in isolation from the effort to theologically elaborate the drama of salvation in doctrinal terms.  Prayer is just one more look at this drama of salvation, where that drama is registered now in the experience of God’s people.  

But after we have been instructed by faith to recognize that whatever we need and whatever we lack is in God, and in our Lord Jesus Christ, in whom the Father willed all the fullness of his bounty to abide [cf. Col. 1:19; John 1:16] so that we may all draw from it as from an overflowing spring, it remains for us to seek in him, and in prayers to ask of him, what we have learned to be in him.  Otherwise, to know God as the master and bestower of all good things, who invites us to request them of him, and still not go to him and not ask of him – this would be of as little profit as for a man to neglect a treasure, buried and hidden in the earth, after it had been pointed out to him (3.20.1).

Here Calvin gathers the main themes developed in Book I – God as the Father who is the fountain of all good and merciful provider of all that creatures lack – and allows those themes to provide the color of the life of prayer that is, essentially, a life of calling on God continually in praise of God’s goodness, in gratitude for divine gifts and in humble confession of need.  And the Scriptural call to pray unceasingly becomes, for Calvin, simply the call to a life of awakened experience to the treasures of God’s fatherly goodness which is the context of all human life.

     

The discussion of prayer provides yet another view of Calvin’s anthropology as well, especially in terms of the role of conscience and the role of desire.  Given Calvin’s own battle with anxiety and despair, perhaps this should be read as an idealized goal of Christian living rather than the comfortable possession of faith.  Nevertheless, Calvin’s picture of the praying believer is, at bottom, the response of a peaceful conscience to God.  It is, like the whole of the Christian life, the response to a gift already freely given.  With Christ as the Mediator who continually intercedes for God’s people, prayer can be undertaken in a disposition of confidence and joy.  In this sense, the life of prayer manifests what is true of Christian freedom more generally: both refer to a life joyfully lived in service and love to God and neighbor precisely because the faithful have come to know God as a Father who promises to receive their always sin-spotted works with pleasure.  United to Christ in faith, the believer now lives life “in” Christ, a way of living characterized not by a dreadful fear of God’s terrifying glory but instead by assurance in the love and mercy of a heavenly Father.  The plight of Calvin’s audiences – many of them part of persecuted and illegal communities in 1536 and later – is woven into Calvin’s discussion of the texture of peace and assurance.  Prayer is the fruit of a peaceful conscience, not in the sense of someone free of all afflictions, but in the sense of someone who finds peace in the midst of anxiety and fear.  “But for the saints the occasion that best stimulates them to call upon God is when, distressed by their own need, they are troubled by the greatest unrest, and are almost driven out of their senses, until faith opportunely comes to their relief” (3.20.11).  Prayer fosters a confident trust in the faithful that God is “wholly present” as providential Lord and sustaining power (3.20.2), which shows that Calvin’s resistance to the localization of the holy, to the idolatrous craving to have a god nearby in material things, was not an opposition to God’s presence.  Yet prayer is the practice that assures believers of that presence in Calvin’s alternative to Catholic notions of the sacramental presence of Christ.  Likewise, the practice of prayer that is confident because of the one Mediator, Jesus Christ, is used as a principle of resistance to the intercession and veneration of saints in prayer (3.20.21-27).

     

Calvin’s discussion of prayer also illumines his anthropology of desire.  Calvin assures his readers that the practice of praying to an omniscient and omnipotent God is far from superfluous.  God ordained prayer “not so much for his own sake as for ours.”  So prayer is to be seen more as a help to the faithful than as simply a duty commanded by God.  And as Calvin develops his picture of how prayer is a help to the faithful, a picture emerges of human life as a life of intense desiring, a way of living in the world that is suffused with deep gratitude and joy (3.20.3).  It is a robust picture of human affections stirred up by the drama of salvation, a life of “delight” [voluptas] in God.  Here Calvin picks up the primacy of the affections that accompanies all true knowledge of God.  Even in Book I, Calvin’s discussion of human knowledge of God was not cold and rational, but an existentially engaged knowledge characterized by trust and joy.  Both in his discussion of the knowledge of God the Creator and now in his discussion of prayer as a form of knowledge of God the redeemer, Calvin’s anthropological picture presupposes that the gospel elicits a range of desires and emotions in those for whom it becomes the truth.  This emphasis on the affections is registered as well in Calvin’s commendation of the importance of congregational singing.

Mapping the Social World Doctrinally: Identity, Borders, and the Outside (Institutes 3.14)

     

One of the functions of Calvin’s doctrinal discourse is to provide for his readers an alternative way to map, organize, and orient themselves within their social world.  Given the historical and social context of sixteenth century Europe as a highly contested social space (as I attempted to show in chapter 1), it is not at all surprising that part of the theological burden that fell to Calvin was the task of giving his audiences a compelling set of lenses through which they can identify themselves and others in a rapidly changing and politically volatile world.  That such a mapping was an “alternative” was due to the fact that the social world had already been mapped in various contested ways; there were established ways of “identifying” individuals and groups and drawing boundaries in the creation of a space between this side and the “other.”  How does a persecuted minority begin to construct an alternative mapping of the social world?  They did it, in part at least, by means of the creative implementation of traditional doctrinal categories.  Calvin’s discourse may well be an “ideology” or “propaganda,” but it is no less “doctrinal” for that reason.

     

Following the focus on the peaceful conscience in 1539 is a section that begins by offering a four-fold classification of human life.  

For men are either (1) endowed with no knowledge of God and immersed in idolatry, or (2) initiated into the sacraments, yet by impurity of life denying God in their actions while they confess him with their lips, they belong to Christ only in name; or (3) they are hypocrites who conceal with empty pretenses their wickedness of heart, or (4) regenerated by God’s Spirit, they make true holiness their concern (3.14.1).

In light of the many ways that social worlds were mapped in sixteenth century Europe, exploring the rationale of Calvin’s mapping should provide helpful clues to how Calvin identified Reformed communities and to what kind of “othering” this identification entailed.  Calvin introduces the classification as having to do with “righteousness.” In this way Calvin signals that all of the prevailing social identities and boundary markers are called into question by a new kind of map whose coordinates, strangely enough, are not nation, class, and gender, but “righteousness.”  Who are these groups in the world of Calvin and his audiences?  It was written in 1539, which may provide some guidance, but the fact that it was retained in all subsequent editions suggests that Calvin continued to be confident about the way it served to map the world his readers navigated on a daily basis.  

     

Group 1: Who are these idolaters who have “no knowledge of God”?  Any hypothesis attempting to draw tight connections between this first group and particular social groupings would be provocative, but still only a guess.  In fact Calvin’s rhetoric suggests that this grouping is, in a way, not a grouping at all.  Calvin describes the group in such a way that the reader is lead to realize that he is not picking out and circumscribing any particular grouping but is describing the plight of every human being who lives apart from Christ.  Two themes dominate.  First, group one is not in a neutral state, but is cast unambiguously as God’s “enemies,” as “dead” to God.  Here the tone of writing is destructive and critical.  Calvin re-describes for his readers the lives of those whose outward course of life is commendable and virtuous but who lack faith and thus fail to aim at loving and serving God.  Perhaps Calvin had some of his humanist contemporaries in mind when deconstructing the image of the virtuous pagan.  Regardless, any course of life, no matter how impressively virtuous, lived apart from faith in Christ is “accursed, not only of no value for righteousness, but surely deserving condemnation” (3.14.3).  But the tone of Calvin’s rhetoric turns more constructive as Calvin affirms that it is precisely the enemies of God whom God loves and reconciles in Christ.  Rather than invoking the theme of election, Calvin extols the divine love as a love of enemies, as a kind of raising of the dead to life, in order to argue for the inappropriateness of coming to God with the expectation of cooperating somehow with one’s own goodness.

     

Groups 2 and 3: Calvin treats these two groups as one and then affords them half the space he devoted to Group 1.  While those in the first group were pictured as ignorant idolaters devoid of all righteousness, groups two and three are pictured as those whose participation in sacramental practices belie rather than confirm their bond to Christ, hypocrites whose hearts belie their outward lives.  

For impurity of conscience proves that both classes [two and three] have not yet been regenerated by the Spirit of God.  On the other hand, the absence of regeneration in them shows their lack of faith.  From this it is clear that they have not yet been reconciled to God, not yet been justified in his sight, inasmuch as men attain these benefits only by faith (3.14.7).

This second main group comes under attack, as does the first group, perhaps even with a greater force since here Calvin works hard to undermine any confidence some may have in the Catholic sacramental system.  Calvin attempts to reverse the cultural assumption that participation in the rhythm of sacraments is a means of participating in Christ himself.  Calvin describes these folks as not regenerate, lacking faith, and not justified.  Taken at face value, such a position suggests that taking an inventory of conscience or analyzing one’s moral life is a sure-fire sign of whether one is in fact reconciled to God.  The dominant strand of Calvin’s thought is just the reverse, i.e. that faith in God’s mercy and love is signaled by clinging to Christ in spite of a guilty conscience or moral deficiency.   What Calvin thinks this second grouping does not understand is the familiar person/work distinction, that God has favor for works only when God has already favored the person.  What was needed, according to Calvin, was a breaking down of the cultural confidence in the efficacy of the sacramental system to rightly negotiate humanity’s relation with God.  As long as that confidence remained, the fate of the reforming cause remained bleak.

     

Group 4: With the final group Calvin’s rhetoric shifts from “them” to “us.”  Clearly with group 4 we have crossed from those outside to those inside.  What is peculiarly striking at first is the realization that the boundary itself and the distinct identities formed by this boundary are, in a real sense, invisible.  There are not any visible moral distinctions that could provide a point of contrast between the faithful saints on one hand and the idolaters and hypocrites on the other.  All the works of the faithful are “still always spotted and corrupted with some impurity of the flesh, and has, so to speak, some dregs mixed with it.”  Again, the “stains that bespatter the works of the saints are plainly visible” (3.14.9).  The absence of any claim about the moral differences between the faithful and the others is important, because it means that Calvin does not automatically assume a visible and publicly recognizable difference between the moral lives of Christians and others.  What distinguishes those made righteous by God’s mercy is not an empirically verifiable superiority but an identity shaped by the claim that God “by continual forgiveness of sins repeatedly acquits us.” (3.14.10).  Theologically speaking, the “righteousness” which provides the new identity of the Christian community never becomes their own in such a way that it could be collapsed into a newly energized moral life.  Notice the way Calvin juxtaposes a picture of the sanctified life with a picture of a life of sin that needs continued repentance.  Through the Holy Spirit, God

dwells in us and by his power the lusts of our flesh are each day more and more mortified; we are indeed sanctified, that is, consecrated to the Lord in true purity of life, with our hearts formed to obedience to the law.  The end is that our especial will may be to serve his will and by every means to advance his glory alone (3.14.9).

We must strongly insist on these two points: first, that there never existed any work of a godly man which, if examined by God’s stern judgment, would not deserve condemnation; secondly, if such a work were found (something not possible for man), it would still lose favor – weakened and stained as it is by the sins with which its author himself is surely burdened (3.14.11).

Sanctified by the indwelling power of the Spirit and continually plagued by the continuation of sin – this is Calvin’s picture of group four.  

     

What kind of outsiders or others does this identity entail?  What is the significance of Calvin’s suggestion that important identity markers are socially invisible, at least on the moral plane?  His broader constructive proposal for change in the external religious ceremonies of Europe and the installation of a considerably different ecclesial and social order would seem to suggest that Calvin was not content to talk only about the invisibility of identity markers.  The anti-nicodemite writings suggest the same.  But it was this tension between visibility and invisibility that provided much of the drama and dynamism in Calvin’s attempts to fashion a new reformed identity.  No doubt Calvin’s description of the faithful was at odds with currently available Catholic options, but the question is the extent to which these ideological/doctrinal differences were manifest in socially recognizable ways.  He contests the culturally predominant mapping of religious identities, not by switching the frame of reference from public to private, or from external to internal.  Rather, his resistance recapitulates the (Catholic) emphasis upon the public and external character of religion, all the while shifting its significance.  What publicly identifies evangelical communities is not the superiority of their moral lives, but the visibility of their liturgical practices.

A New Conscience: Joyful Working Rewarded by God (Institutes 3.15)

     

Calvin’s justification discourse should not be seen as monolithically critical or deconstructive.  It is not the case that sanctification provides the positive or constructive pole opposite the negative and critical pole called justification.  The reason for avoiding such over simplification is that the positive and constructive character of Calvin’s justification rhetoric would be overlooked.  I have tried to demonstrate that Calvin’s soteriological discourse should not be read simply as doctrines to be believed but rather as a complex proposal aimed at providing a mirror in which Calvin’s audiences can begin to see themselves anew.  A large part of this effort focuses on fashioning a particular kind of “conscience” in his readers.  The central themes in Calvin’s theology – the mercy of God the Father, the saving sufficiency of Jesus as God incarnate, and the power of the Spirit to engraft the faithful into the risen Christ - converge to create a conscience that is characterized by a peaceful assurance and a humble gratitude towards the generous Fount of all gifts.  Certainly the language of “justification” functions critically – Calvin feels that he has to get his audiences to experience themselves in a novel way, in a way that the traditional rhythms of religious power and practices tended to obscure.  And his chief efforts on this front were to get his readers to experience their moral efforts as thoroughly polluted by sin and hence totally incapable of providing the gratitude and joy that should characterize the life of the faithful.  But this critical enterprise does not exhaust Calvin’s doctrinal and rhetorical goals under the rubric of justification.  Even within the realm of justification, Calvin is at work to evoke a new conscience in his readers.  

     

Because the aim of God’s redemptive activity in Jesus and the Spirit aims not only at forgiveness and obedience, but a life characterized by joy, the faithful must also come to see themselves as capable of performing works of love that are pleasing to and rewarded by God.  This required Calvin to write in a way attentive to both the theoretical and practical dimensions of the religious life.  In addressing the distorted religious practices of the European laity, Calvin was also criticizing the beliefs and ideas that informed and guided them.  Likewise, in criticizing the ideas of his scholarly opponents, he was all the while criticizing the cultural and religious habits which were funded by such ideas.  The simple fact that Calvin could refer to “great damage it has done to the world” (3.15.2) – meaning the theological term “merit” – counsels against any attempt by analysists of the period to isolate thought/theology from history/practices.  And Calvin’s remark that his opponents always “rush off to those passages which seem to attribute to works some merit in God’s sight” (3.15.1) suggests that Calvin saw the rhetorical goal as having largely to do with a battle for the imaginations of the European public regarding what a Scripturally informed Christian identity would look like.  Because the polyphony of Scripture allowed a variety of interpretations, Calvin had to argue that his recommendations were, at bottom, an attempt to see more clearly into the heart of Scripture. 

     

The ideological contest over the meaning of Scripture had as one of its battles the difference between “merit” and “reward.”  Both terms represent attempts to make existential sense of Scriptural teaching, and both carry along with them attitudinal corollaries that would affect the experience and life rhythms of believers whose lives were given shape by them.  Calvin agrees with his Catholic opponents that the moral effort of the faithful matters; yet he proposes way of signaling that significance that turns on notions of “reward” rather than “merit.”  

Good works, then, are pleasing to God and are not unfruitful for their doers.  But they receive by way of reward [remunerationis] the most ample benefits of God, not because they so deserve but because God’s kindness has of itself set this value on them . . . For the only lawful way of enjoying a benefit is neither to claim for ourselves more than was given nor to defraud of his praise the author of the good, but so to behave that what he has transferred to us may still seem in a way to reside with him (3.15.3/CR II.581).

The first part of the above claim represents, I think, Calvin’s failure to appreciate the similarity between his claims and the late medieval or nominalist conception of “merit.”  But the second part of the claim begins to suggest the kind of difference Calvin had in mind (even if there were in fact similarities he himself did not recognize).  

     

Calvin’s counsel for believers not to “claim” for themselves what had been given them is, on the surface, an awkward claim.  It is not rendered any more intelligible by the suggestion that “what has been transferred to us” should be seen as still “residing” with God, the author of the good.  These statements simply bring to the surface Calvin’s broad attempts to figure the identity of his readers within an imaginative world where their having is a not-having kind of having.  I think that the concept of possession – in all its ambiguity - lay at the heart of Calvin’s attempt to fashion the lives of his audiences.  Do the faithful have their salvation in the form of possessing it, in a way that it has is some real way become their own?  The question asked this way is too vague and ambiguous.  But Calvin provides two images that are meant to help (3.15.3).  First, the believer is compared to one who “holds the usufruct of a field by another’s liberality” but might be tempted to claim the property title for himself.  Then comes the question, “Does he not by such ungratefulness deserve to lose the very possession that he has held [tenebat possessionem]?”  This image is interesting insofar as it displays a complex structure to “ungratefulness”: it is the desire to have by “title” what one already has by another’s “liberality.”  It is the desire to “possess” something in a flatly direct way that which one currently “possesses” in more ambiguous or at least derivative way.  In light of Calvin’s focus on gifts, we might say that ingratitude is a desire to possess as a justly earned exchange what one can only have in the mode of a gift.  Second, the believer is compared to a slave who, “liberated by his master, hides his base freed man’s condition and claims to be freeborn.”  By exaggerating his own origins, the slave actually spurns his own liberation.  The freed slave does not want to be known as what he is but instead as one who has been free all along, free in the proper sense of legal claim.  One who has his freedom at the initiative of another claims to have it in a less dependent way, as his own birthright.  

     

The notion of “possession” and the metaphysical picture it implies are driven, theologically speaking, by an attempt to ground the identity of believers in their union with Christ, a union described in the principally “Lutheran” terms of the glorious exchange.

We experience such participation in him [Christ] that, although we are still foolish in ourselves, he is our wisdom before God; while we are sinners, he is our righteousness; while we are unclean, he is our purity; while we are weak, while we are unarmed and exposed to Satan, yet ours is that power which has been given him in heaven and on earth, by which to crush Satan for us and shatter the gates of hell; while we still bear about with us the body of death, he is yet our life.  In brief, because all his things are ours and we have all things in him, in us there is nothing (3.15.5).

This Lutheran emphasis upon the exchange of righteousness and unrighteousness that is at the heart of the believer’s union with Christ was penned in 1536, and retained in all editions.  The way believers “participate” in Christ results in a sharing in what is directly his in such a way that it becomes indirectly the possession of the faithful.  Obviously, the terms “direct” and “indirect” are loose metaphorical translations of Calvin’s statement that “all his things are ours and we have all things in him.”  Only in that way is Christ’s righteousness “ours.”  Believers have these things in a peculiar mode: they have them “in him.”  Calvin’s claim that “in us there is nothing” should be read as a commentary on the claim that what we have, we have “in him,” by virtue of our participation in him.

Gifts, Merit, and Pelagianism

     

The joyful and grateful disposition that motivates the moral efforts of the faithful hinges on this participatory possession of grace and eternal life.  For Calvin, Catholic notions of merit fund a cultural imagination and a corresponding way of life that are problematic on two related fronts.  First, there is the subjective distortion of the attitudes and motivations of the faithful.  As I explored in the previous section, Calvin thought that lives characterized by a joyful service of God and neighbor were possible only when humans live in the fullness of their justification by faith.  Translated, this means that happiness accompanies all human endeavors only when human communities are freed from the burden of paying for the good things God offers.  It is when the faithful rest assured that the righteousness by which they are accepted and loved as God’s children is “theirs” because they themselves belong to Christ that their moral efforts can assume the proper orientation: gratitude from adopted children to a loving parent.  This question of “joy” and motivation is the subjective problem.  

     

The second problem with merit is the way that it objectively distorts who God is and how God deals with sinful humanity in the drama of salvation.  To that second, objective, problem of merit we now turn.   

     

In Calvin’s Response to the Council of Trent, written in 1547, he characterized the prevailing Catholic understanding of grace with the catchy, but not too flattering epithet, “heaven for hire.”  Here Calvin is playing with Latin words having to do with payment, wages, markets, buying and selling in a treatise that is, at bottom, an extended argument against Catholic notions of “merit” (mercatus, merces, meritus, promercalis).  But Calvin took this play of words to be deadly serious.  It was intended to problematize and undermine the way Trent made use of notions of “merit” to describe the drama of salvation.  Calvin was suggesting, without much subtlety, that the connection between marketplace economies and Catholic conceptions of “merit” was actually a form of theological contamination.  For Calvin, there were only two ways to describe the process by which God provides grace and eternal life to sinful human creatures: either it is an exchange in which grace is metaphorically pictured as wages returned for labor, or it is the utterly free giving of a gift which is metaphorically uncontaminated by any hint of reciprocal exchange.  

     

Calvin’s Catholic contemporaries were also aware of important differences between gifts and wages.  But they were not convinced, like Calvin was, that gift-relations are undermined when understood in conjunction with metaphors drawn from marketplace practices of buying and selling.  Trent solidified a long Catholic tradition of using the concept of “merit” to illumine the dynamics of grace.  Simplifying things a bit, Trent affirmed a form of medieval covenant theology wherein God’s generosity was preserved by emphasizing the gracious divine decision to grant eternal life as wages for human labor that is, in itself, puny and powerless apart from the gracious divine covenant.  But note that within this Catholic framework, gift-relations and labor-relations are permeable by one another, and can be seen as compatible, as long as grace or the gift-logic situates merit or the wage-logic and not the reverse.  

     

So a sixteenth century debate about the character of divine grace was, in large part, a debate about the character of gifts.  Can gifts and payments circulate within the same relational circuits, as Trent affirmed?  Or are relationships grounded and sustained by gift giving contaminated when combined with relations governed by labor and wages, as Calvin affirmed?

     

In Calvin’s world at least, religious discourse about the ways that God and humans can and cannot “give” to one another overlapped in various ways with other cultural practices of gift-giving.  N.Z. Davis argues persuasively that “Sixteenth-century people were evaluating gifts all the time, their own gifts and those of others, deciding what was at stake, and judging whether it was a good gift or a bad gift or even a gift at all” (2000: 9).  If Davis is right about that, then sixteenth century debates about grace took place within a larger cultural conversation about gifts and gift giving.  Obviously, Calvin’s use of the “pelagian” charge was informed by his borrowing of a cluster of terms and arguments from Scripture and from Augustine.  But what Davis helps us see is that Calvin’s understanding of grace and his use of the “pelagian” charge were influenced as well by a whole range of gift practices that permeated virtually every dimension of his culture.

     

In a chapter entitled “Gifts Gone Wrong,” Davis details the dark side of gift-practices in sixteenth century France.  She points to a strain in gift-practices deriving from “an intensified culture of obligation” (2000: 67).  Davis uses the popular proverb – “To father, to master, to God all powerful, no one can return the equivalent” – as a way of emphasizing the constant burden laid upon social inferiors who were the recipients of gifts given them by those of a higher social station.  In these gift relations, “the requirement to be pleasing and gracious was continuous, not intermittent.  A gracious, friendly, or benevolent manner was thought intrinsic to the gift mode: the strain on participants could be considerable” (2000: 74).  And finally Davis connects this social commentary to the religious life of sixteenth century France: “The pressures of obligation, weighing down gift relations in so many areas, found anguished expression in Protestant criticism of Catholic paths to salvation” (2000: 100).  What Davis suggests is that Calvin’s theological worries about the possible distortions of gift relations were part of a larger cultural conversation about the many ways that gifts can go wrong.

     

The most pointed formulation of Calvin’s argument can be found already in 1539, 

But they [the Scholastics] are doubly deceived here both because they call faith an assurance of conscience in awaiting from God their reward [remuneratione, later mercede] for merits and because they interpret the grace of God not as the imputation of free righteousness but as the Spirit helping in the pursuit of holiness . . . The schools have gone continually from bad to worse until, in headlong ruin, they have plunged into a sort of Pelagianism.

All the central elements to Calvin’s “pelagian” worries are here: remuneration or wages versus grace as a freely given gift, and reciprocity versus the utter passivity that characterizes gift-recipients.  Calvin locates the problem at two levels: “faith” is pictured as a distorted form of “assurance,” i.e. as an expectation of “reward for merits”; and second, “grace” is pictured not as the reception of a gift freely given but as the bestowal of a power which elicits human cooperation.  The “pelagian” charge, then, refers to any proposal that contaminates a divine/human relationship grounded in gift giving with relations pictured in terms of merit, payment, cooperation, or reciprocity.  For Calvin, “grace” refers to the establishment of a particular kind of gift-relation between God and sinners.  On this basis, both medieval scholastics and Calvin’s contemporaries were charged with undermining this way of picturing gift-relations.

     

The theological significance of distinguishing but not separating the relational logic of divine acceptance (justification/faith) from “renovation of life” (sanctification/love) received great attention in Calvin’s 1547 response to Trent, since Calvin had to respond to the charge that Protestants denied the necessity of transformation.

     

Calvin’s response to Trent’s understanding of justification is, in large part, a conversation about the “cause of justification.”  Calvin interprets Trent as claiming a “two-fold” cause of justification (caused partly by forgiveness, partly by regeneration), but fails to engage important medieval distinctions between various kinds of causes: “I maintain that it [the cause of justification] is one, and simple, and is wholly included in the gratuitous acceptance of God.”

[W]hen Christ is declared by Paul to be our righteousness and sanctification, a distinction is certainly drawn between these two things, though the Fathers of Trent confound them.  For if there is a two-fold grace, inasmuch as Christ both justifies and sanctifies us, righteousness does not include under it renovation of life.

Yet justification and sanctification “are constantly conjoined and cohere,” distinguishable but inseparable like the light and heat of the sun.  The rigorous conceptual distinctions made between regeneration and justification was, for Calvin, a way of keeping gift-relations and exchange-relations within their own circuits.

     In response to Canon IX of Trent – which anathematizes the “faith alone” formula – Calvin says, “[W]hen we say a man is justified by faith alone, we do not fancy a faith devoid of charity, but we mean that faith alone is the cause of justification.” Or again, “It is faith alone with justifies, and yet the faith which justifies is not alone . . . we do not separate the whole grace of regeneration from faith, but claim the power and faculty of justifying entirely for faith, as we ought.”  So Calvin agrees with Trent that “justification” and “regeneration” (transformation) are always found together in the life of the faithful.  But he parts ways with Trent when he distinguishes “justification” (or “faith”) as the only “cause” of justification.

     

For Calvin, eternal life has to be either a gift or a payment – it cannot be a mixture, since any mixture would result in the erasure of the gift altogether.  The problem is crystallized in a powerful question posed by Calvin: “How will a free gift agree with works?”  Calvin asks the question after noting that “the Sophists today cavil against” the teaching of justification by faith alone.  Here Calvin puts the problem squarely within a debate about the nature of gifts, and gestures toward a clear boundary between gift giving on the one hand, and payments, wages, reciprocity, and exchange on the other.

     

To understand Calvin’s deep intuitions about grace and gifts will require saying something about his doctrine of God as Gift-Giver.  Recall that Trent affirmed that it was only by virtue of God’s installation of a gracious covenant that human efforts could be rewarded with grace and eternal life.  Calvin was convinced that Trent’s picture of God diverged from what could be discerned of God in Scripture.  Picturing God as ordaining the laws within which human works are graciously regarded as meriting eternal life would violate the radical character of divine giving that constitutes the very identity of God.  “[T]he Lord does not examine for merits the works of those whom he has received into the covenant of grace but embraces them with fatherly affection.”  Calvin agrees with the scholastics that the guidepost for a discussion of the economy of salvation has to be God’s enacting of a gracious covenant with humanity.  But Calvin disagrees with them on the nature of this covenant.  

     

The “covenant of grace,” for Calvin, means that God can no longer be pictured primarily in terms of a Judge whose job is to discriminate whether humans have merited eternal life and, if so, rewarding it on the basis of such works.  Calvin rejects this characterization of the economy of salvation because, to him, God is here pictured as calculating the worthiness of human actions and rewarding them.  In spite of the theological claim that God’s calculations are based on a prior divine decision to install a gracious covenant, Calvin is uncomfortable with such a picture of God.  Calvin’s alternative vision of the “covenant of grace” is one wherein God is pictured as “embracing” human works “with fatherly affection.”  Responding to Trent, Calvin says, “We reach the haven of security only when God lays aside the character of Judge, and exhibits himself to us as a Father.”  Calvin does not want a “Father” whose kindness is marked by a gracious “judging” of human works as meritorious (broadly, Trent’s position).  Rather, God’s being a “Father” to sinners requires God’s “laying aside” the persona or role of “Judge.”

     

But what does Calvin have in mind when he juxtaposes the divine roles of “Father” and “Judge”?   

[T]he Lord does not examine for merits the works of those whom he has received into the covenant of grace but embraces them with fatherly affection.  By this we understand not only what the Schoolmen teach – that works have their value from ‘accepting grace.’  For they mean that works, otherwise insufficient to obtain salvation in accordance with the covenant of the law, still, by God’s acceptance of them, are advanced to a value adequate for this.  But I say that those works, defiled as well with other transgressions as with their own spots, have no other value except that the Lord extends pardon to both, that is, to bestow free righteousness upon man.

Here Calvin demonstrates that he understands the basic logic of late medieval covenant theology, viz., that the meritorious character of works has its rationale not in the moral character of the work itself but in a free divine decision to accept it as such, i.e. from “accepting grace.”  But Calvin contends that describing the drama of salvation using the metaphoric economy of payment and reward radically mis-describes a drama better captured in metaphors of gift-giving, what he here calls the “bestowal of free righteousness.”

     

Calvin associated “pelagianism” with Catholic conceptions of “merit” because the Catholic or “scholastic” reliance on metaphors of “merit” made the gift of divine grace unrecognizable by viewing God’s giving as a kind of benevolent and generous payment of wages.  For Calvin’s Catholic opponents, the conceptual framework of God’s ordination of a covenant of grace within which certain acts were rewarded with eternal life functioned to preserve an economy of gift-relations with God.  For Calvin – who could bear no mixture or overlap between gift-relations and exchange-relations – this same conceptual framework marked the erasure of the graced network between giver, gift, and recipient.  

     

Catholic notions of “merit” presupposed a circuit beginning with the free grace of the divine covenant and cycling back to God in works regarded as meritorious by virtue of the covenant.  Among other things, this scholastic theology attempts to explain how it is that human persons participate in God’s saving action.  But Calvin perceived this theological framework not as a subtle way to integrate divine sovereignty and human participation, but as a corruption of divine grace and gift-giving insofar as it relies on metaphorical models of reciprocity, exchange, and payment.

     

Calvin, for his part, wants the circuit of divine grace to elicit nothing but a return of gratitude appropriate to a gift freely given.  But Calvin conceives of divine gift giving such that this circuit of divine acceptance of sinners will never be separated from a related but distinct circuit of regeneration and sanctification.  The sphere of grace-initiated, Spirit-authored works is just a different circuit of relations – these works are a sacrifice offered to God, and while pleasing to God and rewarded by God they do not “merit” eternal life.  By distinguishing between the realm of divine acceptance and the human response of love toward God, Calvin attempts to sever what he himself perceives as a circuit of exchange between God and humans.  So in spite of the fact of Calvin’s agreement with his opponents that God’s acceptance of sinners has its primary cause (or is logically grounded) in God’s gracious will, Calvin contends that any use of “merit” language whatsoever is “pelagian.”

     

Calvin’s interest in re-locating the significance and value of human works is taken up and worked out again in a discussion about the relation between the conditional nature of blessings and curses under the law and the freely awarded promise under the gospel.  What was promised under the law to the righteous is “paid [rependi] to the works of believers, but in this repayment [retributione] we must always consider the reason that wins favor for these works” (3.17.3).  But this happens not because believer’s works represent perfect obedience to the law.  In fact, the “repayment” of the works of the faithful is so odd that the logic of payment fails to capture the relations Calvin describes.  Calvin lists three reasons why works are rewarded with God’s favor:

“God, having turned his gaze from his servants’ works . . . embraces his servants in Christ”

“of his own fatherly generosity and loving-kindness, and without considering their worth, he raises works to this place of honor, so that he attributes some value to them.”

“He receives these very works with pardon, not imputing the imperfection with which they are all so corrupted that they would otherwise be reckoned as sins rather than virtues” (3.17.3).

Calvin’s goal here is to refashion the consciences of his audiences by ushering them into an imaginative space quite different from the one currently on offer.  It is an imaginative world in which human works are valued - but whose value is re-situated into a framework in which God is pictured in the persona of a loving father and not in the persona of a calculating judge.  This picture of God is meant to undermine and refute the picture of God implied by the “covenant” theology of merit and the religious practices it informs.

Justification, Freedom, and Politics

     

Calvin’s doctrinal efforts to delineate the contours of a Christian conscience for his readers continues in the chapter on Christian “freedom” (3.19), written mostly in 1536, but placed in 1559 at the tail end of the extended treatment of justification.  This placement signals an important connection for Calvin.  In 1559 he adds the comment that “freedom is especially an appendage of justification and is of no little avail in understanding its power.”  The thematic connections between justification, the conscience, and freedom – so central to all that has proceeded – now becomes the explicit focus.  He begins by distinguishing three parts of Christian freedom, all of them forms of “spiritual” freedom.  First, there is the freedom of the justified conscience from the anxiety and uncertainty produced by attempting to please God by way of a “law righteousness.”  The second part of freedom is derivative upon the first: the freedom with which the justified conscience willingly obeys God.  Here the conformity of conscience to God’s law can be free and joyous because it is obedience to law no longer motivated by a desire to make oneself acceptable to God.  No longer afraid of the curse of the law, believers eagerly desire to live out the law in the full trust that their heavenly Father will gladly accept their imperfect obedience.  “Such children ought we to be, firmly trusting that our services will be approved by our most merciful Father, however small, rude, and imperfect these may be” (3.19.5).  

     

The third part of Christian freedom concerns a slightly different feature of Christian living.  It is the freedom concerning things adiaphora or “indifferent.”  There are some matters of the religious life and practice that are “indifferent,” a term used in Calvin’s world to distinguish what may be freely observed or not from what is obligatory.  Far from lacking importance, matters of “indifference” were actually of great significance to Calvin.  Without the freedom that comes from a right understanding of matters indifferent, “our consciences will have no repose and there will be no end to superstitions” (3.19.7).  Calvin adds in 1539 that what he has his eye on here are “ceremonies whose observance is optional” (3.19.8).  His examples in 1536 were the eating of meat and the observance of special days, but his comment about the vulnerability of the conscience to superstition signals that Calvin saw his age as one in which life was lived in an almost unbearable mass of obligations.  He is particularly attuned to the psychological effect of the religious climate:

For when consciences once ensnare themselves, they enter a long and inextricable maze, not easy to get out of.  If a man begins to doubt whether he may use linen for sheets, shirts, handkerchiefs, and napkins, he will afterward be uncertain also about hemp; finally, doubt will even arise over tow . . . If any man should consider daintier food unlawful, in the end he will not be at peace before God, when he eats either black bread or common victuals, while it occurs to him that he could sustain his body on even coarser foods . . . For all those entangled in such doubts, wherever they turn, see offense of conscience everywhere present (3.19.7).

Calvin’s comments here reveal that his worry about religious observances concerns not only the propriety of the observance itself, but also what it does to the conscience of the believer.  There can come over the imagination, Calvin suggests, an ever-widening scope of obligation.  Without the freedom that comes from recognizing observances as indifferent, the “ensnared” or “entangled” conscience burrows ever deeper under a mound of increasing obligations.

     

Following the three-part identification of Christian freedom’s component parts, Calvin turns to consider two dangerous responses to this freedom.  The first danger concerns a self-indulgent and luxurious life.  Those with material resources consider those resources as things indifferent, and thus consider an extravagant lifestyle a matter of Christian freedom.  Calvin admits that there is “freedom” here since there can be no clear rule about how to use resources.  But Christian freedom has always to be calculated in light of what would be a “lawful use of God’s gifts . . . Thus let every man live in his station, whether slenderly, or moderately, or plentifully, so that all may remember God nourishes them to live, not to luxuriate” (3.19.9).  In spite of Calvin’s principle that Christian freedom is “spiritual” freedom, an inward matter of the soul and not of externals, his treatment of freedom deals squarely with the ethical and economic character of the social lives of his readers.  Thus Calvin’s discourse about freedom and the conscience is at the same time a discourse about divine giving.  And questions about what is allowed, economically speaking, are pressed back into the theological question of what human lives and communities are to look like when figured as sites of the reception and circulation of God’s gifts.

     

The second danger Calvin mentions in connection with Christian freedom concerns the question of whether some kinds of religious observances, or abstaining from them, may offend “weaker” believers.  Here Calvin warns against viewing freedom “as though it were not sound and safe if men did not witness it.”  The Christian conscience truly has been set free in matters of indifference, such that dietary concerns or concerns about clothing are not to bind the conscience.  But the ideal of Christian love and concern for one’s neighbors is always to restrain the exercise of such freedom.  Interestingly though, Calvin moves quickly to guard against the possibility that this teaching about not offending others should be manipulated by Catholic authorities who might claim that any deviation from established religious practices and ceremonies would constitute an “offense” against one’s neighbor.  Calvin introduces two qualifications.  First, Christian freedom is to be tempered for the sake of one’s weaker brothers but not at all for the “rigor of the Pharisees” (3.19.11).  Thus it becomes imperative to learn to discern “whom we are to consider weak, whom Pharisees” (3.19.12).  Yet while Calvin cites evidence for this distinction in the apostle Paul’s decision to circumcise Timothy (Acts 16:3) but not Titus (Gal. 2:3), he offers little guidance about how to apply the principle.  The second qualification concerns the principle that concern about offending others is restricted only to matters that are truly “indifferent.”  “For the things necessary to be done must not be omitted for fear of any offense” (3.19.13).  Clearly Calvin has in mind the suggestion of his opponents that reform-minded Christians should nevertheless remain within the established religious rhythms for the sake of their neighbors.  But given Calvin’s uncompromising criticism of the Catholic penitential and eucharistic practices as idolatrous distortions and thus as dishonoring to God, he counsels that on these matters of religious observance there is no choice but to offend those committed to the Roman church.  

     

Before leaving the topic of justification, freedom, and conscience, Calvin returns once more to the distinction between the “spiritual” and the “political.”  This distinction appears also as spiritual/temporal, soul/body, inner/outward, the outer forum/forum of conscience, or “two worlds over which different kings and different laws have authority” (3.19.15).  Calvin’s reason for introducing the distinction at this point is to emphasize that Christian freedom concerns only the “spiritual” freedom of the conscience before God.  This distinction undercuts any attempt to “misapply to the political order the gospel teaching on spiritual freedom.”  Calvin’s definition of “conscience” functions to mark these boundaries as clearly as possible.

When they have a sense of divine judgment, as a witness joined to them, which does not allow them to hide their sins from being accused before the Judge’s tribunal, this sense is called “conscience” . . . A simple knowledge could reside, so to speak, closed up in man.  Therefore this awareness which hales man before God’s judgment is a sort of guardian appointed for man to note and spy out all his secrets that nothing may remain buried in darkness (3.19.15).

Conscience functions to spy out secrets hidden in darkness.  This marks the appropriate sphere of Christian freedom that results from God’s merciful justification of sinners in Jesus Christ. 

     

Calvin’s remarks on freedom lead us to ask about the connection between justification and politics.  The primary force of Calvin’s distinction between “spiritual” and “political” freedom appears to deny any significant, organic connections between them.  Calvin distinguishes the two kinds of freedom in such a way as to support his appeal to King Francis I in the preface that the Reformed communities are not seditious and thus established political authorities need not repress and persecute them.  This apology regarding the political intentions of the Reformed communities certainly makes sense in light of the political context of 1536 when Calvin first wrote the preface.  Anabaptist communities had become notorious for their revolutionary agenda with respect to established authorities.  And Calvin wanted to help such authorities distinguish between differing groups within the Protestant fold.  Theologically speaking, then, Calvin argued that the doctrine of justification unfolds the complex drama of God the Father’s adoption of sinners through the incorporation of these sinners into the body and benefits of Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit.  While this new status for the faithful results in a three-fold freedom, it does not result in “political” freedom (where this means a license for revolution against established authorities).  The qualification was meant both to assure the political authorities and to warn the persecuted Reformed churches away from revolutionary ideologies.  Calvin’s frequent counsel throughout the 1540’s and 1550’s to Reformed churches in France to endure trials patiently is proof that Calvin’s political conservatism was not limited to his early writings but continued to represent his position.

     

Yet it is also true to say that there was a quality of Calvin’s politics that can be characterized as progressive, activist, or even revolutionary.  The classification of Calvin as a political conservative, while obviously true on one level, fails to capture the complexity of the theological identity his writing fostered and fashioned.  The label of  conservatism cannot capture the challenge to established political authority that is obvious to any careful reader of the Institutes.  Standing beside Calvin’s assurance to the French King that Reformed communities have no revolutionary agenda is his warning to all established powers – written in 1536 but retained in all editions – that there is an exception to the obedience due earthly authorities: “[S]uch obedience is never to lead us away from obedience to [God], to whose will the desires of all kings ought to be subject, to whose decrees all their commands ought to yield, to whose majesty their scepters ought to be submitted” (4.20.32).  The loyalty promised to established rulers has its limits.  In the case of conflict, “We must obey God rather than men [Acts 5:29].”  In this conclusion to the Institutes as a whole, Calvin returns to one of the themes that organized and impassioned his writing all along – the majesty of God.  This certainly does not constitute anything like a transparent sanction for revolution.  But given Calvin’s uncompromising criticism of the Catholic regime as an idolatrous corruption of human life before God, and given his criticism of the way earthly regimes participate in and prop up such idolatry, it would be hard to classify such remarks as political conservatism.  The revolutionary character of Calvinism in the later sixteenth century was clearly an adaptation of Calvin’s political thought, but it was not a creation ex nihilo.

Conclusion

     

This chapter focused largely on a close reading of Calvin’s treatment of the doctrine of justification in the 1559 Institutes.  The goal of this textual narrowness was to show that the broad argument I am making actually resides in and inform Calvin’s theological writing.  I have tried to show that worship, politics, and identity formation serve as a helpful and illuminating interpretive guide to analyzing the historical and social significance of Calvin’s doctrinal rhetoric.  The juxtaposition of the practical/rhetorical features of Calvin’s theological writing (creating alternative institutions, crafting conscience, mapping social identities, fostering joy) with more arcane scholarly disputes (like those with Osiander and Trent) was deliberate.  I hoped to show that even Calvin’s scholarly theological engagements were driven by more practical concerns.  At stake in seemingly obscure doctrinal arguments was the fate of Calvin’s Europe.  Would individuals and communities, along with their political and ecclesial authorities, attain the goal of their existence in glorifying and praising God?  Or might European culture miss the window of opportunity ushered in by the breathtaking reforms begun in the mid-sixteenth century?  Only questions this big could drive the urgency and seriousness of Calvin’s theological project. 

Bossy: 1985, p. 94.

 See Peter Matheson, The Imaginative World of the Reformation (Fortress Press: 2001), the broad thesis of which is that what we call the “Reformation” is not sufficiently captured without great attention to the “imaginative world.”

 Numerous treatments of Calvin’s politics emphasize lay activism.  For example, see Weber (1958), Walzer (1965), Donald Kelley (1981), Ralph Hancock (1989), and Stevenson (1999: esp. ch. 1) 

 See Steinmetz: 1995, 12-13.  Already by 1539, Caroli had gone from being Catholic to being a Protestant minister at Lausanne, then returned to Catholicism for a brief period before again turning back to Protestantism by the time he met Calvin in Strasburg in 1538.  He later changed his stripes yet again, returning to the Catholic fold.  Louis du Tillet was an old friend of Calvin’s who actually accompanied him to Geneva, only to return to Catholicism, writing letters to Calvin urging him, too, to return to the Roman Church.  

 Nunc iusta fidei definitio nobis constabit, si dicamus esse divinae erga nos benevolentiae firmam certamque cognitionem, quae gratuitae in Christo promissionis veritate fundata, per spiritum sanctum et revelatur mentibus nostris et cordibus obsignatur (CR II.403).

 The Catholic conscience, pictured as trembling and wavering before God, was at least situated in a familiar network of religious and social practices that reinforced one’s belonging to the Church, and therefore to God.  Calvin’s focus upon the need for certainty is intelligible, in large part, as deriving from the precarious social standing of a community that, in breaking free of bondage, had simultaneously broken free from the comforting familiarity of a sacramental system that functioned to allay the frightened conscience.  Once a Calvinist, in other words, one no longer had the comfort and assurance of priestly words of absolution, nor of priestly last rites to commend one to God.  Calvin’s emphasis on election and certainty should be seen in the light of this emergence of Reformed communities from the familiar and comforting rhythms of European religious life.

 With this in mind, it seems to me that we should not make too much of the ordering of sanctification prior to justification in Calvin’s Institutes.  Certainly, the role of the law and the “form” of the Christian life receive greater treatment than, say, in Luther.  But the distinctive order is qualified by the introductory material in 3.1-5, where Calvin places the theme of the forgiveness of sins – as well as the mediation of that forgiveness – at the front of the book.

 My picture of Calvin as offering an alternative institutional embodiment of the Christian faith is different from the frequent attempt to picture Calvin’s alternative in terms of an “individualism” over against an “institutional” Roman Catholicism.  For a subtle discussion of the nature of Calvin’s alleged “individualism”, see Stevenson’s Sovereign Grace (1999: chs 1-2).

 See Eire, “Antisacerdotalism and the Young Calvin,” in Anticlericalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Dykema and Oberman (E.J. Brill: 1993).

 For the text of Ignatius’ Exercises, see The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, translated by Pierre Wolff (Triumph Press: 1997).

 For a helpful summary of Calvin’s use of this “fountain” imagery, see Zachman (1993), ch. 9.

 Ita nos iustificationem simpliciter interpretamur acceptionem qua nos Deus in gratiam receptos pro iustis habet.  Eamque in peccatorum remissione ac iustitiae Christi imputatione positam esse dicimus (CR II.534).

 Carl J. Lawrenz emphasizes the differences between Osiander and Luther on the character of justification.  He characterizes Luther as arguing for a forensic notion of justification and Osiander as transgressing this Lutheran principle by replacing Luther’s “Christ for us” with a mystical “Christ in us.”  Thus, Osiander represents a “departure from the scriptural forensic understanding of justification within Lutheranism’s own ranks” (149).  [“On Justification, Osiander’s Doctrine of the Indwelling Christ,” in No Other Gospel.  Milwaukee: Northwestern Publishing House, 1980].  Similarly, Henry Hamann contrasts Luther’s objectivity – the way consciences are assured by trusting in what transpired on the cross and continues to transpire in the eucharistic meal - to Osiander, who “had as his chief emphasis in justification a view of righteousness that directed the man of faith to what happened within him when he came to faith” (138).  [“Article III: The Righteousness of Faith before God,” in A Contemporary Look at the Formula of Concord.  St. Louis: Concordia Publishing, 1978].  But Stephen Strehle offers a contrasting, and more persuasive, interpretation of Osiander’s significance.  Strehle emphasizes that the forensic notion of justification so often identified with Protestantism did not characterize the earliest Protestant teaching and “was never accentuated in the pillars of the movement as Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin” (201).  Rather, the forensic view came into focus only with Melancthon in the 1530’s.  It was only then “that a pronounced emphasis appeared upon the forensic terms imputatio and acceptio, along with a demarcation between justification and any novitas or qualitas in the believer” (202).  [“Imputatio iustitiae: Its Origin in Melancthon, its Opposition in Osiander,” in Theolgische Zeitschrift 50, no 3, 1994].  If Strehle is right in arguing that Osiander’s basic position was a rejection of a merely forensic (and therefore cold and external) view of justification in Melancthon, and that his positive claim was that justification involves a real union of the believer with the living Christ who indwells her, then Osiander’s position bears considerable overlap with both Luther and Calvin.   

 Strehle characterizes Calvin’s accusations of Osiander as “patently false” (209).

 One of the best short summaries of work on Osiander occurs at the beginning of Patricia Wilson-Kastner’s article, “Andreas Osiander’s Theology of Grace in the Perspective of the Influence of Augustine of Hippo,” in Sixteenth Century Journal 10, 1979.

 In the Commentary John 17:21 (CO XLVII.387c), Calvin says:  “Thus it agrees best with the context, that in order to prevent that unity of the Son with the Father from being fruitless and unavailing, the power of that unity must be diffused into the whole body of the pious.  Hence, too, we infer that we are one with Christ, not because he transfuses his substance into us, but because by the power of his Spirit, he imparts to us his life and all the blessings which he has received from the Father.”

 Niesel’s thesis attempts to explain this, and all other instances where Calvin avoids “mixing,” by arguing that the guiding principle of Calvin’s thought is a Chalcedonian Christology in which the two natures are united but not confused.  My sense is that Calvin’s understanding of Chalcedon, and his interpretation of a wide range of theological and practical problems, were informed by a deep intuition about the radical ontological divide between finite and infinite realities.  No doubt that his vision of the God/world relation was a Christologically informed one, but one need not thereby agree with Niesel that all of Calvin’s theology was a consistent and rigorous working out of the logic of Chalcedon.

 See Wilson-Kastner (1979: 84): “In On the Unique Mediator Osiander spells out in more detail what he means by this participation in the divine nature.  He employs the notion of this presence of Christ in the soul as the ‘seed of God’ which renews us and is the source of our growth in the life of grace, yet is at the same time the perfect divine essence.  He does not mean by the seed of God a created reality but the presence of God acting as a principle of growth in us.  Thus he intends neither an habitus nor some natural divine element in the soul, but God within us.”

 For a helpful analysis of Calvin’s notion of “mystical union,” see Dennis Tamburello, Union with Christ: John Calvin and the Mysticism of St. Benard (1994).  Tamburello provides an Appendix containing references to Calvin’s favorite images and metaphors depicting the union of believers with Christ.  Within the Institutes, the most numerous references are to “engrafting” (insero or insitio), followed by “communion” (communio or communico), “fellowship” (societas), and “participation” (participes) (cf Tamburello, p. 90).

 On this pattern, see Zachman, (1993: 133).  Consider, by comparison, the soteriology developed by Kathryn Tanner in Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity.  While her picture of the Christian life bears striking similarity to Calvin’s, she takes pains to develop an account of inner-Trinitarian relations of gift-giving as a basis for the character of human sharing in the divine life.  She devotes more attention to developing her account of God’s inner-Trinitarian relation that does Calvin, but the resulting patterns are largely the same. 

 See, for example, Calvin’s Trinitarian theology of baptism at Institutes 4.15.6.  Baptism into the three-fold name of God is appropriate says Calvin, because in this we “clearly discern in the Father the cause, in the Son the matter, and in the Spirit the effect, of our purgation and our regeneration.”

 There may be parallels between my argument here and the argument made in behalf of Luther’s notion of justification by the Flemish school in Union With Christ: The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther.  Yet I will point out in chapter 5 that Luther and Calvin differ on how to figure the relation between infinite and finite realities as that problem is registered in Eucharistic debates.

 The Eucharistic debates will be considered more fully in chapter 5.  I mention them here only to the extent that they inform Calvin’s debate with Osiander on how we share in Christ’s righteousness.

 The popular suggestion that Calvin offered a “religion of transcendence” might be challenged at this point.  Calvin is not against mystical union with the divine, he is against descriptions of that union that either fail to mark it as a union of opposites (the sinful with the holy) or that fail to maintain the ontological divide between Creator and creature.  The radical otherness of God on Calvin’s picture obviously should not be correlated simply with “transcendence” as such.  For only the God who shares a different ontological plane from creation can be radically present to that creation.  Seeing the debate simply in terms of transcendence vs. immanence makes it sound as if it is a discussion of whether God’s relation to the world should be characterized as present/near or absent/distant.  The discussion is not about whether but how God is present to finite reality.  And “how” is God present according to Calvin?  Present in such a way as never to be mingled or confused with what is not God.  For it is God’s peculiar capacity to remain wholly and utterly the other-than-created even as the Father sustains and redeems creation through Christ and the Spirit.

 Osiander’s charge that “faith is Christ” is mistaken, says Calvin, because “I say that faith, which is only the instrument for receiving righteousness, is ignorantly confused with Christ, who is the material cause and at the same time the Author and Minister of this great benefit” (3.11.7).  Here Calvin makes the point by distinguishing between the instrumental and material causes of righteousness.  

 Zachman’s (1993) thesis regarding the centrality of “assurance” in Calvin’s thought is relevant here.  That thesis is as follows: Calvin and Luther “agree fundamentally that the foundation of the assurance of faith lies in the grace and mercy of God toward us in Jesus Christ crucified, revealed to us in the gospel.  The testimony of a good conscience confirms, but does not ground, this assurance of faith by attesting that our faith in Christ is sincere and not feigned.”  Yet both theologians leave open “the possibility that the relation between the two might in fact be reversed” (vii).  What makes such a reversal possible, according to Zachman, is a doctrine of election: “[T]he distinction both theologians make between the foundation and confirmation of assurance is inherently unstable, given their combination of the universal reconciliation in Christ offered to all in the gospel with the individual reconciliation of the believer in faith limited by divine election . . . Calvin did not seem to be aware of the tension inherent in making both Christ and election the fountain of every good for sinners” (246). 

 Yet the metaphorical resources Calvin utilized for expressing this vision of human life before God can be difficult to manage.  The convergence of the forensic metaphors (which hinge on a notion of non-possession) with union/sharing metaphors (which hinge on a kind of possession-by-partaking) can sometimes be dizzying.  On a theological plane, Calvin is clear enough why both sets of metaphors are required.  Without the forensic language of imputation one runs the risk of picturing the drama of salvation in terms of an infusion of divine grace and power into the lives of believers, turning the merciful verdict of the judge which is radical gift into a cooperative endeavor between judge and defendant that is less obviously a sheer gift.  And without the metaphors of mystical union and sharing in Christ, one runs the risk of replacing Christ’s saving significance with the saving power of human faith itself.  Only by picturing faith as the empty vessel in which humans receive the treasure of Christ can one avoid laying the burden of salvation upon the power and durability of faith as a human work.  This two-fold metaphorical trajectory at the heart of Calvin’s attempt to provide shape to the lives of his readers accounts for why some of Calvin’s claims sit awkwardly.  Otherwise, Calvin’s description of the relation between Christ and believers both in the (hyper-eccentric) language of believers “impersonating [sub aliena persona] “ Christ as well as in the (dangerously “mingling”) sense of Christ “pouring ” his power into us [vim eius in nos transfundat] would appear incongruous to say the least (3.11.23/CR II.552).

 I am aware that this point may sound like an endorsement of Niesel’s well known thesis that Calvin’s theology is a consistent application of Chalcedonian Christological principles to a variety of theological topics.  My view is that Niesel’s argument is overdrawn.  First, I am wary of identifying any “central ideas” or “governing principles” within Calvin’s theology.  This systematizing interest has been correctly criticized by much of Calvin scholarship over the past twenty or thirty years.  Second, while there is no systematic “center” to Calvin’s thought, no doubt there are a number of guiding themes.  I am suggesting that one of those themes is the Creator/creature distinction.  But I see Calvin’s commitment to this theme not as an abstract doctrinal point, but as a description of how deeply his theological claims and his cultural analysis were woven together.  Put differently, I would say that Calvin’s theology is – on one important level – a reworking of theological themes in a principled resistance to the dominant religious landscape of his day, a landscape that, according to Calvin, exaggerated the capacity of finite things to convey the divine presence.

 For a suggestive call for a move in this direction, see Serene Jones, Calvin and the Rhetoric of Piety (1995).  Apart from rhetorical concerns, see Zachman (1993), ch. 6 for an excellent summary of Calvin’s teaching about the nature and function of the conscience.

 This is one of the places where Potter-Engel’s work on “perspectivalism” in Calvin has been so important.  What I here call different doctrinal “spaces” is not the same but bears resemblance to Engel’s talk of “perspectives.”  The chief point here for Calvin interpretation is whether Calvin’s view of divine glory turns on a kind of necessity to human debasement.  Many seem to suggest that God’s increase is tied proportionately to the decrease of being human in a competitive calculus.  I see this as a mistaken reading that stems from failing to distinguish between the rhetorical aims in Calvin’s attempt to fashion a particular conscience in his readers and the broader framework of Calvin’s thought.  

 See Eire (1986: 212ff).

 Randall Zachman, The Assurance of Faith: Conscience in the thought of Martin Luther and John Calvin (1993).

 “In short, we are well-nigh overwhelmed by so great and so plenteous an outpouring of benefactions, by so many and mighty miracles discerned wherever one looks, that we never lack reason and occasion for praise and thanksgiving” (3.20.28).  “The reason why Paul enjoins us both to pray and to give thanks without ceasing is, of course, that he wishes all men to lift up their desires to God, with all possible constancy, at all times, in all places, and in all affairs and transactions, to expect all things from him, and give him praise for all things, since he offers us unfailing reasons to praise and pray” (ibid.).

 See Bouwsma (1988), especially ch. 2.

 “For as soon as God’s dread majesty comes to mind, we cannot but tremble and be driven far away by the recognition of our own unworthiness, until Christ comes forward as intermediary, to change the throne of dreadful glory into the throne of grace” (3.20.17).

 “ . . . it is fully evident that unless voice and song, if interposed in prayer, spring from deep feeling of heart, neither has any value or profit in the least with God.  But they arouse his wrath against us if they come only from the tip of the lips and from the throat, seeing that this is to abuse his most holy name and to hold his majesty in derision . . . Yet we do not here condemn speaking and singing but rather strongly commend them, provided they are associated with the heart’s affection . . . Moreover, since the glory of God ought, in a measure, to shine in the several parts of our bodies, it is especially fitting that the tongue has been assigned and destined for this task, both through singing and trough speaking.  For it was peculiarly created to tell and proclaim the praise of God” (3.20.31).  Here Calvin pictures congregational singing as the activity that most intensely expresses the meaning and dignity of human life more broadly.

 These terms occur frequently in accounts of Calvinism, but see Kelley (1981) and Compier (2001) for specific cases of the “ideology” and “propaganda” labels (respectively).

 See Zachman for an extended discussion of this tension in the theology of Calvin and Luther.  Calvin elaborates on this theme at 3.14.18, where he says that works ought not be seen as a help toward salvation but they can be looked to as a sign of God’s benevolence.  The question is still raised, if works can be a sign of God’s goodness, what keeps the absence of a good conscience from functioning as a sign of the absence of God’s mercy?  And if that is the case, then what has happened to the principle of believing in the merciful promises of God despite or in spite of the testimony of one’s guilty or wavering conscience?

 See 3.15.3-4 for a proliferation of the language of pollution, contamination, defilement, and uncleanness.

 See my comments below on Calvin’s use of the “pelagian” charge.

 Calvin’s soteriological discourse need not be read as an anti-metaphysical religious discourse.  It is certainly true that Calvin departs from scholastic thought insofar as some of the medievals continued the use Thomas Aquinas made of Aristotle’s metaphysics and construed grace as the inherence of a created form in the soul.  The transformation of life was rather the work of the Holy Spirit, and hence ought not be figured as a power inhering the soul.  Human lives, according to Calvin, just aren’t the kinds of things that could function as sites of divine power in that way.  The upshot of Calvin’s argument with Osiander was Calvin’s resistance to a metaphysics that blurs the ontological divide between Creator and creature by suggesting some kind of confusion or mingling (but not to metaphysical pictures of the drama of grace and salvation per se).  That Calvin wants to retain the language of “mystical union” to describe the relation between God and believers ought to signal that this is not simply a forensic and voluntarist picture of salvation.  Calvin’s theological aims were certainly not “academic.”  Thus it should not be thought that constructing an alternative metaphysic was an intentional goal.  Rather, I am arguing that the adoption of a different metaphysic was a part of his program of arguing for and imaginatively bringing into existence a Reformed identity that claimed to get Scripture right.

 Or possibly, “a heaven that can be bought and sold. [from promercalis]” “With the same confidence do they talk of a heaven for hire [coelum promercale], while they themselves meanwhile continue engrossed with the present hire [in praesenti mercede], after which they are always gaping.” - Calvin on the “thick headed monks” who are “intoxicated with ambition.” (Antidote to Trent, OC 7:472, English translation in Dillenberger).

 For example, “For we say that it [righteousness] is of such great value that it cannot be paid for by any good of ours.  Therefore, it can never be obtained except as a free gift” (3.16.4, written 1539).

 In a way, Davis emphasizes the obvious, namely, that theologians didn’t have a monopoly on language involving gifts and gift giving.  Rather, they did their theologizing with words well-worn from a range of customary usage.  Davis details the lives of a cross-section of folks who gave and received gifts in sixteenth century France – authors and patrons, patients and doctors, students and teachers, laborers and employers, French explorers and Native Americans, and parishioners and priests.  And she details the often unclear boundaries between social relations established in terms of payment, transaction, and exchange, and those established in relations of gift-giving.  When Davis finally turns – in the last chapter – to the issue of religious debates about gifts, the importance of social context becomes clear.  Religious language about “gifts” and “gift-giving” cannot be tightly cordoned off from the wider cultural usage of the same metaphorical complex, even if the gift of “grace” given by God to human beings might be quite different, say, than a gift of pins given by a wealthy patron to a serving girl.

 She notes Montaigne’s Essais (1588), where he says, “I’m living more than half by the favor of others and that’s a hard obligation”; or again, “I find nothing so costly as that which is given me, for then my will is mortgaged by a title of gratitude” (2000: 74).

 Atqui his pravis dogmatibus orbem imbuerunt Scholastici.  Sed illi dupliciter hic falluntur: et quod fidem apellant conscientiae certitudinem, in expectanda a Deo pro meritis remuneratione [later changed to mercede], et quod gratiam Dei non gratuitae iustitiae imputationem, sed spiritum ad studium sanctitatis adiuvantem interpretantur . . . Scholae in deterius semper aberrarunt, donec tandem praecipiti ruina devolutae sunt ad quendem pelagianismum. (OC 1:740; or 3.11.15 in 1559 edition).

 OC 7:448; See Dillenberger, p. 164.

 Zachman puts these two terms in their proper theological context, emphasizing participation with Christ and domestic metaphors of adoption by a loving father.  He also  sees the theological distinction functioning as a distinction between the “foundation” and the “goal” of our adoption: “By means of our participation in Christ (participatio Christi), we receive the twofold grace of Christ (duplex gratia Christi), justification and sanctification.  The grace of justification is the foundation and basis of our adoption by God; for God can only regard us as God’s children if God forgives us our sins and reckons us as righteous.  However, the grace of sanctification is the purpose and goal of our adoption, for God adopts us so that we might actually become God’s gratefully obedient children” (1993: 11).  This way of putting things shows nicely that the conformity of human lives and communities to God’s own life is not the precondition of salvation, yet it is the reason or end for which they have in fact been adopted.

 OC 7:476 (italics mine); See Dillenberger p. 197.  See 3.14.17 for an enumeration of the four-fold causality of salvation.  The claim is that “works” do not appear anywhere in this causality.  The efficient cause is the mercy of God the Father, the material cause is Christ and his righteousness acquired for our sake, the formal/instrumental cause is faith, and the final cause is the praise of God’s goodness.

 OC 7:477 (italics mine); See Dillenberger p. 198.

 Quomodo gratuitum cum operibus conveniet? (OC 1:742; or 3.11.19 in 1559).

 I would argue that Calvin’s scholastic opponents had a perfectly good answer to Calvin’s question.  They proposed a framework of covenant relations that configured the “reward” of eternal life merited by human works as congruent and not condign; that is, the meritorious value of human action is not inherent but instead derives wholly from the gratuitous divine ordination to treat them as such.  But note, this scholastic answer sees the range or scope of gift giving as capable of encompassing other modes of exchange within itself, or as eliciting these other modes.

 The phrase I have quoted is part of a question: Sed unde id, nisi quoniam quos in foedus gratiae assumpsit Dominus, eorum opera non excutit pro meritis, sed paterna benignitate osculator? (OC 1:792; or 3.17.15 in 1559).

 Dillenberger, p. 192.

 See 3.17.6 for Calvin’s preference for the domestic economy of adoption metaphors to the economy of labor relations.  This preference for a domestic metaphorical economy is emphasized with regard to the Lord’s Supper in Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude.  On this topic see 3.16.2 – “For if it is only a matter of men looking for reward when they serve God, and hiring or selling their labor to him, it is of little profit.  God wills to be freely worshiped, freely loved.  That worshiper, I say, he approves who, when all hope of receiving reward has been cut off, still ceases not to serve him.”  And see 3.18.2 on the use of “reward” in Scripture: “the Kingdom of Heaven is not servants’ wages but sons’ inheritance [Eph. 1:18], which only they who have been adopted as sons by the Lord shall enjoy [cf. Gal. 4:7], and that for no other reason than this adoption [cf. Eph. 1:5-6].”  

 Sed unde id, nisi quoniam quos in foedus gratiae assumpsit Dominus, eorum opera non excutit pro meritis, sed paterna benignitate osculator?  Quo non tantum intelligimus quod tradunt Scholastici, a gratia acceptante habere opera suum valorem.  Illi enim sentiunt, imparia alioqui opera ex legis pacto saluti comparandae, in aequalitatis tamen pretium Dei acceptione evehi.  Ego autem dico, ea, tum aliis transgressionibus, tum suis ipsorum maculis inquinata, non aliud valere nisi quod Dominus veniam utrisque indulget; quod ist, gratuitam homini iustitiam largiri (OC 1:792; see 3.17.15 in 1559).

 In the Antidote to Trent, Calvin argues against picturing eternal life as a reward for works, saying, “But while our inherent depravity renders every kind of work which proceeds from us vicious in the sight of God, the only thing left for our work is to recover the grace which they have not in themselves, by a gratuitous acceptance” (191 in Dillenberger).  This emphasis upon the covenant of divine acceptance shows a deep continuity with late medieval theology, and the emphasis upon human depravity resonates at least with the “modern Augustinian school” side of the nominalist camp.

 What Calvin claimed was that his Catholic opponents were “pelagian.”  His claims only stick, as I see it, if what counts as “pelagian” shifts from positions seen as failing to affirm divine prevenience and human incapacity to positions failing to invoke a particular conception of gift-relations as a way of affirming divine prevenience and human incapacity.  In spite of Calvin’s rhetoric, it seems possible to say that Calvin’s opponents emphasized the prevenience of divine grace, not by sharply distinguishing the economy of gifts from an “exchange” economy of payment, obligation, and merit – as Calvin wanted - but instead by taking up the exchange economy within the grand logic of grace.

 The general trend of the past century has been to locate some period in which a “market” economy eclipsed older “gift” economies.  Davis joins a growing tide of scholars in questioning this line of interpretation.  Against the assumption that economies of relations regulated by “gifts” and those regulated by “the market” or “sales” are mutually exclusive and inversely proportional, Davis prefers instead to see the two economies of relating as metaphorical worlds that cluster, interact, and overlap.  I suggest that Calvin’s Catholic opponents worked out a theology of grace made plausible by this broader cultural logic: gift-relations and wage-relations can flow in the same circuit.

     But conventional gift practices in early modern Europe were not without problems.  Davis also emphasizes that Calvin’s culture was suffocating in obligations.  Perhaps it was this darker aspect of social life that dominated Calvin’s theological imagination.  Perhaps Calvin’s attempts to keep gift-circuits distinct from economies of reciprocity and exchange should be situated within larger cultural worries about the messy boundaries between “gifts” and “exchange’” as well as the psychological burden of reciprocity and indebtedness that almost always characterized the receiving of gifts.

 On this material, see Stevenson (1999).

 In the Genesis commentary, Calvin explains the logic of Abel’s worship in a way that structurally parallels the faith or person/work distinction within justification.  But with Abel, Calvin points to the priority of the worshiper to the worship.  That is, what makes worship acceptable to God is not anything about the character of the worshiping acts themselves, but the identity of the worshiper herself.  This logic lies behind Book III’s attempt to refashion human nature into those who render God praise.  “God will regard no works with favor except those the doer of which is already previously accepted and approved by him . . . in the judgment of God, no respect is had to works until man is received into favor . . . since God never so regenerates his people in this world, that they can worship him perfectly; no work of man can possibly be acceptable without expiation” (1948: 194-5).

 See Kathryn Tanner’s comments – in Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity (2001: 80) - regarding how to guard a theology that emphasizes divine giving against an irresponsible and smug social ethic.  Given the prevalence of Weber’s thesis in the popular imagination, linking Calvinism and capitalism, it is necessary to point out the kind of social ethic accompanying Calvin’s theology of gifts.

 Calvin’s analysis of what counts as “indifferent” differs from Luther.  See Zachman (1993: 74ff, 110, 122-3, and 232-243).

 Especially helpful here is Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Vol. 2 (1978).