Not As The Scribes

N.B. As cute as the title may be, it is a bit of an overstatement. Truth be told, I very much admire the theology of Jean Calvin. And for what it’s worth, I do not doubt that Nestorius’ intentions were noble.

The Christology of Jean Calvin (1509-64)

Although Calvin never formulated a full orbed treatment of Christology, the heart of his view can be deduced from several pertinent sections of his Institutes. Therein, one finds a Calvin who was no doubt committed to the Chalcedonian formula of 451. Calvin did after all consider Chalcedon among one of the “early councils” whose dogmatic conclusions set forth, in his opinion, nothing less than a “pure and genuine exposition of Scripture.” It is not surprising then that Calvin saw fit to denounce Christologies of a Nestorian sort that erroneously sought to “ … pull apart rather than distinguish the natures of Christ.”

Earnest as he was, Calvin himself was not immune to mishandling the formula of Chalcedon. As my professor Bruce McCormack has often put it, Calvin too often appeared much more interested in the ‘without confusion, without change’ of the formula than he was in the ‘without division, without separation.’ Adamantly opposed to the Eutychian tendencies he sensed in his Lutheran interlocutors, Calvin fervently declared that Christ’s human and divine natures (though they inhered in the same Person) were utterly separate. It was madness, thought Calvin, to suppose that “wherever Christ’s divinity is, there also is his flesh, which cannot be separated from it.” In fact, a close reading of Calvin’s theology reveals that his insistence on keeping Christ’s natures separate precluded him from properly explicating the reality of the hypostatic union. Thus, although he would never have understood himself in such terms, Calvin himself was an unfortunate exponent of the same Nestorian tendencies he was at pains to reprove.

Calvin’s ascribing certain events in Christ’s life to the divine nature and others to the human nature evinces that his theology was indeed tinged with Nestorian tendencies. For our purposes, the most significant instance of Calvin’s short-sighted view towards Christ’s human nature is in his treatment of Jesus’ despairing cry, “My God, my God, why hast though forsaken me?” Now, Calvin certainly understood the gravity of Jesus dereliction; he emphasized that Jesus’ “words clearly were drawn forth from anguish deep within his heart.” Note well, however, that for Calvin Jesus’ lament was drawn forth only from a human heart. It was because Jesus Christ in his human nature “bore the weight of divine severity … and experienced all the signs of a wrathful avenging God” that he issued his cry of terror in God-abandonment.

Was Calvin wrong to ascribe this experience to Christ’s human nature? Certainly not. He erred, however, by neglecting to attribute Jesus’ experience of death in God-abandonment to the Logos as well. To be sure, Calvin’s refusal to attribute such an experience to the Logos was not arbitrary; his aim was to protect the doctrine of divine immutability. In Calvin’s inherited schema, attributing death in God-abandonment to the Logos would entail the splintering of God’s being. To make the Logos the subject of Jesus cry of dereliction would imply an inter-trinitarian fissure between the Father and the Son that Calvin thought impossible.

Calvin’s desire to maintain a biblical account of God’s triunity was understandable. To envisage Jesus’ death in terms of a respite in unity of the Father and the Son (So Moltmann) would have been (and still is!) logically impossible. But unfortunately, Calvin’s commitment to God’s immutability engendered an unbalanced treatment of Christ’s divine-human nature. In the very moment when we most needed Jesus to be God, he apparently was not. And as I shall show in a later post, it precluded him from understanding the atonement in all of its wonder and glory.