The Divided Mediator
Clearly,
Calvin wishes to focus on the one person of the Mediator rather than the two
natures that constitute him; but despite this intention, he has a tendency not
only to distinguish between Christ’s two natures, but also to isolate them from
one another. In doing so, Calvin balances precariously over a trap that he
thinks he avoids completely: he posits a Nestorian division with the persons of
Christ (Calvin denies that his Christology if Nestorian; see Calvin, Institutes,
2:14:4, 486). According to Roger Helland, such a near-Nestorian view
‘attributes [Christ’s] supernatural miracles, knowledge and power to his deity,
while attributing his tiredness, temptations, trials, thirst, and emotions to
his humanity’, with the danger that Christ is presented as ‘some sort of
schizophrenic divine-man who functions back and forth between his two natures’
(R. Helland, ‘The Hypostatic Union: How Did Jesus Function?’, Evangelical
Quarterly 65 [1993], 311-327 [325-326]). This leads us to identify two
problems with Calvin’s Christology. First, Calvin makes too sharp a distinction
between Christ’s two natures so that it is impossible to see how they actually
related; and secondly, Christ’s divine nature is emphasised to such an extent
that his human nature is rendered superficial. Both these problems are
exacerbated by Calvin’s use of the communicatio idiomatum, which
ironically he employs to overcome these problems, and stem from his use of the
body-soul simile. . . . Calvin seems not to address the matter of how the two natures
truly related in Christ and so risks affirming a division in the Mediator. If
the Mediator is divided, if his humanity and his divinity are so distinct that
there is no positive relation between them, then we have good cause to doubt
the effectiveness of his work of atonement. Against the orthodox understanding
of the Son suffering death as a man, we would instead have the Son suffering
death in his humanity whilst his divinity lives on – and this raises the
question of how truly he was united to his humanity at the start. To compensate
for his strong emphasis on the distinction between Christ’s two natures, Calvin
employs the communicatio idiomatum; but this does not resolve the
matter, for ‘the things that [Christ] carried out in his human nature are
transferred improperly, although not without reason, to his divinity”
(Calvin, Institutes, 2:14:2, 484, emphasis mine). The communicatio
for Calvin effectively is a conceptual aid to affirm the relation between the
two distinct natures rather than an attempt to clarify that relation. There is,
however, no actual communicatio, and no sense, as Bruce McCormack
suggests, that a rhetorical understanding of the communicatio is
possible precisely due to an actual communicatio (McCormack, For Us
and Our Salvation, 8-9), that is, the Incarnation of the Word. . . . This
in turn impacts the genuineness of Christ’s humanity. If the notion of a
divided Mediator raises the possibility that the Son suffers death in his
humanity whilst his divinity lives on, as we have said, then there is always a
docetic suggestion that the Son’s humanity is little more than a garment to be
discarded upon death. Insofar as the Son of God assumes humanity to execute
God’s will in created space and time, Christ’s flesh is the clothing in which
the divine will is dressed and so impotent apart from the divinity that wears
it. Calvin not only divides Christ’s activity between what he does as a man and
what he does as divine, but presents the former, human action as somewhat
incidental for achieving salvation:
our
Lord came forth as true man and took the person and the name of Adam in order
to take Adam’s place in obeying the Father, to present our flesh as the price
of satisfaction to God’s righteous judgment, and, in the same flesh, to pay the
penalty that we deserved. In short, since neither as God alone could he feel
death, nor as man alone could he overcome it, he coupled human nature with
divine that to atone for sin he might submit the weakness of the one to death;
and that, wrestling with death by the power of the other nature, he
might win victory for us. (Calvin, Institutes, 2:12:3, 466, emphasis
mine)
The
problem is that this presents Christ as more than human, a tertium quid; he has a divine component from which to
draw resources, something that no other human can claim. Whilst it is true that
Jesus is the Son of God, the word made flesh, this means neither that he has
some intrinsic power to utilise to achieve God’s purposes for the world, nor
that somehow the Word causes the actions of the humanity he assumes. To affirm
the incarnation is to say no more than the Son of God took humanity to himself
and now lives as a man. Although Jesus of Nazareth is unique insofar as no
other human can claim truthfully to be the Word made flesh, there is no
ontological difference between him and any other human. This means that when he
was tempted to disobey his father and so to refuse his calling, Jesus resisted
not because of some inner faculty but through the empowerment of the Holy
Spirit. Indeed, Jesus’s faithfulness to God fundamentally is something prompted
and enabled by the Spirit, who himself is the pledge of God’s faithfulness to
the whole of his creation through his action in Christ. Calvin’s pneumatology,
so clearly present when he discussed the human relation to God through Christ
(See, for example, Calvin, Institutes, 3:1:1, 537-538), is curiously
absent from the constitution of the person of Christ. (Terry J. Wright, Providence
Made Flesh: Divine Presence as a Framework for a Theology of Providence
[Paternoster Theological Monographs; Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf and Stock, 2009], 203,
205, 206-7)
