Tuesday, May 23, 2023

Kilian McDonnell on Calvin's Nestorian Tendencies

Commenting on Calvin's disagreements with Luther on the nature of the Eucharist, Kilian McDonnell noted that:  


There is a Nestorian tendency in Calvin as in Zwingli, though more pronounced in the latter. Calvin gave a Nestorian emphasis to his Christology in his reaction against Luther and also because of his desire to maintain the essential distinction of the two natures and those properties special to each nature. Luther had taken the unity of the person of Christ and proceeded through the use of communication of idioms to extend the ubiquity of the divine person to the human nature of Christ. Calvin took the immutability and incommunicability of the divinity and proceeded to rather different Christological conclusions. In the heart of controversy lines were drawn that might not otherwise have been drawn, and formulas were set up which bear the imprint of the battle front. This must be kept in mind when judging the Christological formulations of Calvin, especially his classical text, which came to be known as the Extra Calvinisticum: “Even if the Word in his immeasurable essence is united with the nature of man into one person, we do not have to imagine that he was confined therein. Here is something marvelous: the Son of God descended from heaven in such a way that, without leaving heaven, he willed to be born in the virgin’s womb, to go about the earth, and to hang upon the cross; yet he continuously filled the world even as he had done from the beginning.” (Inst., II, 13, 4) The Christological dialectic is clearly stated within a Platonic framework: the Godhead uncommitted in the Incarnation remains the Godhead uncommitted; the Godhead unmixed, present everywhere, is the Godhead undivided, present in his humanity.

 

. . .

 

We can see this tendency to separate the two natures in Calvin’s doctrine of the redemptive value of the Passion. He declared that the Passion of Christ was, in itself, of no particular value or efficacy; what value the Passion had was bestowed upon it by the divine will when it accepted the Passion as sufficient. It was this acceptance which gave the Passion its redemptive value. “Apart from God’s pleasure Christ could not merit anything; but did so because he had been appointed to appease God’s wrath with his sacrifice, and to blot out our transgressions with his obedience. To sum up: inasmuch as Christ’s merit depends upon God’s grace alone, which ordained this manner of salvation for us, it is just as properly opposed to all human righteousness as God’s grace is.” (Inst., II, 17, 1) The accent on the will of God and on the acceptation divina makes one wonder to what degree Calvin is here indebted to the nominalist tradition.

 

The doctrine of the ontological union of the two natures would therefore be suspect in Calvin’s mind as a mixing of the natures, although a union of natures is not necessarily a mixing and can be achieved without losing the integrity of either nature. Calvin’s thought processes concentrated rather on the indivisible unity of the person of Christ. By reason of the indivisible unity of the person of Christ one attributes to human nature what belongs to the divine nature, and vice versa. It should be note that Calvin speaks of an omnipresence of God through his Godhead or divinity, but he also speaks of the omnipresence of the person of the God-mean, the Mediator: “Although Christ, who is God and man, mediator between God and man, whole and undivided as he is, fills heaven and earth, but with respect to his flesh, he is only in heaven.” (CR 9:246) For Calvin, the communication of idioms is not to be found in the ontological union of two integral natures, but exclusively in the office of Christ as the Mediator: “Insofar as he is God, he cannot increase in anything, and does all things for his own sake; nothing is hidden from him; he does all things according to the decision of his will, and can be neither seen nor handled. Yet he does not ascribe these qualities solely to his human nature, but takes upon himself as being in harmony with the person of the Mediator.” (Inst., II, 14, 2)

 

Calvin gives a further restriction. He considers the communication of idioms in the Mediator only in relationship to the saving work of that Mediator: “Until he comes forth as judge of the world, Christ will therefore reign, joining us to the Father as the measure of our weakness permits. But when as partakers in heavenly glory we shall see God as he is, Christ, having then discharged the office of Mediator, will cease to be the ambassador of his Father, and will be satisfied with that glory which he enjoyed before the creation of the world . . . He [Christ] then returns the lordship to his Father so that—far from diminishing his own majesty—it may shine all the more brightly. Then, also, God shall cease to be the Head of Christ, for Christ’s own deity will shine of itself, though as yet it is covered by a veil.” (ibid., 14, 3) (Kilian McDonnell, John Calvin, the Church and the Eucharist [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967], 213-14, 215-17)

 

Blog Archive