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Anthropology as a Dynamic Mediatorial Synergism? Exploring Calvin’s Account of Prelapsarian Participation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 March 2025
Abstract
The present article seeks to further the distinctive participatory picture of Calvin through an engagement with the prelapsarian contours of his anthropology and their oft-overlooked importance for the theme of participation that is uniquely found in his thought. The interpretive argument that emerges is that Calvin’s prelapsarian understanding of participation not only necessitated mediation by Christ in a (perhaps unexpectedly) dynamic way but was also synergistic in shape (especially when considered “preceptively” as opposed to “decretively”). Calvin’s postlapsarian understanding of participation will be shown to have adaptively retained its originally dynamic mediatorial aspects through a pivotal shift towards monergism that was brought about by humanity’s fall into sin. Taken together, it will be concluded that Calvin’s prelapsarian assumptions surrounding participation not only undergirded and bolstered the monergistic postlapsarian participatory account of salvation that he is more typically known for but also provides a previously unconsidered angle deserving of conversation.
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- © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the President and Fellows of Harvard College
Footnotes
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The present article is a thoroughly updated and revised adaptation of portions from Clement Yung Wen, “The Monergistic Theme of Participation in the Anthropological Soteriology of John Calvin: A Dialogue with Maximus the Confessor” (MCS thesis, Regent College, 2011) 1–7, 12–17, 79–135. I thank Ross Hastings and Julie Canlis for their guidance and supervision.
References
1 The relevant literature will be highlighted as we proceed. References to the English translation of the 1559 edition of John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (ed. John T. McNeill; trans. Ford Lewis Battles; 2 vols.; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960) will take the form of book.chapter.section either in the main body of the text, parenthetically in the main body of the text, or with the prefixed abbreviation of Inst. within the footnotes. Unless otherwise noted, English translations of Calvin’s Commentaries are from the Calvin Translation Society (ed. John King et al.; 22 vols.; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1981). When relevant, references to Latin editions of Calvin’s works will be made: Joannis Calvini Opera Selecta (ed. Peter Barth and Wilhelm Niesel; Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1926), hereafter OS; Johannis Calvini opera quae supersunt omnia, Corpus Reformatorum (ed. G. Baum et al.; Brunsvigae: apud C. A. Schwetschke et filium, 1863–1900), hereafter CR.
2 For example, Elena Vishnevskaya, “Divinization as Perichoretic Embrace in Maximus the Confessor,” in Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions (ed. Michael J. Christensen and Jeffrey A. Wittung; Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007) 132–45.
3 See Roger E. Olson, “Deification in Contemporary Theology,” ThTo 64 (2007) 186–200.
4 See John Milbank, “Alternative Protestantism: Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition,” in Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition: Creation, Covenant, and Participation (ed. James K. A. Smith and James H. Olthius; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005) 25–41, esp. 32–37.
5 For example, Alexandre Ganoczy, The Young Calvin (trans. David Foxgrover and Wade Provo; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1987) 187; Alister McGrath, A Life of John Calvin: A Study in the Shaping of Western Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1990) 149; Wilhelm Niesel, The Theology of John Calvin (trans. Harold Knight; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1956) 112; and François Wendel, Calvin: Origins and Development of His Religious Thought (trans. Philip Mairet; New York: Harper and Row, 1963) 151.
6 See J. Todd Billings, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) 14–15, 53–54; Julie Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder: A Spiritual Theology of Ascent and Ascension (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010) 12. On “theme” vs. “doctrine,” Richard A. Muller observed that Calvin would “object to the notion of ‘Calvin’s doctrine’ of anything,” for “what Calvin intended to teach was the church’s doctrine, not his own” (The Unaccommodated Calvin: Studies in the Foundation of a Theological Tradition [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000] 7). Gösta Hallonsten’s observation that the “theme” of divinization is “omnipresent” in all Christian theologies due to its affinity with biblical motifs such as adoption, filiation, union with God, union with Christ, and the “blessed inversion,” causes him to reserve the term “doctrine” for the Eastern tradition’s “comprehensive vision” of the economy of salvation, which employs an anthropological distinction between “image” and “likeness” for the purpose of synergistic movement from one to the other (“Theosis in Recent Research: A Renewal of Interest and a Need for Clarity,” in Partakers of the Divine Nature [ed. Christensen and Wittung], 281–93, esp. 283, 287).
7 Billings, Calvin, 15.
8 Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder, 12.
9 See especially Bruce L. McCormack, “Participation in God, Yes; Deification, No: Two Modern Protestant Responses to an Ancient Question,” in Denkwürdiges Geheimnis—Beiträge zur Gotteslehre: Festschrift für Eberhard Jüngel zum 70. Geburtstag (ed. Ingolf U. Dalferth, Johannes Fischer, and Hans-Peter Grosshans; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004) 347–74.
10 Calvin’s prelapsarian voluntarism has often been touched upon (e.g., Alrick George Headley, The Nature of the Will in the Writings of Calvin and Arminius: A Comparative Study [Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2017] 21–38, 96; Dewey J. Hoitenga, Jr., John Calvin and the Will: A Critique and Corrective [Grand Rapids: Baker, 1997] 63–65; Arnold Huijgen, “John Calvin’s Trinitarian Theological Anthropology Reconsidered,” in T&T Clark Handbook of Theological Anthropology [ed. Mary Ann Hinsdale and Stephen Okey; London: T&T Clark, 2021] 193–204, at 199), but not often emphatically or tied to the word “synergism,” especially amidst the participation discussion. Though Billings cites Inst. 2.3.7 to say that “Calvin does not accept the language of ‘cooperative grace’ as used in medieval scholasticism” due to “its possible misleading connotations” (“John Calvin: United to God through Christ,” in Partakers of the Divine Nature [ed. Christensen and Wittung], 200–218, at 214 n. 23), this is only applicable to postlapsarian participation.
11 While others might be legitimately concerned about anachronistic semantic distortion here, my ecumenically constructive aims prevent me from being overly concerned about this.
12 See John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes (New York: Fordham University Press, 1979) 164; A. N. Williams, The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 133.
13 See Roger E. Olson, The Story of Christian Theology: Twenty Centuries of Tradition and Reform (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press) 255–56.
14 Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology (3rd ed.; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013) 389, (italics in original).
15 See Charles Partee, The Theology of John Calvin (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox) 176.
16 One of my anonymous reviewers proposed an interesting line of inquiry that I am unable to pursue here but that is worthy of further development, namely, that rereading Calvin through the perspective of sixteenth-century visual culture may uncover new insights with regard to how Calvin believed “images” functioned, thereby bringing about implications for how Calvin understood “image” when applied to humanity and Christ. Particularly important here is the textual culture brought about by printing which linked the notion of “image” with that of “engraved” or “imprinted” “marks” (notae) and how such influences both “perception” (notitia, cognitio) of God and of ourselves. On this, see the pioneering work of Lee Palmer Wandel (“John Calvin and Michel de Montaigne on the Eye,” in Early Modern Eyes [ed. Walter S. Melion and Lee Palmer Wandel; Leiden: Brill, 2010] 135–55; eadem, “Incarnation, Image, and Sign: John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion & Late Medieval Visual Culture,” in Image and Incarnation: The Early Modern Doctrine of the Pictorial Image [ed. Walter S. Melion and Lee Palmer Wandel; Leiden: Brill, 2015] 187–202), and AnnMarie M. Bridges (“ ‘In the Flesh a Mirror of Spiritual Blessings’: Calvin’s Defence of the Lord’s Supper as a Visual Accommodation,” in Quid est sacramentum? Visual Representation of Sacred Mysteries in Early Modern Europe, 1400–1700 [ed. Walter S. Melion, Elizabeth Carson Paston, and Lee Palmer Wandel; Leiden: Brill, 2020] 105–24; eadem, “Blindness, Imagination, Perception: Calvin’s 1559 Institutes and Early Modern Visual Instability” [PhD diss., Harvard University, 2020]). The question posed is whether this reinterpretation of Calvin restructures the debate surrounding participation away from the classical categories of synergism and monergism. While I think Wandel and Bridges offer seeds towards a compelling rereading of Calvin, I am not yet convinced that their new reading requires a supplanting of the synergism/monergism lens. I look forward, however, to how this new line of inquiry might yield new insights regarding how “participation” is to be more saliently linked to “perception” in Calvin’s thought. A related proposal that may help with this clarifying task is Calvin’s reliance upon Augustine’s theory of signs and whether such has implications for his theme of participation. While space limitations also prevent exploration of this here, a helpful starting point is Michelle Chaplin Sanchez, Calvin and the Resignification of the World: Creation, Incarnation, and the Problem of Political Theology in the 1559 Institutes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
17 Philip Walker Butin, Revelation, Redemption, and Response: Calvin’s Trinitarian Understanding of the Divine-Human Relationship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Julie Canlis uses the phrase “theologian par excellence of the Trinity” in “Calvin, Osiander and Participation in God,” IJST 6 (2004) 169–84, at 177. Billings cites Butin’s work in “John Calvin: United,” 212 n. 2. Examples of the dialectical view are cited in n. 5 above.
18 See Butin, Revelation, 15–19.
19 Ibid., 18.
20 See ibid., 22–23.
21 Critiques include Mark A. Garcia, Life in Christ: Union with Christ and Twofold Grace in Calvin’s Theology (Colorado Springs: Paternoster, 2008) 25–26, 153 n. 13; John McClean, “Perichoresis, Theosis, and Union with Christ in the Thought of John Calvin,” RTR 68 (2009) 130–41; Bruce L. McCormack, “Union with Christ in Calvin’s Theology: Grounds for Divinization Theory?” in Tributes to John Calvin: A Celebration of His Quincentenary (ed. David W. Hall; Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2010) 504–29; Partee, Theology, 39–40.
22 Butin, Revelation, 68.
23 In terms of (1A), see for example Carl Mosser, “The Greatest Possible Blessing: Calvin and Deification,” SJT 55 (2002) 36–57, where at 46, he writes that “there is a communication of properties between Christ’s divinity and his humanity. . . . Christ unites believers to God because in his person God and humanity are already united.” Billings similarly writes that “full humanity must not be thought of as essentially independent or autonomous from divinity, but the two must be thought together in a manner of interpenetration” (italics in original) (“John Calvin: United,” 202); Billings reflects (1B) when he writes that “just as the communication of idioms for Calvin is applied to the person of Christ in concreto, so also believers participate in the person of Christ in concreto” (ibid., 207). In Billings’s Calvin: “deification does not, for Calvin, involve a leakage of divine attributes into human attributes” and a distinction is made “between ‘communicable’ and ‘incommunicable’ attributes” (55). Nevertheless, contra Calvin, Billings’s employment of “interpenetration” fits abstract rather than concrete understandings of the communicatio.
24 See McClean, “Perichoresis,” 130–41; McCormack, “Union with Christ,” 513 n. 17, 515 n. 25, 516; Jonathan Slater, “Salvation as Participation in the Humanity of the Mediator in Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion: A Reply to Carl Mosser,” SJT 58 (2005) 39–58; see also n. 101 below.
25 McCormack, “Union with Christ,” 519–20 n. 34.
26 This helps explain McCormack’s preoccupation with the postlapsarian necessity of forensic justification in Calvin yet without fully capturing the relational (not only forensic) elements of adoption. Since, for Calvin, sonship is a prelapsarian aspect of “imaging God,” it is actually more primal and thus needs to preface Calvin’s account of postlapsarian participation (see McCormack, “Union with Christ,” 516–21).
27 See n. 10 above.
28 Canlis points out that one of the “common interpretive extremes” concerning Calvin’s anthropology is that God’s “image” is “endowed” to humanity without involving humanity’s participation in Christ (Calvin’s Ladder, 77–81). Canlis’s example is Jelle Faber, “Imago Dei in Calvin: Calvin’s Doctrine of Man as the Image of God by Virtue of Creation,” in Essays in Reformed Doctrine (Neerlandia, AB: Inheritance, 1990) 227–50. More recently, Yaroslav Viazovski prioritized the substantial over the relational: “Calvin’s doctrine of the image of God does contain a relational element but it is not primary in and exhaustive of the image of God. Relation is rather the natural outcome of the primary element of the image of God (reason and will). For Calvin, man is man even without this relation with God because his humanity is constituted by the faculties of the human soul” (Image and Hope: John Calvin and Karl Barth on Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting [Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2015] 19–20). Meanwhile, Mary Potter Engel argues that Calvin’s anthropology is viewable as “dynamic” from the “absolute perspective of God as creator” but “constitutive” (i.e., static or substantial) from the “relative perspective of humankind” (John Calvin’s Perspectival Anthropology [Atlanta: Scholar’s Press, 1988] 53–54 [italics in original]). Engel comments that “Calvin simply assumes the coexistence of these contradictory yet complementary views of humankind without arguing for their coherence” (ibid., 23). Otherwise, Yosep Kim concludes “it would be difficult to derive a systematic and determinative definition of the ‘image of God’ from Calvin’s anthropological discussion” (The Identity and the Life of the Church: John Calvin’s Ecclesiology in the Perspective of His Anthropology [Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2014] 23). While Faber is too “static” for not adequately incorporating the relational element, Viazovski’s “staticness” is in his reversal of priorities between the relational and substantial, Engel’s view lacks necessary integration, and Kim’s view is evasive. Ultimately, though indeed true that the other “common interpretive extreme” of a “dynamic” relationship-only approach (e.g., T. F. Torrance’s Calvin’s Doctrine of Man [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1957]) does not tell the full story, the relational dynamism of the divine image should be considered primary over the substantial in a way that does not negate the substantial but instead incorporates it. As Canlis puts it: “For Calvin, participating in God’s gifts does not cut off the possibility of these gifts truly becoming our own, in our nature; but it is the only ground for them” (Calvin’s Ladder, 80).
29 Battles’s translation of “Scriptura nihil aliud ei tribuit quam quod creatus esset ad imaginem Deia: quo scilicet insinuat, non propriis bonisb sed Dei participatione fuisse beatum” (OS 3:241–42).
30 Partee, Theology, 87.
31 Battles’s translation of “Quanvis ab omni labe integer stetisset homo, humilior tamen erat eius conditio quam ut sine Mediatorea ad Deum penetraret” (OS 3:437–38).
32 See John Calvin, “How Christ is the Mediator: A Response to the Polish Brethren to Refute Stancaro’s Error” (trans. Joseph N. Tylenda [CR 9:333–42]), in Joseph N. Tylenda, “Christ the Mediator: Calvin versus Stancaro,” CTJ 8 (1973) 11–16 (hereafter “Stancaro I”), at 12–13.
33 Battles’s translation of “Et proinde quicquid excellentiae insculptum ipsi Adae fuit, inde manasse quod per unigenitum filium ad opificis sui gloriam accederet” (OS 3:444).
34 Inst. 2.12.6 (“speculo” [OS 3:444]).
35 See Torrance, Calvin’s Doctrine of Man, 42; Comm. Gen. 9:6.
36 Calvin, “Stancaro I,” 12.
37 Comm. 1 Tim. 6:16 (“sed vitam ab ipso mutuari” [CR 52:331]); see also John Calvin, “The Controversy on Christ the Mediator: A Response to the Polish Nobles and to Francesco Stancaro of Mantua” (trans. Joseph N. Tylenda [CR 9:345-58]), in Joseph N. Tylenda, “The Controversy on Christ the Mediator: Calvin’s Second Reply to Stancaro,” CTJ 8 (1973) 146–57 (hereafter “Stancaro II”), at 147.
38 See Comm. Gen. 2:9. This “sacramental” symbol in mind, Bernard Cottret writes that Calvin viewed the fall as “a form of excommunication” (Calvin: A Biography [trans. M. Wallace McDonald; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000] 308). Canlis adds: “When Adam broke communion with God, the tree could no longer remind Adam that he was depending ‘wholly upon the Son of God’ and thus became meaningless” (Calvin’s Ladder, 85). One other connection that can be pursued further is how such a prelapsarian sacramental symbol is to be related to the postlapsarian Lord’s Supper, particularly as related to Calvin’s employment of Augustine’s theory of “signs.”
39 See B. A. Gerrish, “The Mirror of God’s Goodness: Man in the Theology of Calvin,” CTQ 45 (1981) 211–22, at 12; Torrance, Calvin’s Doctrine of Man, 51.
40 See Comm Heb. 11:3; B. A. Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993) 43; idem, “The Mirror,” 215.
41 Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude, 41; idem, “The Mirror,” 212.
42 See Torrance, Calvin’s Doctrine of Man, 51, 71 n. 6.
43 Jason Van Vliet has recovered the important insight that sonship played a definitive role in Calvin’s understanding of the divine image (Children of God: The Imago Dei in John Calvin and His Context [Reformed Historical Theology 11; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2009]); idem, “ ‘As a Son to his Father’: An Overlooked Aspect of the Imago Dei in Calvin,” in Calvinus sacrarum literarum interpres: Papers of the International Congress on Calvin Research (ed. Herman J. Selderhuis; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2008) 108–8l. Calvin himself often set sonship over against servitude (e.g., Inst. 3.2.12; 3.2.27; 3.19.5).
44 See Van Vliet, “As a Son,” 115.
45 See John King, translator’s preface to Comm. Gen., 18.
46 Comm. Rom. 8:15 (1540) (“spiritu adoptionis” [CR 49:148]); see also Comm. Gal. 4:6 (1548); Comm. Heb. 10:29 (1551); Comm. Jas. 1:25 (1551); Comm. 1 Jn. 3:1 (1551).
47 Howard Griffith, “ ‘The First Title of the Spirit’: Adoption in Calvin’s Soteriology,” EvQ 73:2 (2001) 135–53.
48 If Randall C. Zachman is correct that “once future candidates for ministry have been taught and confirmed in godly doctrine as summarized in the Institutes, Calvin turns them to his expressions of Scripture in his commentaries,” then this hermeneutical step is warranted (John Calvin as Teacher, Pastor, and Theologian: The Shape of His Writings and Thought [Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006] 103).
49 Comm. Rom. 8:29 (italics in original) (“exemplar” [CR 49:160]).
50 Comm. Col. 3:10 (italics in original).
51 Comm. 1 Jn. 4:17 (italics in original) (“referamus” [CR 55:357]).
52 Comm. Acts 17:28 (“referunt” [CR 48:418]).
53 Comm. Jn. 17:3; other examples: Comm. 2 Cor. 3:18 (1548); Comm. Heb. 6:4 (1551); Comm. Jas. 1:18, 1:25 (1551); Comm. 1 Pt. 1:14 (1551); Comm. 1 Jn. 3:1–2 (1551); Comm. Acts 20:21 (1552); Comm. Ex. 4:22 (1563); Comm. Deut. 32:6 (1563); Comm. Mt. 3:2 (1563).
54 Comm. 1 Jn. 4:17 (“referimus” [CR 55:357]).
55 Comm. Gen. 1:27.
56 Comm. Gen. 5:1 (“referat” [CR 23:105]).
57 Comm. Ps. 33:12.
58 Heiko A. Oberman, “The Pursuit of Happiness: Calvin Between Humanism and Reformation,” in Humanity and Divinity in Renaissance and Reformation (ed. John W. O’Malley, Thomas M. Izbicki, and Gerald Christianson; Leiden: Brill, 1993) 251–83, at 271–72 (italics in original); Comm. Gen. 2:7 (CR 23:35), 2:18; Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder, 81.
59 Inst. 1.15.6 (“cum Deo coniunctum” [OS 3:183]).
60 Comm. Gen. 1:26.
61 Ibid.
62 For example, Andrew Louth, “The Place of Theosis in Orthodox Theology,” in Partakers of the Divine Nature (ed. Christensen and Wittung), 32–44.
63 See also Comm. Gen. 1:26.
64 See Oberman, “Pursuit of Happiness,” 271–72; “ ‘image/likeness’ towards ‘image/likeness’ ” is my own constructive adaptation of Oberman.
65 See n. 28 above.
66 Comm. 1 Jn. 3:6.
67 See Oberman, “Pursuit of Happiness,” 271–72.
68 See ibid., 268–72; Comm. Gen. 2:7.
69 See Inst. 1.15.1–8; Calvin only pits grace against nature in the postlapsarian condition (e.g., Comm. Gen. 2:9, 2:16, 3:19; Comm. Ps. 33:12; Comm. Jer. 32:40; Comm. Ezk. 11:19–20; Comm. Lk. 2:22; Comm. Jn. 3:6; Comm. Acts. 13:48).
70 Comm. Gen. 3:1.
71 See also Comm. Ps. 104:29.
72 Inst. 2.6.1 (“magnificum hoc theatrum” [OS 3:320]); see also 1.5.8; 1.16.2.
73 Canlis maintains Calvin understood creation to be “the sphere of koinonia” (Calvin’s Ladder, 54).
74 Comm. Gen. 3:1; see also 2:2.
75 Canlis describes creation as “the ground and grammar” of humanity’s communion with God, what she also labels as “ascent” (Calvin’s Ladder, 53–88).
76 Comm. Rom. 8:21.
77 Ibid.
78 Ibid.
79 See, for example, Maximus the Confessor, Ambiguum 41 (PG 91:1308B); idem, Difficulty 41, in Maximus the Confessor (ed. and trans. Andrew Louth; London: Routledge, 1996) 155–62, at 158.
80 Comm. Rom. 8:21; on “divinization” or “deification,” see Comm. 2 Pet. 1:4, where Calvin writes: “Let us then mark, that the end of the gospel is, to render us eventually conformable to God, and, if we may so speak, to deify us” (Calvin notably uses the phrases “conformes Deo,” “quasi deificari,” and “ut ita loquamur” here [CR 55:446]). Elsewhere, refuting Osiander: “I shall not labor much in refuting the Scriptural proofs that he brings forward, which he wrongly twists from the heavenly life to the present state. ‘Through Christ,’ says Peter, ‘were granted to us precious and very great promises. . . that we might become partakers of the divine nature.’ [II Peter 1:4 p.] As if we now were what the gospel promises that we shall be at the final coming of Christ!” (Inst. 3.11.10). This raises the question: Is Calvin affirming some sort of eschatological notion of participation in God’s nature, i.e., “divinization” or “deification” (even if only “quasi”)? It certainly seems like it. Calvin’s nuance between “divine essence” and “divine kind,” however, will be discussed below. On this, see Yang-Ho Lee, “Calvin on Deification: A Reply to Carl Mosser and Jonathan Slater,” SJT 63 (2010) 272–84.
81 Comm. Rom. 8:21.
82 Comm. Col. 1:17 (italics omitted).
83 Ibid. (italics in original). Calvin’s use of these words is about angels, but thereafter he writes: “At the same time, [Paul] does not affirm this merely as to angels, but also as to the whole world.” Yet, unlike angels and humans, the cosmos’s being in Christ is never fully developed; see Inst. 1.13.24; 1.15.6; 2.1.5; 2.6.1; 2.8.19; 2.10.7–8; 2.12.4; 3.11.10; 3.20.21; 3.21.7; 3.24.1; 3.25.2; 3.25.10; 4.17.2; Comm. Col. 1:17; Comm. Eph. 1:10; idem, “Stancaro I,” 12–13; idem, “Stancaro II,” 147.
84 See Peter Wyatt, Jesus Christ and Creation in the Theology of John Calvin (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick, 1996) 61.
85 See Inst. 1.5.3 (“μικρὁκοσμον” [OS 3:46]); Comm. Gen. 1:26.
86 Comm. Gen. 1:26.
87 See Engel, John Calvin’s Perspectival Anthropology, 195–96. Maximus the Confessor assumed such a definition (see Lars Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor [2nd ed.; Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1995] 132–43).
88 See Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, 331–432.
89 William J. Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) 78.
90 Engel, John Calvin’s Perspectival Anthropology, 196 (italics in original).
91 I thank one of my anonymous reviewers for helping me see this.
92 This fits Edward A. Dowey, Jr.’s assessment that “Calvin’s thought has a soteriological center which dominates all of his theology” (italics in original) (The Knowledge of God in Calvin’s Theology [3rd ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994] 246 [italics in original]).
93 Canlis’s comment fits well with Calvin’s understanding of prelapsarian humanity’s need for a mediator: “Calvin does not begin with the problem of how a transcendent God and the world are related; he begins with the truth of the Mediator, the one who functions not as a tertium quid for middle space between Creator and creation, but as the one in whom they are joined” (Calvin’s Ladder, 61).
94 Comm. Col. 1:15, 1:17 (italics in original).
95 Canlis adds that “creation is not self-enclosed but is only itself when participating in God (and as we know, Calvin never sees this as God simpliciter, but as in Christ, by the Spirit)” (see Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder, 82–83); see idem, “Calvin’s Institutes: Primer for Spiritual Formation,” Crux 47:1 (2011) 16–29, esp. 28 n. 28, where this participatory language of “by the Spirit, in the Son, to the Father” is further highlighted.
96 Comm. Eph. 1:10.
97 See Comm. Col. 1:17. E. David Willis observes that Calvin recognized “two different nuances” of Christ’s mediation: reconciliation (postlapsarian) and sustenance (both prelapsarian and postlapsarian) (Calvin’s Catholic Christology: The Function of the So-Called Extra Calvinisticum in Calvin’s Theology [Leiden: Brill, 1966] 70). This sustaining role of Christ prior to the fall and incarnation is also inferable from Comm. Gen. 2:2.
98 Calvin, “Stancaro I,” 12.
99 Ibid., 13.
100 Calvin, “Stancaro II,” 147.
101 T. F. Torrance, “The Distinctive Character of the Reformed Tradition,” RefR 54 (2000) 5–16, at 9. See also Trevor Hart, “Humankind in Christ and Christ in Humankind: Salvation as Participation in Our Substitute in the Theology of John Calvin,” SJT 42 (1989) 67–84; J. B. Torrance, “The Vicarious Humanity and Priesthood of Christ in the Theology of John Calvin,” in Calvinus Ecclesiae Doctor: Die Referate des Congrès International de Recherches Calviniennes, internationalen Kongresses für Calvinforschung vom 25. bis 28. September 1978 in Amsterdam (ed. W. H. Neuser; Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1978) 68–84.
102 See Billings, Calvin, 53–65; Canlis, “Calvin, Osiander, and Participation,” 177–84; McCormack, “Union with Christ,” 516–21.
103 See Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder, 57 n. 13.
104 Lee, “Calvin on Deification,” 272–84; Lee points out that Mosser made a similar move (albeit, without the categories of “divine essence” vs. “divine kind”) when speaking of a “functional similarity with the Orthodox essence/energies distinction” (ibid., 278; Mosser, “Greatest Possible Blessing,” 54). Otherwise, see McCormack, “Union with Christ,” 527–28; see also n. 80 above.
105 Comm. 2 Pet. 1:4 (CR 55:446), as appears in John Calvin, The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews and the First and Second Letters of St. Peter (trans. William B. Johnson; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974) 330 (italics in original). This passage is quoted by both Lee (“Calvin on Deification,” 278) and McCormack (“Union with Christ,” 528), but neither Lee nor McCormack cite each other.
106 McCormack, “Union with Christ,” 521, also 505, 519 n. 34, 520–21.
107 Lee, “Calvin on Deification,” 284.
108 Kyle Strobel rightly adjudicates that “McCormack’s critique only works against one strand of the theosis tradition, and that the Reformed (I here include Calvin) followed the relational strand instead” (“Jonathan Edwards’s Reformed Doctrine of Theosis,” HTR 109 [2016] 371–99, at 391 n. 28).
109 On humanity’s prelapsarian “participation in God,” see Inst. 2.2.1.
110 See n. 95 above.
111 Huijgen, “John Calvin’s Trinitarian,” 197–98.
112 See n. 26 above.
113 Willis, Calvin’s Catholic Christology, 70.
114 See Inst. 1.15.3–16; Comm. Gen. 1:26: “Since the image of God had been destroyed in us by the fall, we may judge from its restoration what it originally had been. Paul says that we are transformed into the image of God by the gospel. And, according to him, spiritual regeneration is nothing else than the restoration of the same image (Colossians 3:10, and Ephesians 3:23)”; Comm. Eph. 4:24: “Adam lost the image which he had originally received, and therefore it becomes necessary that it shall be restored to us by Christ.” Richard Prins’s argument that Calvin had “mingled heaven and earth” by believing humanity to be restored by Christ to a different “image” than that which Adam had originally borne fails to account for the fact that “image” for Calvin was endowed dynamically “by way of” participation rather than statically “for” participation (“The Image of God in Adam and the Restoration of Man in Jesus Christ,” SJT 25 [1972] 32–44).
115 Inst. 3.1.8: “For even though God alone is the source of righteousness, and we are righteous only by participation in him, yet, because we have been estranged from his righteousness by unhappy disagreement, we must have recourse to this lower remedy that Christ may justify us by the power of his death and resurrection”; see also n. 101 above; Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder, 100–112.
116 Inst. 1.15.4 (“uberiorem gratiae mensuram” [OS 3:179]); see also Comm. Gen. 3:7. This insight fits Dowey’s “two-fold knowledge of God” theory (The Knowledge of God, 3–4).
117 Comm. Gen. 1:26.
118 Comm. Heb. 4:12.
119 The oft-observed notion that, for Calvin, God could have but did not supply the grace needed for perseverance, making Adam’s fall “inevitable, though not logically necessary,” only strengthens my argument (see Huijgen, “John Calvin’s Trinitarian,” 199, where Inst. 1.15.8 and 3.23.8 are cited).
120 In saying this, I am in no way suggesting that Calvin would have been happy with “pelagianism.”
121 T. H. L. Parker, Calvin: An Introduction to His Thought (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995) 42.
122 See n. 10 above.
123 See John Calvin, The Bondage and Liberation of the Will: A Defence of Human Choice Against Pighius (ed. A. N. S. Lane; trans. G. I. Davies; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996) [hereafter Bond. Lib.] 74-75 (CR 6:284), 84-85 (CR 6:291).
124 Bond. Lib. 75 (CR 6:284).
125 Ibid., 75 (CR 6:284–85).
126 Ibid., 84 (CR 6:290).
127 Ibid., 91 (CR 6:295); Calvin is loosely quoting from Augustine’s Nature and Grace 53.62 (ibid., 91 n. 24; Augustine, On Nature and Grace [NPNF 1 5:142]).
128 See n. 119 above.
129 Butin, Revelation, 77.
130 See n. 95 above.
131 See Comm. Gen. 3:6. Elsewhere, Calvin observed that it was sin when people were was simply “tickled by any desire at all against the law of God,” that it was sin when people “[were] subject to the inordinate desires of the flesh” (Inst. 3.3.10). Thus, for Calvin, sin was much more than just its abstract or physical outward manifestation: “Indeed, we label ‘sin’ that very depravity which begets in us desires of this sort” (Inst. 3.3.10).
132 Bond. Lib., 210 (CR 6:378–79).