Nature’s initial estimation of itself as capable of some righteousness, relying on its powers of obedience as at least partially sufficient for justification, implies an ontological hope in the acquisition of form through obedience. Nature seeks to rise in form as it seeks justification via obedience to the law. Yet Calvin wants to destroy the impression that nature could add to its justification by completely denying natural righteousness. He insists that man abandon the “human tribunal,” coming before the unmitigated requirement of the law in the person of the divine Judge. Calvin’s descent into the self mirrors the growth of the law to infinity experienced by Luther, though couched in the language of the majesty and wrath of God rather than the multiplication of commands. In each reformer, the power and judgment of the law expand beyond all expectation that obedience could fulfill it. This produces, for Calvin as well as Luther, dual and antagonistic qualities within the law itself. The law promises to give life as the way of justification while its expansion to infinity would annul that promise, and by extension the law’s capacity as life-giver.
The increasing chasm between the righteousness of the Judge and the weakness of the believer presses in upon nature’s earlier confidence in its capacities. Where the will seemed capable of choosing the good, one finds that capability progressively neutered. Where one might have thought reason sufficient to discern saving truths, its conclusions evaporate as smoke and foolishness. For Calvin, the righteousness that nature would hold up as its achievement shrinks before the “thousand sins” that the Judge brings in accusation, just as, for Luther, each single act of obedience is dwarfed by nature’s “wagonloads of sins that increase infinitely.” Surveying the nature that tempts man to pride, Calvin finds it all but helpless before the immensity of God’s judgment. Like Luther’s exhortation that the law reduce the believer to nothing, imposing a “true taste of death,” Calvin insists that nature come to recognize its “nothingness” under a law that bears “the most immediate death.”
By this process both the law and nature reverse their assumed tendency toward form. The law loses definition in its growth to infinity at the same time that God appears unforgiving, severe, and bent upon punishment. Whereas Calvin elsewhere identifies divine law as a restatement of natural law, the identification of the same divine law with the character of God suggests an intriguing distortion, as if the nature of the creature should replicate the ineffability of the Creator. So the law’s infinity crushes the individual by a mercilessness in step with the looming holiness of the Judge. Terrified under this judgment, nature endures the opposite diminishment of form, shedding its definition in the lessening confidence that it possesses intrinsic righteousness. The law expands without boundary while nature contracts into the infinitesimal, with both progressively abdicating the form with which they were designed. The ontological pattern of growth to infinity and reduction to nothing by which Luther’s believer experiences the deformation of the law and nature resurfaces in Calvin.
When man at last releases the claim to natural righteousness in toto, acknowledging nature’s utter emptiness and submitting to the inevitable curse of disobedience, when the descent into the self hits bottom in a psychological hell, then one meets the grace that comforts the conscience, liberating the believer unto joy. Ontologically speaking, when the law has so expanded as to completely annul its support of nature’s inclination to form, its movement to infinity equaling and thereby conquering its appearance as a way of righteousness, nature sincerely perceives its own nothingness, that is, it is freed from form as freed from the law. Just as for Luther, Calvin’s law perishes in the equality in which the movement to infinity annuls the law’s claim to justify, an annulment that renders nature free from the law’s curse. Again like Luther, Calvin implicitly links this culminating ontological event to the appropriation of grace in the heart, the felt knowledge that the Christ, secretly redefined as Christ-Idol, justifies the sinner in nature’s total abdication of form.
This shared ontological story joins Luther and Calvin despite their differences, notably the latter’s embedding of the law within grace. In Calvin’s thought, the underlying ontology and the embedding combine in the ceaseless obedience that he requires of Christians. His calls to “unceasing progress” in and “unwavering attention” toward the law, with a heart “zealously inclined” to obedience by grace and on guard against all kinds of sloth, invest the infinity of the law into ethical life. In the descent into the self, the law expands to infinity as one approaches God’s judgment seat, while in the ceaseless obedience exhorted by Calvin man submits outwardly to the law so expanded. The law whose commands provide no rest, and that goads man on to an apparently limitless expectation of conformity, is the practical meaning of a law whose tendency to infinity is its participation in grace. This life of obedience, according to Calvin, is grounded in, oriented to, and in a muted way expressive of the grace by which God calls his children. It is the sanctification inseparable from the justification to which God destines his elect.
Herein lies the most significant difference between Luther and Calvin: Luther views the law’s infinity, experienced in the conscience, as the antithetical enemy that grace conquers by consummating the law’s regression from form, whereas Calvin, applying the law’s infinity to both the inner and the outer life, embeds a ceaseless obedience within the grace that consummates it. It is implicit in Calvin that the law in its tendency toward form, but especially in the infinitizing movement that annuls that tendency, springs forth from the promise of annulment in grace; that the law’s increasing unboundedness, by advancing toward annulment, expresses the destined abdication of form in an incomplete and muted way; and that grace, at its advent, fulfills the destiny of the law as the obliteration of the form that remains. The law’s fulfilled dissolution differs from its infinitizing progress toward that end, one might say, as a difference in “clarity of manifestation,” Calvin’s distinction between the law and the gospel. The law also meets that end as predestined in a way resonant with the procession of the elect to heaven according to God’s eternal decree. Both Luther and Calvin teach the believer to advance toward grace through an infinite law, a road by which both nature and the law begin to lose their form. Only Calvin makes the law’s inward and outward infinity a participant in grace, destining the law’s path in parallel with the chosen embarked upon it.
That path injects the infinite law into man’s dealings with the natural order, expanding the docetic advance beyond the conscience and the church to the political world as well as the natural environment. Under Calvin’s aegis, man strives to achieve freedom from political and natural law through the annulment in which the infinity that undermines the law equals and negates its authority. Along the way his social existence operates according to a frantic and chaotic intensity, with man sensing that he must perform all his works to their limit and beyond. His economic and scientific ethos push him to undreamed ingenuity in the accumulation of wealth and bodily comforts, while his political ethos celebrates the destruction of a well-ordered society in the name of democratic liberation. In both the divine and the natural orders the docetic spirit rules over man by enslaving him to an ethic that erodes his being, whipping him to reach further above his limit so that his form might descend further below it. Through so cherished and misunderstood an event as the Reformation, Docetism forwarded its reign under the name of Christianity, cloaking its deception under the Christ-Idol. Now disclosed, its principle is a grace that destroys the law, its promise a liberation in universality. Docetism is man’s well-meaning entanglement in the undoing of his world.
III
The spiritual element in man so determines the physical that he always strives to model his physical existence after the image of the god he worships. Man cannot exist apart from such an authority, he cannot live and move without unspoken and often unthought adherence to a divine ontology that both explains his nature and directs him toward conduct in conformity with the explanation. This unconscious adherence appears with full force in men who misunderstand the ontological foundations of their god, losing no potency even if man disavows all gods and declares himself an atheist. The ontology remains though the theological language has dried up, guiding man according to forces that, in the advanced stages of Docetism, he considers mythology and superstition if he recognizes them at all. If the divine