as accomplished in the movement through its opposite. Dialectics at that early stage acknowledged no intrinsic connection between the alternatives beyond their shared grounding in a more fundamental concept of law. Luther’s experience of the law in the matter of the justified conscience—the same law collected and ordered in the Summae of the preceding centuries—accelerated the interrelationship of the opposites at the same time that it redefined them according to universal categories. Rather than a single legal case or maxim set against another for adjudication, Luther set the oppression of the conscience under an infinite and dominating law against the freedom of the conscience as the total liberation from its oppression. The dialectic now called a comprehensive, inescapable, and merciless demand into battle against an indifference to law that renders its legal character obsolete. The genius of the dialectic consists in Luther’s assertion that man cannot know the liberty of Christ, cannot receive righteousness by faith alone nor assurance of pardon, until he has passed through the hell of the law’s limitless requirement. The law must crush man’s nature, including all his powers of reason and will, until he knows no natural freedom and no hope apart from Christ. The liberty of grace presumes man’s oppression under the law, germinating in the progressive tyranny in which man bows to the infinite demand. The dialectic concludes in the achievement of joy-through-terror, the explosion that Luther errantly understood as forgiveness and a new communion with his creator.
This explosion reveals the Christ-Idol in man’s experience as the validation of his universality. The whole process of docetic grace means man’s liberation from law natural and divine, a process crystallized in Luther’s conscience and brought to dialectical fruition in the electrifying discovery of Christ “for you and me.” For the dialectical expansion of the law divides man against his nature, rending him into two parts. One side of his nature stands with the infinite law, imposing the boundless demand upon the finite creature as if man were the infinite, as if his nature could absorb infinity. Cowering beneath this terror, oppressed and horrified like Luther before the Judge and Tormentor, is that same nature as hopelessly unable to fulfill the law’s demands. Man at once becomes executioner and victim, destroyer and destroyed. The interweaving of nature and law, two realities bound under the grace of form, splinters in a dual and antagonistic movement toward the infinite. The law and nature as its ally accept expansion to infinity as legitimate at the same time that each shrinks into nothingness, though the law better expresses the expansion and nature the diminution. Docetic man does not understand (and Luther never understood!) that the dialectical culmination of brutality in the grace of the Christ-Idol means man’s absorption into the infinite and the disintegration of his being. In the Christ-Idol man stands above the law because he renounces all law; he feels the exuberance of chains broken because he has torn his nature into pieces. Man confuses this advance toward the scattering with beatitude and assurance, with Luther trumpeting the deformity of the conscience as justification by faith alone.
If Luther introduced the dialectical intensification that provokes inner terror for the sake of man’s liberation from it, he did so primarily in the spiritual order. His breakthrough cast down the ramparts of an infinitized ecclesiastical and divine law, destroying the monastery and holding out a new way of life that called itself Christian though it rejected the habit of finitude. Luther nonetheless fancied himself no revolutionary, no disturber of the peace nor political gadfly, but saw himself rescuing sinners from a God depicted as hot with anger by the church. At least in his own mind Luther would keep the natural order and its political systems intact, and this despite his consideration of divine law as a restatement of the natural and as fundamentally synonymous with it. Luther did not rigorously press man into the annulment of the natural order either in its ecological or its political manifestations. It fell to John Calvin, the lawyer of Geneva, to wear the crown as ruler of the new age. Whereas Luther stood as the apex of the docetic movement to decapitate the divine law, summing up the trajectory of his medieval predecessors, Calvin transferred the docetic spirit into the natural order with a logical vivacity no less enthusiastic than the pride of Gregory VII and no less subtle than the philosophy of Manegold of Lautenbach. In the single move of the Reformation Docetism thus captured the queen and placed the king in check, turning its canons upon the natural order before the corpse of the spiritual had grown cold. For it was Calvin’s lot to take up the infinite law in the conscience in a way not far from Luther, but more importantly to unleash the mayhem of infinity into the ethical life of man.
Luther gives an account of man and the law: nature initially trusts in the law for justification; the law then grows into an infinite and merciless tyrant; finally the righteousness of God, given through faith alone, liberates the believer from the law’s horrors. Calvin provides an account of man before God’s judgment: the believer first takes confidence in nature’s abilities; one then comes under an infinite law in the form of God’s unyielding holiness, “descending into the self” until one recognizes nature’s “nothingness”; then the grace of Christ, again the resolution of the dynamic, announces the believer as justified by faith alone, propelling nature into a life of ceaseless obedience. Unlike Luther, however, Calvin applies the infinite character of the law to both the inner and the outer aspects of man’s nature and sees the law’s infinity as illustrative of its embedding in grace.
For Calvin, Christ grounds the law or Old Testament as its foundation; Christ is likewise at work, in a muted way, within the law through its ceremonies and the promises that point to him; and he is the law’s goal as the terminus in which it finds fulfillment. Man approaches the law in its proper context as enfolded within the gracious covenant established in Christ, whose delivery of justifying grace entails engagement in the non-justifying but necessary law allied with it. If, at this point, Luther should accuse Calvin of blurring the antagonism between law and gospel, Calvin would respond that while the law certainly does not justify, God is always one and unified. So also is his revelation through Christ’s grace and the law embedded within it one and unified, a revelation consistent throughout salvation history. Applied to the life of man, this revelation entails not only saving grace, but the uninterrupted obedience that accompanies it.
Calvin’s version of religious experience begins with nature’s temptation to ascribe righteousness to itself in light of its gifts, which include natural virtues and the goodness that men can achieve by human standards. Concentration on these gifts results in pride in one’s merit and a consequent sluggishness toward the obedience demanded by the law. Nature always wants to flatter itself, but this flattery is anathema to justification in Christ. For this reason Calvin directs the believer to the law, not that it should justify, but that by it men might “shake off their sluggishness” and be “pinch[ed] awake to their imperfection.” This “pinching” amounts to a terrifying confrontation with God’s holiness that decimates man’s former confidence. Calvin describes this “descent into the self” from two angles, one focused upon the holiness of God and the other upon the depravity of nature. This movement stands at the center of Docetism’s logic for the inner man, described by Calvin at various points in his writings alternately from the perspective of God and from that of the sinner:
Our discourse is concerned with the justice not of a human court but of a heavenly tribunal, lest we measure by our own small measure the integrity of works needed to satisfy the divine judgment . . . Yet surely it is held of precious little value if it is not recognized as God’s justice and so perfect that nothing can be admitted except what is in every part whole and complete and undefiled by any corruption. Such was never found in man and never will be . . . for [before God’s justice] we deal with a serious matter, and do not engage in frivolous word battles. To this question, I insist, we must apply our mind if we would profitably inquire concerning true righteousness: How shall we reply to the Heavenly Judge when he calls us to account? Let us envisage for ourselves that Judge, not as our minds naturally imagine him, but as he is depicted for us in Scripture: by whose brightness the stars are darkened; by whose strength the mountains are melted; by whose wrath the earth is shaken; beside whose purity all things are defiled; whose righteousness not even the angels can bear; who makes not the guilty man innocent; whose vengeance when once kindled penetrates to the depths of hell. Let us behold him, I say, sitting in judgment to examine the deeds of men: Who will stand confident before his throne? “Who . . . can dwell with the everlasting fire?” asks
