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 ontology instills law and rest, mercy and peace, then man shall move in no small part according to these realities; if the ontology entails lawlessness, cruelty, and war, then man shall suffer their excesses. The ontology of Docetism, whose anti-god reigns over the contemporary world, is the formlessness of law dialectically annulled. Its image is an indefinite universality, its imprint upon man his unraveling as a nature.
Docetism does not work the truth as the conformity of being with its law but falsehood as the dialectical bifurcation of being and combat between its elements. Its god is at once the positing of the law and its negation, at once the construction of form and order and its being torn down. At one pole stands the docetic god as law, a form reminiscent of the eternal changelessness of the true God, of he who is mercy to man and all creation. Whereas the true God infuses grace into men so that they might come to the knowledge of the divine and better obey the law implicit in their natures, however, Docetism vilifies its law-god and announces him as the enemy. Justification by faith alone, the Christ-Idol’s doctrinal fortress, knows the law finally as wrath and cruelty and will not tolerate it. At the other pole the Christ-Idol trumpets a grace alienated from law and thereby from form, redefined as the adversary of both. Thus law and grace, form and formlessness, distilled and opposed within the docetic opposition-god, the divine war-in-act. All law, immutability, wrath, holiness, and authority, which man ought to know among the attributes of the true God’s being, represent one half of this bifurcated god. All grace, compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and gospel, what man should also know as attributes of the true God, comprise the other half as the scepter of the Christ-Idol. Law stands against grace as sin against righteousness, two armies arranged for the battle in which the Son negates the negation that is the Father.
That the docetic God proclaims itself fundamentally as grace, love, and compassion, affirming that man can know it through the Christ-Idol alone, means that it exists fundamentally as formlessness. Utter emptiness and indifference ground the docetic divinity as the putative void behind all that is, possessed of neither form nor content, subsisting in its purity as a cloud or a mist. This primordiality cannot continue its existence on its own, for it has no principle of continuity intrinsic to its indefinition. It is deceptive to think of it as an independent principle, as if non-being could claim actuality apart from being or evil were not dependent on the good. Docetism’s primordial abyss must therefore posit its negation, it must affirm the form that is its opposite, but it can do this only because from the start it relies upon the goodness of actual being, including its finite measure. The initial work of Docetism, which it accomplishes through deception, is to invite itself into this being, to become attached to it like a parasite and feed off of it, infinitizing the good measure of being unto mercilessness and fragmentation. Thus the docetic development through the medieval era presupposed the divine law as measured, gentle, and oriented toward salvation, invading that law and perverting it as a preparation for the Christ-Idol. Docetism then furthers the deception by redefining the law in terms of the perversion. Insofar as it is authoritative, docetic law has become this infinity, this terror, this assault upon man, and it cannot but be so. Docetism supposes this infinite law to have arisen from the infinity of the abyss, and in a sense it has. In the docetic logic, law and form burst forth from formlessness in an inexplicable and ultimately false vision of creation, for what Docetism construes as the birth of form from formlessness conceals its reliance on the givenness of nature. Hiding this foundation, Docetism’s god proclaims the evolution of form out of formlessness by an unnamed power, even the power of nothingness. Life, it would seem, evolves willy-nilly out of death, and light proceeds from darkness.
The dialectical advance of the docetic god projects a form, a “Father,” that at first appears congenial, even merciful, maintaining the harmony of being with its law, rising like the bell curve. The mist wavers as though its potentiality would bear fruit, producing a certainty that steadies its uncertainty and a knowledge that qualifies its unknowing. It seems that the unnatural and unlimited shall acquire nature and limit, achieving a higher reality. This is another deception, for the law that seems to bring limitation will later reveal its lack of limit. The infinity of possibility has only withdrawn for the moment to allow the growth of form, but it will reapply its hand. As the nascent form progresses it reveals that the law intrinsic to it knows no end, multiplying
