Osiander and the Reformed Tradition

Julie Canlis has a helpful article on Calvin’s response to Osiander in the International Journal of Systematic Theology (6:2 [2004]). A few points are worth highlighting:

1) She sees the response to Osiander as part of the reason why Reformed theologians tend to be skittish about talk of “participation.” Calvin, she argues, has no such fears, and develops a Trinitarian account of participation that does not imply an ontological union of substances but does make plenty of room for the language of participation and communion.

2) Her summary of Melanchthon’s views, drawn from an article by Stephen Strehle, are quite damnign: The difference between Luther and Melanchthon is, she claims, more “attitude” than substance: “Melanchthon’s theology tends to be flavored by an extreme mechanistic causality due to Nominalism. Medieval Nominalism focused on the absolute power of God – a power that could decree anything it wished. If God wanted to make salvation be through Jesus, so be it. If he instead decided that we would be saved by a donkey, then God could procure our salvation through an ass . . . The obvious result is that God’s justification of sinners – his declaration of ‘innocent’ upon our guilt – came to be seen as an arbitrary pronouncement, having no effect upon us whatsoever. If God could make an ass be our salvation, so he could declare a sinner righteous. The picture that can come to mind is of a God in heaven changing the divine ledger books, while we on earth remain untouched by his grace. As Stephen Srehle observes, ‘And so, the belief in a God who could declare a sinner righteous – a sinner not touched by his grace – is seen to arise, not so much from the seminal ideas of Protestantism, but from the accentuation upon the divine will in the nominalists’ doctrine of justification’” (p. 171).

3) The key problem with Osiander, in Calvin’s view, was pneumatological and hence Trinitarian. Osiander argued that our righteousness comes from “Christ dwelling in us by faith,” but the Christ that dwells in us is the divine Logos, denuded of his humanity (p. 171). Calvin agreed that the Christ whose righteousness is our justification is not “outside of and distant from us” so that “His righteousness is imputed to us in mechanical fashion,” but rather “we put Him on and are made members of His body.” Osiander fails to recognize the “bond of this unity,” which Calvin identifies: “we hold ourselves to be united with Christ by the secret power of his Spirit” (p. 172). Osiander obected that he was not arguing for a fusion of divine and human, but Calvin recognized, as Canlis says, “without a genuine role for the Holy Spirit, you cannot help but have a fusion, or divine overwhelming of some sort” (p. 172). Calvin thus has a strong notion of participation that is not all that distant from Osiander; but he “strictly adheres to a trinitarian structure” (p. 172).

4) Canlis cites Strehle’s contention that Osiander’s doctrine arises, paradoxically as it seems, from an overemphasis on the distinction of divine and human. Osiander’s logic is: “God alone is righteousnes. And righteousness out there in the world is wholly identical with God himself, and cannot be possessed by, or exhibited by humanity – not even by Christ’s human nature” (p. 173, fn 15). Canlis points to analogies with the gnostics, who denied that the world could share in or participate in God, such that creatureliness is an obstacle to salvation. She argues that “Calvin wants flesh participating in the Spirit, not a replacement of our flesh by divinity” (p. 173, fn 16). This is an intriguing take on Osiander: It might appear that his doctrine tends in an almost pantheistic direction, when in fact the groundwork of his doctrine is laid in a polarization of divine and human. Pantheistic absorption and dualistic polarization appear to be two poles of a single system, a system that inherently denies that the world is the bearer and expression of God’s glory. That is, Osiander’s basic failure is aesthetic, his inability to see in creation a theater of glory.

5) Canlis suggests that the Reformed tradition has often taken Calvin’s insistence on righteousness “extra nos” in an absolute sense that Calvin did not intend. Calvin taught that righteousness was both imputed and imparted, but insisted that assurance is grounded in imputed righteousness rather than in the imperfect and fluctuating righteousness that is being worked in us. In later Reformed theology, “Calvin’s relentless insistence upon a righteousness extra nos has been extracted from its polemical situation, in which he was emphasizing that assurance was not to be found in us, and hardened into a spatial distance between humanity and God. This has had enormous implications for a general Protestant understanding of salvation and of the divine-human relationship” (p. 175). In particular, this hardening has made it difficult for Reformed theology to follow Calvin’s view “of the Holy Spirit as enabling a true, non-substantial participation in God” (p. 177), with the soteriological result that the righteousness of justification is never understood as ours in any strong sense: “What Calvin emphasizes time and again is that this forensic word does not remain outside of us, but by its very creative nature, transforms us. Perhaps this is where the acute limitations of spatial metaphors in theology become most apparent. We are not just declared righteous, so much as we are given Christ himself – not a word of pardon, btu The Word . We participate in Christ himself and all of his gifts so intimately that they properly become ours . ‘You see that our righteousness is not in us but in Christ, that we possess it only because we are partakers in Christ; indeed with him we possess all its riches” (p. 176; emphasis original). Unfortunately, Canlis does not provide any citations from Calvin for the claim that he saw the forensic declaration as a creative, transforming word. I remain skeptical that this is Calvin’s view.

6) Another implication of the Reformed skittishness toward participation is a tendency to explain Christ’s obedience in terms of keeping of the law. She cites Bruce McCormack to the effect that “the prominence of law inthe conception that resulted in an abstracting of law from the graciousness of the divine willing and action, thereby construing the efficacy of Christ’s work in terms of merit” (p. 178). This ignores Calvin’s emphasis on Jesus’ life of obedience as the life of the Son, a life of constant communion with the Father, of which obedience is one aspect. For Calvin, the “blessed exchange” that occurs through union with Christ is not an exchange of our sins for Christ’s righteousness, but an exchange of sonship: “This is the wonderful exchange,” Calvin writes, “which, out of his measureless benevolence, he has made with us; that, becoming Son of man with us, he has made us sons of God with him” (p. 180). Canlis argues that this exchange of sonship is the overarching category in Calvin’s understanding of union with Christ, rather than simply one benefit of union alongside others (p. 180-181). While it is certainly true that Christ’s life is a living out of His Sonship, and therefore includes communion witht he Father as well as obedience, it seems that Canlis has polarized issues that Calvin wanted to join together. For Calvin (or so I would argue), the exchange of sonship encompasses and includes an exchange of our sin and Christ’s righteousness. In becoming “Son of man,” I suggest, Calvin would say that the Son was also becoming sin for us.

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