Anthropology and soteriology

Explaining the meaning of the image of God, Calvin writes, “there is no solidity in Augustine’s speculation, that the soul is a mirror of the Trinity, inasmuch as it comprehends within itself, intellect, will, and memory. Nor is there any probability in the opinion of those who place likeness to God in the dominion bestowed upon man, as if he only resembled God in this, that he is appointed lord and master of all things. The likeness must be within, in himself. It must be something which is not external to him, but is properly the internal good of the soul” ( Institutes 1.15.4).

One wishes for further explanation of that “must”: Why must the image be “within” rather than in man’s relationship to God or to the creation? Why must it not be external? (Perhaps he explains this further elsewhere.)

Whatever Calvin’s reasons for stressing this, it is a fateful move in his theology. Consider:

1) On the one hand, Calvin insists that man’s created nature as “image” is strictly something internal. In pomo lingo, the essence of Calvin’s Adam consists in his being a “self-present subject.”

2) On the other hand, Calvin insists that our justification is extra nos , dependent on the work of Christ and on our being outside ourselves in Christ. In pomo lingo, the essence of Calvin’s saved person consists in his being a “decentered subject,” whose center of existence is located outside himself. (Unless Calvin doesn’t think justification has anything to do with “essence” – on which see below).

3) This appears to set up some kind of nature/supernature distinction. Man as created and man as saved are not merely two stages of one subject, but two different sorts of subject, one defined “in himself” and the other defined externally.

4) Regarding justification: Is the person justified when he is taken out of himself and relocated in Christ? Or does the person remain defined by what he is “in himself”? Is he righteous in Christ? Or a dual person – iustus et peccator not just in fact but in definition?

5) Because of this anthropological setup, only sanctification can affect the person himself (“essentially”). Justification, precisely because it is ecstatic, does not affect the person, who is defined by standing within himself rather than outside.

6) Bonhoeffer is stronger – more Protestant even – when he insists that the image of God is fundamentally ecstatic, fundamentally an ” analogia relationis ” rather than an ” analogia entis .” Bonhoeffer even introduces soteriological language to describe the original condition of Adam: The relatio “is not a human potential or possibility or a structure of human existence; instead it is a given relat, a relation in which human beings are set, a justitia passiva !”

7) One can out-Calvin Calvin here. He formulates his understanding of the content of the image of God by reasoning from eschatology to protology, from the restoration of the image in Christ to the meaning of the original image in Adam. One could do the same with regard to the “location” of the image: Since we are restored to God’s image by a “decentering” of the self, then Adam in his original enjoyment of the image was also “decentered.”

8) One might suggest too that the curse on sin is precisely a relocation of self-definition to the inside. Human beings are sinners precisely insofar as they are incurvatus in se . Calvin thus (perhaps) is liable to the charge he brings against the philosophers, namely, that he fails to distinguish rightly between man as created and man as ruined creation. He defines human existence as such by reference to a human condition that is the result of sin.