Have you ever wondered how Christ was all present, yet located locally in Jesus Christ of Nazareth? Have you ever wondered how Christ continued to uphold the universe yet walk around Jerusalem? Or, how did the fulness of deity dwell bodily in Christ (Col. 2:9)? In other words, how do we uphold the deity and the humanity of Christ?
This is quite a monumental subject, and something which I admit to be quite the learner about. Yet, I think this doctrine of the Extra Calvinisticum is of crucial importance for Christology.
Usually attributed to John Calvin (by the Lutherans due to the debate on the ‘Real Presence’ in the Lord’s Supper), this is a very important and orthodox doctrine that I’ve been reading about lately. Basically it states that in the Incarnation, God the Son retained his divine properties such as omnipresence, omniscience and immensity, and therefore Christ was not confined within the limits of a creaturely human. In other words, Christ was not less than divine nor less than human. Later reformed theologians used the dictum: finitum non capax infinitum (the finite cannot grasp, or exhaust the infinite) to describe this. The reverse is also true: the infinite God grasps finite human nature in the Incarnation.
One great passage in Calvin where this is explained is here:
“For even if the Word in his immeasurable essence united with the nature of man into one person, we do not imagine that he was confined therein. Here is something marvelous: the Son of God descended from heaven in such a way that, without leaving heaven, he willed to be borne in the virgin’s womb, to go about earth, and to hang upon the cross; yet he continuously filled the world even as he had done from the beginning.” Institutes II.13.4
As E. David Willis shows in his excellent study on the Extra Calvinisticum, this doctrine has undeniable orthodox catholicity – so much so, that Willis thinks a better term might be the Extra Catholicum! We find this doctrine in Cyril, Athanasius, Augustine, John of Damascus, Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas and the reformed orthodox in the 16th and 17th centuries. I’ve listed these quotes and others, here.
One area which this doctrine is helpful is in protecting against kenotic theologies which claim that in the Incarnation, Christ emptied himself of divine properties such as omniscience or omnipresence. This seems to be a mistaken exegesis of Philippians 2, where the reference to ‘emptying’ is taken to refer to Christ losing particular attributes, rather than referring to the general movement of descent from heaven to earth as a man. The Extra protects Christ’s divinity by insisting that whilst fully man, Christ nevertheless filled the universe with His presence. And although His glory was veiled within human flesh, he was still nevertheless utterly glorious as the fully divine second person of the Trinity. Paul Helm describes this as follows:
“The Logos, as Calvin liked to say, in true Chalcedonian fashion, ‘remains what He was’; what happened was that at the Incarnation, while continuing to exist eternally in the form of God, the logos, in Incarnation, took the form of a servant.” Calvin’s Ideas, p64.
The other area where the Extra Calvinisticum is very important is with respect to Christ as God’s revelation. Without a doubt, Christ is the true revelation of God. He is the true image of God (Col. 1) and the exact imprint of God (Heb. 1). There is no other way to know the Father except through Him (John 14:6). Yet, the Extra Calvinisticum supports revelation extra Christ – for instance, Scripture and General Revelation. In other words, as Muller puts it:
“Christ, the God-man, the center of everything we can say about salvation, is not the center of everything we can say about God, and not even the rule for everything that we can say about the Word in its work of creation, providence and revelation. The extra-Calvinisticum allows, therefore, both for a genuine revelation of God in nature, accomplished by the Word extra Christum or, as the fathers would have said, the Logos asarkos, and a special revelation of God focused soteriologically upon but not restricted to the person of Christ, the Logos ensarkos.” Richard Muller, The Barth Legacy: New Athanasius or Origen Redivivus? A Response to T.F. Torrance.
As I see it, the Extra Calvinisticum brings great and helpful benefits to our understanding and love of God. Firstly, it protects Chalcedonian Christology by preserving the humanity and deity of Christ against kenotic Christologies which empty Christ of His true divinity. Secondly, it preserves General Revelation by admitting true revelation beyond the flesh of Christ (of course, sadly the unregenerate man suppresses the truth of God’s revelation as per Romans 1). Thirdly, this brings some sense to the confusions surrounding the term ‘Christocentric.’ It insists upon a Soteriological Christocentrism whereby Christ is the beginning and center of Salvation (which is historically orthodox), yet banishes the idea of a Principial Christocentrism which insists that Christ (not Scripture) is the beginning, ground and center of all doctrine of God (which is not historically orthodox). The danger of the wrong-headed idea of a Principial Christocentrism, Muller says is that: ”… it becomes a Christological reductionism, a ‘Christmonism,’ as some have labelled it.” Muller, The Barth Legacy. p691.
All in all, I think that the Extra Calvinisticum is a wonderfully catholic and orthodox doctrine which frees us up from dangerous ideas about God, and allows us to rejoice in the greatness of our divine Saviour’s Incarnation which led to His gracious redemption of us!
I’m not keen to get stuck blogging all about the 