Paying More than We should?

The cost of political campaigns keeps growing. As we see additional levels of poverty in our country and in our world, how do we react when political candidates and government officials spend large sums of money to further their own interests? How do we justify the amount of money that government officials receive for performing the duties of their office?

The Missing Link (Wild Card)

Wil Reinowski

I am a bit surprised that Lane’s guide to the Institutes glazes over Book 3 Chapter 15, and while it may be true that this does not contain information central to Calvin’s theology this chapter is worth some discussion.

 In section 2, Calvin notes that the word “merit” is not Biblically-based. Here, we have another of Calvin’s contradictions. Calvin does find that the term was used in ancient church writings, that God assigns some value to our works, but we should never see our works  as a type of Divine currency.

Section 3 is a discussion of grace. Calvin asserts that nothing that we do is meritorious enough to receive the gift of grace that God gives, and yet God bestows grace on us. Calvin says in the first sentence of this section, “Scripture shows what all our works deserve when it states that they cannot bear God’s gaze because they are full of uncleanness.” Humans cannot perfectly follow the law, but God bestows his good works on us anyway and calls them “ours.”

13. Wholly Human, Holy Divine

Wil Reinowski

Lane asks one very brief but very loaded question for these three chapters of the Institutes, “How does Calvin portray the person of Christ?” The short answer to this would be that Christ is both fully human and fully divine. His one being is a storehouse of qualities that can be attributed to his divine nature and his human nature. All of these qualities are at the same time separated and united in a paradox Calvin calls “the communicating of properties.” 

Calvin uses Chapter 12  of Book 2 to discuss three main reasons that God took on the person of Christ. The first reason he notes is that humanity is steeped in sin.  Calvin says that because each of us are so far gone and so unclean, we would never reach God without someone to mediate. The next reason Calvin gives that God took on the person of Christ is simply because God wanted to do it.  Calvin summarizes here that Christ is the total package, and that he contains at the same time God qualities and human qualities; he’ll list each of these qualities in the next chapter. While it is true that Christ had a threefold task - to blaze the path to eternal life, to show us how to live a life free from sin, and to save us from our own destruction - we should not be too prideful to think it was necessary for Christ to be born. This all happened because God wanted it to happen. The third reason is to teach us how to be obedient to God. The only way to counter disobedience is with obedience, and so Christ was a hundred percent obedient to God.