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.
