Calvin’s Views of Jesus and the Trinity

Calvin’s Views of Jesus and the Trinity

Thomas Allen

In History of the Dogma of the Deity of Jesus Christ (revised edition of 1876, translated 1878), Albert Reville, a minister of the French Reformed Church, gives a brief description of Calvin’s views on the Trinity and Jesus. Although Calvin claimed to support the orthodox Trinitarian and Incarnation doctrines of the Catholic Church, his Christology and explanation of the Trinity approached the unitarianism of the modalists or Sabellians.

Calvin maintained “that the finite cannot contain the infinite” (p. 179). This axiom, he used against the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist, which holds that the bread is the actual body of Christ and the wine is his actual blood.

If this axiom is applied to the person of Jesus, it results in a contradiction: “‘the whole plenitude of the Deity dwelt in the human nature of Christ,’ and at the same time, ‘the whole Deity was without him’” (pp. 179-180). Thus, “the Son, or the Word[,] was not circumscribed or enclosed in the man Jesus” (p. 180). While intimately united with Jesus, the Word never ceased to fill the infinite.  Consequently, “the Word was united to the man Jesus, so far as human nature, without false to itself, was capable of embodying the divine perfection” (p. 180). Reville concludes, “If in the place of the Word, we put here the Holy Spirit, which after all only differs from the Word in name, we are on the verge of the most decided Unitarianism” (p. 180).

The divine attributes of which human nature is capable are not omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence. They are moral attributes like holiness, justice, and goodness. Thus, the perfection of Jesus is “moral perfection, holiness, not absolute perfection” (p. 180). Calvin seriously accepted “all those details of the evangelical history in which the truly human nature of Jesus is positively indicated” (p. 180). Reville asks, “Did Calvin himself see that his exegesis . . . disposed of almost all scriptural proofs generally brought forward in support of the Trinity? On thing is certain, that his Commentaries reduced them to nothing” (p. 181). Accordingly, Calvin claimed that the formula of baptism (baptizing in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit — Matthew 28:19) did “not relate to the Trinity of the Divine Persons, but to the triple relation in which God stands towards man in the new economy” (p. 182).

Moreover, Calvin modified “the strict notion of personality as applied to the three terms of the trinity. The three persons (the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) became simply divine attributes or modes. Thus, his doctrine of the Trinity is essentially Sabellianism (which was considered heresy by the fourth century). “In effect, the personality of Jesus, which in the old orthodoxy was a divine personality, becomes once more the human personality of primitive Unitarianism” (p. 182). Consequently, Mary is no longer the Mother of God. Faith becomes one of Jesus’ virtues. Worship should not be paid to Christ because he “possesses only a part of the Divine perfections” (p. 183). Although Jesus is the Mediator, “he cannot be the object of that worship which can be properly addressed only to the absolute Being” (p. 183).

For Calvin, the Holy Spirit “is no longer a person in the true sense of the world; . . . it is God in action in the world and the soul” (p. 183).

Nevertheless, Calvin and his followers claimed to follow the Catholic orthodoxy of the Trinity and defended it against its opponents. However, Calvin had changed the fundamental idea of the Trinity.

Copyright © 2021 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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