Calvin's Metaphysics of Our Union with Christ

This study of the Calvin corpus asks whether the older works of Emmen, Dominicé and Kolfhaus and English monographs adequately answer the question of how human beings can receive life‐giving properties from the person of Christ without recognizing Calvin's use of the conceptual tool of reduplicative predication to explain our unio spiritualis cum Christo. Thanks to a renaissance in the use of conceptual analysis in the service of theology, we identify Calvin's use of this conceptual tool and propose a tentative solution to the vexing question of how he predicates a unio spiritualis between humans and the person of the Mediator, since he states that the unio is, in the first instance, between our self‐subsistent natura humana and Christ's anhypostatic natura humana . How then can this unio ‘channel’ life‐giving properties to us? Calvin himself states the rule that ‘the flesh of Christ does not of itself have a power so great as to quicken us’; that is, only a supposit, not a nature, can perform such operations. Calvin relieves this predicative tension by employing the conceptual tool of reduplicative predication – the borrowing and ‘channeling’ of properties across the hypostatic union of Christ as well as across the unio spiritualis – such that Homo secundum istum unionem est iustus .