2.7. Simulación
2.7.8. Verificación y validación del modelo
For Calvin, as mentioned, the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper has an eschatological meaning: it is an instrument of God, which “is intended to make us grow in faith and confirm therein until His second coming,” when we will be fully sensible of the fruit of His death and passion and have full possession and enjoyment of it.850 However, it is also true that Calvin stops short of probing more into the direct relationship between the Lord’s Supper and the eschatological Kingdom.
In Calvin’s theology, the nature of our final resurrection and the final Kingdom is in many ways analogous to that of the Lord’s Supper. Like the Lord’s Supper, according to Calvin, the goal of Christ’s coming again is our “union with God,” which is the highest good of humanity.851 While our redemption has already begun by Christ’s
first coming, Christ will complete the redemption by resurrecting His people, when He appears a second time. In this eschaton, the resurrected people of God will be fully
850 Sermon on 1 Corinthians 10:14, quoted from Ronald S. Wallace, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Christian Life (Eerdmans, 1959), 208.
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reckoned as the children of God, who fully recognize God as a “propitious Father,” being no longer uncertain about His goodness and benevolence towards them.852
As in his doctrine of the Lord’s Supper, Calvin does not reduce this union to a noetic union, but intimates that our human body is involved in it. The resurrection at the Last Day is by no means the neo-platonic enlightenment of minds or escape of souls from the imprisonment in the body. Since the resurrection of believers is patterned upon on the resurrection of Christ, who is the “prototype” and “pledge of our resurrection,” the people of God are also resurrected in their true flesh.853 This means that the resurrected people of God, in the eschaton, will be united to God and have communion with Him in their whole person. At that time, Calvin explains, the godly will be made not only children of God, but also “companions” of Christ, which is the aim of Christ’s own resurrection,854 because then they are reformed to the image of Christ. “By the inestimable power of his Spirit,” God will “make us “conform to himself.”855 And this
is the completion of the process of our sanctification. That is, this resurrection of the godly is also a restoration of God’s image in them, which they had lost in the fall.856
In the eschaton there is not only the resurrection of believers but also the renewal of the whole created world. For Calvin, the destiny of humanity is interwoven with that of creation, especially in the Fall and in the final resurrection. Just as the created order became corrupted in the Fall of Adam, it will be restored when there is renewal of humanity. “Now subject to corruption, the creatures cannot be renewed until the sons of God are wholly restored.”857 The pattern of renewal of the created world is parallel to the resurrection and restoration of human beings. Just like the renewal of human beings, the primarily created nature of the cosmos does not change, when it is renewed in the eschaton, but it is transformed and reclaimed.858 This renewal of
everything in heaven and on earth makes “all creatures…as companions” to believers.859
852 Institutes (1559), 3.2.14-15 and 3.2.38. 853 Institutes (1559), 3.25.3.
854 Institutes (1559), 3.25.3. 855 Institutes (1559), 1.15.5.
856 Quistorp summarizes that, for Calvin, the Last Day is a completion of our “progressive sanctification and regeneration in the resurrection of the recreated body on the second coming of Christ.” Heinrich Quistorp, Calvin’s Doctrine Of The Last Things. Translated By Harold Knight London : 1955. Hardback In Jacket (Lutterworth Press, 1955), 90. Also see, Philip Walker Butin, Revelation, Redemption, and Response: Calvin’s Trinitarian Understanding of the Divine-Human Relationship (OUP USA, 1995), 68-9.
857 Comm. Romans 8:20.
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Calvin often implies that the Resurrection and the Kingdom are brought forth in the Trinitarian manner. In a way reminiscent of the manner he handled the purpose of Christ’s ascension, Calvin argues that the resurrection of believers is based upon Christ’s own resurrection, which ab initio aims for the resurrection of His people. “It was not for himself alone…rather there was begun in the Head what must be completed in all the members.”860 This is possible not because we are equal to him in any sense,
but because God applies to believers “the same working of the Spirit” by whose power Christ was raised.861 We are raised by the Holy Spirit, “the Quickener of us in common with Him [Christ].”862 And the Holy Spirit resurrects the faithful by making them
conjoined to Christ, separation from whom “is not permissible and not even possible.”863 As mentioned, the resurrection of the faithful is also the completion of
their restoration into the image of Christ, and the proper agent of this restoration of the Holy Spirit. Since the origin of our resurrection is the Father, Calvin also states that the resurrection of Christ and the resulting resurrection of the church is by the Father.864
Given the affinity, we can assume that Calvin could have done better to relate the eucharist to the Last Day, or to suggest the former as a partial achievement of the eschatological banquet. Indeed, Calvin often portrays the day of restoration of humans and the world as “the manifestation of the heavenly Kingdom,"865 and Christ the
“originator and source” of this heavenly Kingdom.866 Probably he could have spoken of
the Holy Spirit as the bond which binds believers to Christ in the Kingdom, and thus to the reality of Kingdom. If he said that in the Lord’s Supper the Holy Spirit draws us to Christ in the Last Day, he could have said that the Lord’s Supper is a temporal
while their substance remains the same…” Comm. 2 Peter 3:10. 859 Institutes (1559), 3.25.2.
860 Institutes (1559), 3.25.3. Regarding the resurrection of the body, Calvin says that while “it is difficult to believe that bodies, when consumed with rottenness, will at length be raised up in their season,” scripture provides some helps by which faith may overcome this great obstacle, and one of them is “in the parallel to Christ’s resurrection.”
861 Institutes (1559), 3.25.3. 862 Institutes (1559), 3.25.3. 863 Institutes (1559), 3.25.3. 864 Institutes (1559), 3.25.3.
865 Comm. Romans 8:20. This is because when He comes again, He will bring in the heavenly Kingdom. 866 Comm. 1 Corinthians 15:47. Waiting upon heaven, the day of resurrection and restoration, is fixing our eyes fast on Christ in there. Institutes (1559), 3.25.1.
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accomplishment of the Day. As noted, the completion of our restoration is a constant working of the Holy Spirit and Calvin speaks of this restoration as the Holy Spirit’s work of implanting “heavenly life within us.”867 Given this, if he had applied the notion
of the Holy Spirit as the bond chronologically, Calvin could have said that the heavenly reality in the Supper is the heavenly life of eternal day.
In his discussion of our final resurrection, Calvin briefly mentions the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper as “the seal of our future resurrection.”868
Noting that believers will be made “companions of Christ” in their resurrection of the body, Calvin says that the burial rites celebrated by the holy patriarchs under the law were helps to “make them know that a new life was prepared for the bodies laid away.”869 In a similar vein, the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, in which we receive by
bodily mouth the symbols of spiritual grace, is an event which testifies that “the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body” [Rom. 8:11] and that “He who raised Christ from the dead will give life also to your mortal bodies.” [1 Cor. 6:15] For Calvin the true service of God is that which requires the devotion of our “feet, hand, eyes, and tongue,” since through them we can realize and share in the fruit and reward of Christ’s bodily resurrection.870 Given Calvin’s understanding that the
sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is not only a sign or seal of divine grace, but an actual instrument of it, which really brings forth the reality it signifies, Calvin might have also held that the sacrament not only testifies but really, though partially, accomplishes the life of resurrection.
In Calvin’s thought, as mentioned, the Lord’s Supper can by no means be equated with the Banquet of the real eschatological Kingdom, where there will be the coming of Christ and the full revelation of Him. However, just as our communion with the body of the heavenly Christ is pneumatologically embodied on earth and in the Lord’s Supper, as seen in the previous chapter, the reality of the eschatological times could also be brought forth in a pneumatological way in the Lord’s Supper so that it can be experienced by the earthly participants.
Farrow’s critique of Calvin proceeded to his liturgy, which, in Farrow’s view, is
867 Comm. Romans 8:11. A role of the Holy Spirit, Calvin also expresses, is to “give us access to the kingdom of heaven,” or to make us “come near the heavenly life.” Sermons on Ephesians, 1:17-18, p. 100.
868 Institutes (1559), 3.25.8. 869 Institutes (1559), 3.25.8. 870 Institutes (1559), 3.25.8.
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marked by “inwardness,” especially represented by the eucharistic teaching of the
Sursum Corda and the invitation to “feed on Him in your hearts by faith with
thanksgiving.”871 If he could speak of the Lord’s Supper more thoroughly as the partial rendering of the Resurrection, when there is the embodied restoration of humans and the world, the teaching of “lift up your hearts” could be understood as an exaltation to open the hearts to see ourselves and the given place inside God’s story, that is, inside the resurrected, eschatological life.872 In that case, the ascent of our souls in the Lord’s
Supper, which is, the ascent into the easchatological heaven, would not be an ethereal or disembodied experience, since it involves our whole bodies, senses, and actions.