Browsing by Subject "Calvin"
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Item Open Access Affect before Spinoza: Reformed Faith, Affectus, and Experience in Jean Calvin, John Donne, John Milton and Baruch Spinoza(2009) Leo, Russell JosephAffects are not reducible to feelings or emotions. On the contrary, Affect Before
Spinoza investigates the extent to which affects exceed, reconfigure and reorganize
bodies and subjects. Affects are constitutive of and integral to dynamic economies of
activity and passivity. This dissertation traces the origins and histories of this definition
of affect, from the Latin affectus, discovering emergent affective approaches to faith,
devotional poetry and philosophy in early modernity. For early modern believers across
confessions, faith was neither reducible to a dry intellectual concern nor to a personal,
emotional appeal to God. Instead, faith was a transformative relation between humans
and God, realized in affective terms that, in turn, reconfigured theories of human agency
and activity. Beginning with John Calvin and continuing through the work of John
Donne, John Milton, and Baruch Spinoza, Affect Before Spinoza posits affectus as a basis
of faith in an emergent Reformed tradition as well as a term that informs disparate
developments in poetry and philosophy beyond Reformed Orthodoxy. Calvin's
configuration of affect turns existing languages of the passions and of rhetorical motives
towards an understanding of faith and certainty. In this sense, Calvin, Donne, Spinoza
and Milton use affectus to pose questions of agency, will, tendency, inclination, and
determinism.
Item Open Access Beholding the Image: Vision in John Calvin's Theology(2018) Capps, Franklin TannerThe aim of this dissertation is to expound the role of vision in John Calvin’s theology. Given the many-sided and often confusing—sometimes even apparently contradictory—nature of Calvin’s account and use of the category of vision, I set out to illuminate the implicit and deeply rooted coherence of his thought on this topic. Calvin’s treatment of vision consistently intertwines two fundamental elements: (1) a theological interpretation of the literal, bodily sense of sight, and (2) the use of sight as a metaphor for comprehensive, penetrating ‘spiritual’ understanding. A dominant strand of scholarship, along with much popular thinking about Calvin, tends to regard him as either an extreme iconoclast or, if the visual is acknowledged as playing a role in his theology, as always insisting on recourse to ‘the word’ over against the visual. (The word, for Calvin, encompasses both Jesus Christ as ‘Word’ and ‘words’ proclaimed or spoken about Christ, including, for example, the Christian sermon and sacred Scripture.) By contrast, I contend that visual patterns of thinking pervade his thought, even without recourse to the word, which is to say the use of language to describe or clarify the visual. To this end, I propose that his theological use of vision is best elicited according to an implicit distinction between simply ‘seeing’ (frequently, specere) things as they appear to present themselves—that is to say, perceiving a thing isolated from God and all other created things; and ‘beholding’ (frequently, aspicere) things as they truly are—that is to say, understanding a thing in relation to God and, by extension, to all other created things. Seeing indicates the superficial perception of some thing, grounded in mere physical perception, while beholding indicates dynamic vision, which may also be called ‘insight,’ involving the exercise of faith, in which some thing is comprehended in relation to the divine and thereby to all other created things. While beholding may or may not entail physically seeing an object, it does require that a thing be understood in relation to its source and end, which, according to Calvin, is God. Seeing and beholding are related in that both are modes of visual comprehension—involving a range of modes of visual encounter, from literal sight to mental picturing to singular visual manifestations of the divine—though seeing is a relatively diminished mode of visual comprehension in relation to beholding. Around this seeing-beholding distinction I organize what I call Calvin’s ‘theology of vision.’
The bulk of this dissertation is occupied with an exposition of Calvin’s theology of vision. After developing an account of it, I close by drawing out some of its implications for current debate in theological aesthetics. I suggest that Calvin gives us theological tools for articulating the mystery of humanity’s visually mediated encounter with divinity in a way that encompasses but is not reducible to the traditional concepts of aesthetic experience and aesthetic action.
Item Open Access Figural Reading in the Epistle to the Hebrews: A Dialogue with Augustine and Calvin(2010) Lee, Gregory WoodaeThis exercise in constructive Christian theology presents the relation between the testaments as a critical problematic for the figural reading of the Old Testament. The project consists of two parts, the first focusing on Augustine and Calvin, and the second primarily on the Epistle to the Hebrews.
The first part provides a typological comparison between Augustine and Calvin on the continuity and discontinuity of the testaments (chapters 1-2), the people of God across the testaments (chapter 3), and the purpose of Scripture in redemptive history (chapter 4). Augustine defines the unity of the testaments according to a sign-referent framework whereby the Old Testament signifies the New. Calvin, on the other hand, locates this unity in the one covenant, grounded in Christ across the testaments. Since Augustine thinks the grace of the New Testament was veiled before the time of Christ, he asserts the necessity of interpreting the Old Testament according to two levels of meaning: the literal and the spiritual. Since Calvin thinks both the Old and New Testaments reveal the knowledge of God, he restricts interpretation to the literal sense, though this sense can have multiple referents: Israel, Christ, the church, and the eschaton. Each figure struggles to account for Israel and the Old Testament saints. For Augustine, the saints belonged to the New Testament as they mediated the Old. Calvin alternately identifies Israel as the church during Old Testament times, and the Old Testament saints as redemptive-historical aberrations.
The second part draws upon this typological comparison to consider the Epistle to the Hebrews with reference to its depiction of redemptive history (chapter 5), its appropriation of the Psalms (chapter 6), and its overarching vision of Scripture (chapter 7). Hebrews locates the discontinuity between the testaments in the establishment of Christ as high priest, and the continuity in a common people and a common hope for an eternal inheritance. The author interprets the Psalms neither according to two levels of meaning, nor within an expansive literal sense, but as a living word of address whereby God speaks directly to his people. Old Testament locutions retain their illocutionary force, but adopt new valence in light of Christ. The authority of Scripture, then, rests not in some historically reconstructed sense, but in God's self-communicative act in the redemptive-historical present.