The interest is incorporation. The (mystic) Oetinger said: “Corporality is the end of the ways of God.” Therefore the great interest in the bodily reality of Christ, in history and in sacrament. The second spiritual difference is the religious meaning of nature, the control of nature in Zwinglian thinking which demands regularly calculable natural laws the dynamic naturalism of Luther which often goes into demonic depths and is not interested in any law of nature.
And then the final and most important form which was expressed in two Latin formulas. Finitum capax infiniti the finite is capable of the infinite. For Zwingli this is not possible. They said directly: finitum non capax infiniti — the finite is not able to have the infinite within itself. And this of course is a very fundamental difference, which first occurs in Christology and then is extended to the whole sacramental life and the whole relationship to nature.
It is perhaps wise to say that in the Swiss Reformation, from which, with Zwingli, we now turn to Calvin, .the sociological background was co-determining for the special form in which the whole thing happened. In Luther we have the form of surviving aristocracy. In Switzerland we have the large cities which, like Zurich and Geneva, were mostly trade and small factory cities. That means that sociologically the background of the Swiss Reformation drives in the direction of industrial society. In the German Reformation especially the North German, the Lutheran Reformation it sticks to the pre-bourgeois situation as much as possible If you read Luther’s little catechism, you have there a paternalistic culture of small farmers and some craftsmen in villages and small cities. If you read, in contrast to this, some letters and other expressions in Zwingli and Calvin, then you have the men of the world. who have a world-wide horizon, through the trading relationships in the centers in which they lived. This produces a quite different attitude towards nature, the state, and everything.
Calvin: This leads us now to Calvin himself The first point I want to make in my discussion of Calvinism is his doctrine of God and man. Here we have the turning point of everything in him. One has said that the doctrine of predestination is the main point. Now this is easily refuted by the fact that in the first edition of his “Institutes” it was not even developed; only in the later editions did it acquire great space. But it is to be refuted also from more important points of view.
In every theology. the decisive thing is always the doctrine of God I told you this with regard to Luther, to Augustine. etc. For Calvin the central doctrine of Christianity is the doctrine of the majesty of God. The attitude in which God is known as an existential attitude, more than in any other of the Reformers – -at least in formula, even more than in Luther. For Calvin human misery and Divine majesty are correlated. Only out of the human misery can we understand the divine majesty and only in the light of the Divine majesty can we understand the human misery.
Calvin applies to God a word which has been rediscovered by Rudolf Otto numen, the numinous. God is a numen for him, He is unapproachable, horrifying. and at the same time fascinating. He speaks of “this sacred numinous nature,” when he speaks of God. This is distinguished from all idols, from every polytheistic God. It is transcended in a radical way. so radically that you cannot speak directly of God. And here he has a very interesting theory of Christian symbolism. The symbols are significations of His incomprehensible essence. Symbols have to be momentary, disappearing, self-negating, He says they are not the matter itself. I think this self- negating is the decisive characteristic of every symbol with respect to God, because if they are taken literally, if they are not self-negating, then they produce idols. This is Calvin and not a mystical theology such as in Pseudo-Dionysius, who says this. So when you speak of symbolism when referring to God, you can refer to a man who is certainly beyond suspicion of being less than orthodox. namely, to Calvin.
